Kontakt 6 wish list

I really liked the sound emulation MPC 60 and SP-1200. My dream is to see in the Kontakt emulation of vintage samplers Roland (series SP-303 and SP-404)

 

NI definitely rolled that way for Maschine and Komplete Kontrol , but seriously 3 products that did that, might be a bit much ..

 

VST 3.5 support. Some great features there, shame they aren't supported by Contact.

Here's a big one for me: ability to set buffer sizes for individual disks. Some samples are on SSD and others on traditional drives, it would be great to have the option to set bigger options on HD and smaller for SSD. Or even better, have Kontakt monitor performance and automatically see how fast the data is coming from disk and up the buffer if it's not keeping up or shrink the buffer if less is needed.

 

NI doesn't seem very eager about VST3 (just my personal observation from some discussions with them). I can understand that, considering there's over 10 years of legacy code in Kontakt (and some other NI products as well) that would be a bitch to transfer to a whole new framework... In any case, it's not among top priorities for K6 it seems.

However I very much agree with global DFD buffer sizes adjustable per drive. That would be oh-so-useful.

 

grain delay

 

I am far from "expert" status with Kontakt, so some of these may already exist.

- Instrument level LFOs (i.e. one LFO that can control group level parameters).
- Allow_group/Disallow_group function that can work exclusively from On Note callbacks, allowing groups to be switched on and off mid note.
- Allowing bulk import/export and click and drag re-ordering of groups from the group editor. And a 'Group Lock' feature to disable any changes.
- Incorporate more/better effects and filters from the rest of NI's arsenal.
- Global variables that can be shared between scripts.

 

Already exists for a long time. It's called PGS, read up the KSP reference

 

Ha! I honestly thought the list would have been longer. Thanks for the heads up!

 

Regarding Kontakt 6, I have been a Kontakt user since version 2. Since then tons of additions have been made, but I still recognise the basic GUI of version 2 from the latest update.

I have no trouble admitting that I find the Kontakt interface complicated. There are countless (too) small knobs and faders, which rarely explain themselves. I like to get into things fast and learn more while doing stuff. This is not the form of the Kontakt learning curve, and I feel the same when using Maschine.

Both Kontakt and Maschine are capable of a lot of things, but I am usually not capable of exploiting these features without resorting to manual, or, more likely, the tutorial videos online made by third-party services. Since these numerous video services exist in the first place, I have deducted that I am not the only one feeling this way.

Back to beginning: a lot my troubles with Kontakt stem from the fact that I cannot find the things I need. Therefore making the existing features in Kontakt more accessible should be a priority before adding new ones. To be honest I am a bit puzzled that this hasn't been done already. After all the Kontakt instrument developers have taken a huge leap in GUI upgrade since the times I purchased Kontakt 2.

When I bought K2, I had no idea what a multi is and how to actually create a playable kit from my own drum samples in ten seconds (after a decade I still don't, and yes, I have watched those countless tutorials). The Kontakt GUI is quite unhelpful unless you know exactly what to do and how. I am sure some programmers kind of like it, but the people NI aims its products at these days are rarely into heavy coding. They want to make music instead, and everything else is a needless distraction.

Maybe this is why I really don't use Kontakt that much any more. Applying the recent meme by NI, after a decade of Kontakt experience I still cannot kontrol it the way I'd like to.