Native Instruments Kontakt 2 VST PC

I found the interface to be just ok. There is to much jammed into one screen for my taste. Don't know why I can't scroll with the use of the mouse wheel. If you're going to jam it all in, at least make it easier to get to everything. I can't paste into script editor with the mouse either. Gotta push a keyboard button for that (hello!). Many bugs reported ... (Big ones). The first update did not solve much. I still have not been able to load GS3 files yet. The manual is like most other manuals (falls way short of expectation).

I have no complaints about the sound quality, however the effects fall a bit short. There are plenty of ways to go about slicing and dicing the sound in a quirky kind of way.

I don't recommend this product until the bugs are ironed out. The next update is expected to happen before January 2006 from what I could gather. If these bugs are not fixed by then (they may never be fixed), and by rights I'd be asking for my money back (dream on). I have crashed several times (blue screen of death), and been frozen in a big chill enough to get frostbite. This is not a pretty function for NI to be handing out to costomers that fork over hundreds of dollars.
I've heard reports of this plugin hogging the CPU, but Disagree here.
I'll rate this product a 7 only because I rate it slightly more than six and one half.

Me: I've made electronic music for about ten years and originally began with the Kurzweil K2000 hardware sampler/workstation. About four years ago I made the move to PC using Cubase and began working with Kontakt 1.0.

I use Kontakt 2.0 mainly for drums and have set up elaborate libararies. I also use Kontakt for found sound--playing back and processing audio I have sampled from around the house and around my neighborhood.

The version of Kontakt in this review is 2.0.1.

Kontakt 2.0 is a world ahead of Kontakt 1.0. I was pleased with Kontakt 1.0's low CPU overhead, but very displeased with it's poor user interface. It had many capabilities but was too confusing to figure out which group you were editing, which zone, sample, etc. 2.0 is far superior to 1.0.

It is crystal clear which zone you are editing, whether you are editing zones or instruments, and setting up send effects to use with both zones and instruments. For example, the light green sections indicate the sample is being processed at the group level, the dark green indicate processing at the instrument level.

I knew 1.0 had many capibilities but could never implement them with any efficiency due to the poor interface. The routing capabilities are fully realized in 2.0 for me because the interface is so excellent.

I was able to read the entire manual in pretty much one day, and learn everything about Kontakt 2.0. To me, this says something about how straight-forward and easy to use it is.

I am very impressed with Kontakt's sound processing cabilities. The effects and processors are excellent and there are many to choose from.

The reverb is solid. It's not as crystal clear as, say, my TC Powercore reverbs, but for drums it does the trick nicely.

Other processing capabilities are nice as well. And it has a ton of them. All the processing capabilities have presets that usually sound pretty nice.

Almost all of the signal processing comes with easy-to-implement mudulation. For example, if you want to use the LFO to modulate the pan or the filter, it is quite easy to do so.

The instrument banks are also a nice feature. You can set up large groups of instruments and flip through them with ease.

In terms of sound quality, I've noticed that when routing to individual outputs, there tends to be distortion you didn't hear when running the sample through it's default output. I won't rule out this isn't a problem with how 2.0 is working with Cubase, but this wasn't an issue in 1.0. I suspect this is a bug that needs to be fixed with newer versions. But this takes the 'sound quality' rating down a bit.

In general, I can't rave enough about Kontakt 2.0. There are a few minor improvements that could be made, but overall it is a quantum leap above 1.0 and I would highly recommend it. I wrestled with the interface in 1.0 and could not get it to serve me, but the 2.0 interface is fantastic.

There's a lot of great little features that weren't overlooked, like for example, the ability to re-order insert effects by clicking and dragging.

A feature that I used a lot in 1.0 and still has in 2.0, is 'open in external audio editor.' This allows me to choose a sample I have loaded into an instrument in Kontakt, click on 'open in external audio editor' and my external audio editor (Soundforge) opens for editing the sample. You edit the sample through Soundforge and when you close it, it automatically updates the sample in the current Kontakt instrument. Hooray.

Some things that could be improved:

There is no way to modulate loop points. For example, you can't set up the Modwheel to change a the point in a sample where it loops so that you can make it loop shorter or longer while it's being played.

It's a bit cumbersome to set up ignore release--to make it so the sample plays all the way through, ignoring the release of keys. You should not have to go into the loop editor and select "one-shot" to do this. This gets really irritating when adding large groups of samples that need the ignore release. There should be an ignore release option somewhere on the group editing.

Syncing an LFO to the tempo of a song seems impossible to do as well. It's possible I've overlooked it, but it seems like you can't sync the two. There are other ways to sync modulation to tempo but there's no way to set up, say, a sine wave modulation that is synced to tempo.

It's also a bit cumbersome to remove effects and DSPs. It's very easy to add one, you can click on a drop-down and choose what you want. But to remove it there is no other way to do it than to highlight the modulation of the effect (not even the effect itself) and use the delete key on your keyboard. You should be able to at least right-click and choose remove. You shouldn't need to use your keyboard.

I love the instrument banks that you can set up, and this is a fantastic new feature. However, it seems you cannot add newly created instruments to the bank. You need to save the instrument first and then add it through the file manager.