Kontakt

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).

This is a bad product.

Maybe it was a good (and better than all of it's competition) sometimes in the past, but not now. If you are about to purchase it, here's what to expect.

1. It's kind of heavy on resources. Some libraries can make my 2018 Hexacore Core i5 chug to the point of complete impossibility to work (and that's for 1 instance).

2. Expect locate samples manually all the time, because at least for 5th of libraries paths to samples won't work for some reason.

3. Expect to pay $100 on average per library.

4. Expect buyer's remorse. It's a bad value for the 50% Sale price, and terrible value for the fill price.

5. Expect to not being able to write your instrument as a markup file, and fiddling with the UI instead.

6. Expect to receive samples packed in a proprietary encrypted .ncw pseudo-format often with inability to unpack anything.

Kontakt is bad. And it's status quo is to blame.

Kontakt by itself is a five-star sampling application and the literal heart and centerpiece of all my music production. Kontakt as an MPE software ranges from 3.5 stars to 4.5 stars depending on a billion factors, like:

• If you can find a Kontakt Library that's MPE-compatible that fits your project or use-purpose.
• If you have to do any finnicky fiddling / routing to get your desired effect.
• If you'll buy an MPE-enabled synth or plugin instead of even trying anymore.

So if you need Kontakt for its core functionality (loading up and playing your virtual instruments beyond the Kontakt Player functionality) and also found at least one MPE-enabled Kontakt library, then grab it for sure.

But if you think Kontakt is (as of 2020) a playground of enldess MPE-controlled fun, dig much deeper before pressing the buy button.