Released: Kontakt 6

Completely agree!
Very disappointed with K6.
No GUI update, no sampling features update, no library/browser/quickload update.
Slap a coding app and a few new libraries and hope none of us will notice.
What a let down NI!!

 

I recently called the NI support line and asked this question. The fellow I was talking to put me on hold and when he came back he said that it required macOS 10.12 and above. I mentioned the info on the buy page, but he stuck by the info he got from whoever he had checked with. So, who knows.

 

Thanks for checking. Not good that conflicting info is coming out of NI on this. When you don't know who to trust it's dangerous.

 

What more does NI need to do with Kontakt?
I wish they would write their own OS and build a stage worthy hardware version.
Keep it proprietary if need be.
I’d pay a couple large for that.

 

Oh please no. Somebody did a hardware system a few years back that used customized versions of plugins which was a disaster. Let's put it this way - it was the XBox of music but didn't have the development team behind it like Microsnot has (or did). I would hate to see NI take Kontakt that way and lose those of us who use it no problem in there computers. You want a stage version? Pimp out a desktop or even laptop with all ssd's and as much ram as possible and you're there.

 

I didn’t say to stop development, simply expand on it.
If you were referring to Receptor it was just another PC IMHO.
I can already build very powerful 1U PCs. Very stable too.

 

Yeah - the late unlamented Muse Receptor. What I would love to see is Kontakt with the synthesis capabilities like UVI Falcon as well as Kontakt's current sample library support. There's precious little third party support for Falcon; certainly nothing like we have for Kontakt. To put it mildly the synthesis capabilities suck; and it doesn't look like the wavetable stuff is all that easily usable like in Falcon. Shouldn't have to be a synth builder expert to use a built-in tool like wavetables.

 

I'd love a dedicated OS for music, but it will never happen. Who in their right mind would buy into it first?

As for Kontakt, it's like MIDI: Not perfect, but it's a standard. We're lucky to have both of them. Momentum builds trust, and trust gives developers the balls to invest lots o' money in amazing sound libraries. At this point, Falcon is (on a lot of levels) a better program than Kontakt, but it wouldn't be if NI hadn't blazed the trail. Never say never, but it is unlikely that Falcon will ever knock Kontakt off its pedestal. Overall, NI has done a good job of balancing legacy support with new features. I know a lot of folks won't agree with last statement, but you can't argue with success.

Personally, the thing I worry most about concerning NI is them going in the "new is all that matters" and "we must control everything" mode that seems to be so prevalent these days with software companies. Will I not be able to use the protected sound libraries I've purchased someday because NI will no longer "talk" to the version of Native Access I'm running on an old Mac OS?

 

Your last paragraph is already happening; witness the OSX requirement for the current Kontakt 5 revision. Or the fact that when you start up NA it checks for and installs a new revision of itself.

Would love to see Kontakt go the modular route of Falcon where you can have various multiple synth/sampler modules. But again make it relatively easy to use like Falcon.

 

There's a price to pay for being as modular as Falcon - read increase in RAM and CPU usage (plus Falcon doesn't support multicore, which is a pretty big minus in my book). Falcon is great, I use it all the time, but NOT for things Kontakt does as it's just not as efficient as Kontakt in those same things. They are extremely complementary. Kontakt will never be Falcon, and Falcon will never be Kontakt.

 

That depends on the will of the developer. You also need a third party library developer willing and able to work with both NI and UVI. If NI hadn't gone to monolithic structure for their libraries this would be a lot easier. There's nothing except NI being stuck in their ways that would allow functionality such as Falcon has.

Also I think a whether a vi supports multicore processing depends on the daw in use.

 

UVI uses even more monolithic approach than NI - even the instrument files are part of the monolith!

 

NI stated this month that they will not support OS X 10.8 and older. But, what does "not support" mean? You can still download older versions of Service Center (including pre 10.9) and Native Access (pre 10.11), and you can still run them on older versions of OS X; pre 10.8 in the case of Service Center. As long as they continue to "talk" to these old installation programs, they are supporting them as far as I'm concerned.

As for Native Access auto updating on startup, it doesn't thrill me that it does that, but I'm hoping that it will leave the installed version alone if it can't update it (due to the OS). I've posted this very question over in the Native Access part of the Forum, but have received no replies, so far. I think it has to work this way though, as there would be no point in NI supplying older versions of NA if it didn't.

 

With this kind of thing NI does with auto updates it's why I have complete clones of my system drive that I manually update before doing any kind of housekeeping with anything NI related. Sucks but that's the only way to be able to get back to a working when when the crap hits the fan.

 

Interesting. Don't protection schemes (iLok, NI, etc) generally tie in to something (serial number?) in a particular drive / computer? How do you do this?

 

NI system only relies on system ID, doesn't really depend on your hard drives.

 

Moron question here: Will Kontakt Player be discontinued when Kontakt 6 is released?

 

iLok is such that once you have the license asset on it deposited via their proprietary s/w which runs in connection with their servers to do that part you can take that iLok to any computer that has the iLok License Manager s/w and run your plugin/vi/whatever.

There are some challenge/response systems that use the system configuration as part of the deal in creating a code that gets sent to the developer's servers which in turn sends a code back to your computer and that code stays on your computer. Some of these types of systems in the past used to depend so heavily on how your system was configured that say you changed a hard drive (not necessarily the system drive) or the amount of ram you would need to go through authorization again. Hopefully no one does that anymore.

 

I assume you are referring to the computer's UUID. If that's the case, if my Mac dies, and I replace it with another one of the exact same model, the protected software on the reinstalled disk image won't work because the UUID is different. If that's true, the only way to maintain an old system and its licensed software would be to image the drive and change the new computer's UUID to the old computer's UUID. Is this possible? Something tells me it can't be that simple.

 

Then it might not be UUID. I remember imaging my whole C: drive and all NI products worked after replacing the main hard drive.