Kontakt

Kontakt needs a serious overhaul for 2023 to meet great plugin standards. The Gui should be resizeable, preset management should be modernized, even the way we select a library and add it should be more of a a bunch of smaller squares or something instead of the current large panels on the left. Samples are slow to load, volumes need to be cranked up to hear them.

Is Kontakt the best sampling platform I can imagine? Not even close. Worse yet, the version 6 pitfalls have been among the worst since early version 4 (about 10 years ago). Have they added features? Sure. And gigantic bloat.

Unfortunately, the bloat is not only in the size of the engine. The screen real estate it fills with useless graphics is even worse.

All that negativity aside, Kontakt is the standard of the industry for sampling that sits in your DAW. If you don't license it, you will be missing a significant chunk of available sound libraries and virtual instruments. And that's the cool part: if you want more sounds, get Kontakt for endless possibilities.

At this point, in 2021, Kontakt is very much a necessary evil. If you want to use many of the best sample libraries out there, you need to pay up the cash for the full version of Kontakt. But you probably won't be happy about it.

There are competing products out there that offer (at least) most of the same functionality, for a lot less money, and without using anywhere near the ridiculous processing overhead that Kontakt uses.

Oh, and those competing products have re-sizable GUIs as well. Still not figured that out in Kontakt, Native Instruments, despite what you charge for it?

It's become a bit of a joke how little regard NI has for its customers concerning this and other core products. They keep pumping out new expensive products and focus on drawing in new customers, whilst completely ignoring the problems with Kontakt that existing customers have been complaining about for years (yes, YEARS).

Sadly, it has gotten to the point where I will actively avoid buying Native Instruments products unless there's absolutely no alternative. Their market segment is ripe for disruption and frankly the day can't come soon enough...

The worst piece of drek this side of Pro Tools. Overpriced, the ridiculously cramped screen with tons of real estate wasted, you can't resize or even simply maximize that cramped screen, the ridiculous cobweb of file extensions, the lame and inconsistent file navigation, the weak customer service, the short shelf life (it's not long before simply having Kontakt is enough, you need a newer version for newer plugins, and can only get the free upgrade for minor upgrades), I could go on. And really this plugin within a plugin thing is stupid in the first place. It's a shame that so many plugins were written just to appease this archaic software sewage, which is the ONLY reason to get it. Fortunately I there are a ton of great plugins which don't require it, and few if any sample libraries do anymore, so I'll never waste money on it (I'm only familiar with due to a friend having it and quickly realized how happy I was that I never bought it).

Kontakt can afford itself to have bugs that hinder or even break your workflow (unresponsive UI bug for example) for a couple of years without a fix and offer no customer support for you.