NI Kontakt - nice sampling app

ponky

This is a pretty powerful sampling tool you can use standalone or as a VSTi. Having used it for a couple of sessions I feel like I'm coming to grips with it - so its no so hard to pick up - tho I havent touched a lot of the features yet.

Every sound/module in the app can have all the parameters set up to use midi contollers, or you can modulate the parameters with lfos etc in the app itself. Very quick and easy to map sample start and filter attack/cutoff to velocity to get some dynamic stuff happening in a tune.

If you wanted to you could use it as a mean ass drum machine... Loading each drum sound as a seperate module, each with its own set of filters/eq/effects, and then route them all through seperate outs.

Huge potential methinks.

More about it on the NI site:
http://www.nativeinstruments.de/index.php?kontakt_us

FrankieP

I had tested Kontakt a couple of days ago on my mate's PC, my 2 cents...
When I first heard about it, it boasted a feature that really got me interested. The Time machine Mode was hyped to be better than Roland's Variphrase technology. After hearing Kontakt for the first time with time machine mode on, I wasn't very impressed with it! Too much artifacts when you get to the higher keys and it sounded very artificial. So much for that! Yes, the filters are excellent and the layout is pretty good and effective. But it seems to be a very buggy release. Akai import is very limited. You could only drag one program at a time. Can't load more than that. No way you could automate Kontakt in VST. Still missing that feature which I think is very important. Although you could automate using midi cc's. For emulating real instruments, Kontakt is very limited bcoz it loads samples to RAM. NI should have considered disk streaming instead like Gigasampler and HALion.
In a related story, i've been beta-testing for Reason2. I have to say that the new NN-XT Advanced Sampler is !!! Can't say more than that!