Kompakt

I got Kompakt as a Kontakt crossgrade on Friday. Sounds are a mixed bag. The basses are very good, esp the 'Hardcore Bass' and 'Spector Bass', as are the vocals and brasses (except for sax, sampled versions of which thus far have always seemed awful, dang, I don't even like the real thing most of the time, a dangerous weapon in the wrong hands :lol: ). Organs are good, rhodes is nice, no decent wurly sound really. Fazioli piano is appalling for an instrument of even 100MB - you'd be better off checking out the 256MB AKAI Splendid Grand, Nemesys Gigapiano or, if you want a really decent piano sound the, Post Instruments Bosendorfer Grandioso.

The strings are good, especially the solo/legato string stuff - the notes are long and unlooped, but appear to have only one velocity layer. However the strings appear to have more clarity/life than some of the ones on my copy of Garritan Lite, especially the violin and viola sounds. Drum kits are very good, drum loops are great but unfortunately Kompakt has no Intakt-like ability to slice. Not interested in the synth samples particularly, apart from genuine analogue stuff which seemed limited to some Prophet and Oberheim waveforms. For digital-based synthesis, I'd rather do it myself anyway, owning Reaktor 4 and Pro-53 as I do.

Choir sounds aren't bad, usable with some nice modwheel vowel-changing. Not too cheesy.

The 'Solo Pick Pluck' Acoustic Guitar is very nice for the price point with some nice twangy effects at higher velocities.

CPU usage in multitimbral mode was great on my XP2000,512MB DDR laptop - 30% CPU to spare using 5 channels of DFD instruments.

User interface is quite nice - having instant access to hierarchical menus of multis and instruments is a nice touch. OTOH the indispensible ability to use the mouse wheel to scroll around the sample browser is lost and there is no facility for changing the key mappings (I wanted to extend the range of some instruments a little) or turning DFD on or off for particular instruments.Read Review