Best Of

JUST DROPPED

KONTAKT 7 is now up for grabs. See more info here.

KONTAKT 7 AT A GLANCE

• New Factory Library: The revamped Factory Library comes with new sounds, effects, added functionality, plus a HiDPI interface.
• 7 Collections of brand-new instruments in the Factory Library: Anything from orchestral, acoustic, band, beats, choir, synth to vintage.
• Enhanced browsing experience: You can now search, filter, and audition sounds as well as viewing preset properties and editing tags.
• Improved engine: Updated time stretching algorithm and 2 new effects from GUITAR RIG 6.
• Simpler instrument creation process: Instrument developers now have access to Creator Tools, a standalone application suite consisting of a Debugger, an Instrument Editor, and a GUI Designer.

BE THE FIRST TO TRY

Watch Red Means Recording play with PLAYBOX in the all-new interface:

Questions or issues? Check out these support articles:

Notes on KONTAKT 7's HiDPI implementation and other FAQs

How to Add Non-Player Libraries to KONTAKT 7's Browser

KONTAKT Error Message: “Content Missing”

KONTAKT 7 Appears Blurry in FL Studio

Curious what you all think about this. Share your first impression below. 👇

So Kontakt 7 is there, and I'm not impressed at all. It's a good thing I barely use anything NI anymore. But Native Instruments just doesn't know how to do GUIs well. So if someone from NI is reading this, I'm going to show you what a real HiDPI scalable GUI is.

This is Kontakt 7:

Looks better, but the text is still small and hard to read. The only thing that resizes is the window, and then the thumbnails scale in a weird way as you keep dragging the bottom right corner, they grow big, then get smaller to accommodate another column. And, you can only resize it by that bottom right corner handle, just like Mac OS 9 over 20 years ago. It's puzzling that you can't do that resizing by clicking and dragging anywhere in the border.

Then we choose an instrument, and it's the same as it always was:

And, good luck trying to read those preferences.

This is shameful. This was the great HiDPI experience you were talking about?

So, let me show you some examples of proper HiDPI scaling.

This is CS-80 V4 from Arturia. The first time you open it, it launches at 100%:

Not bad, but my 27" monitor is a few feet away, so I would prefer the text a bit larger. No problem! I just go into the menu, and choose whatever zoom size I prefer:

Now it takes up all my screen, and I can play with all those beautiful knobs and sliders without ending with a headache because I had to force my eyes.

Another example. This is the Opus engine from Eastwest. Also opens at 100% the first time:

That's a bit hard to read for me, so again, an easy fix:

So NI software engineers, THAT is how you do a real HiDPI GUI, not the half assed implementation that you did. What you did is not even HiDPI, you just put a handle to resize the window, and made the text small but slightly more readable than before. But it's just lipstick on a pig. A Frankenstein with part new GUI, part old GUI. When you select an instrument, the old GUI opens up just like before, and it looks and acts just the same as Kontakt 6 or 5:

So you want an applause for this? More like an "Oh, OK. So that's it?"