[Livestream] Get together with KONTAKT team

Kaiwan_NI

Tune in for a livestream for a chance to get your questions answered by a KONTAKT team.

Another KONTAKT get-together is around the corner. Run by the KSP wizard @EvilDragon himself, our next livestream will be joined by a VP of Product Management Christian Wachsmuth. Christian's experience with the iconic sampling platform spans many years. Starting as a sound designer on the KONTAKT 3 Factory Library, he moved on to take on a series of roles, from a QA on the KONTAKT platform team, a Project Manager of the KONTAKT Instruments team, to the director of KOMPLETE division, and now a VP of Product Management at Native Instruments. If there's one person who can talk about the history of KONTAKT, it's definitely Christian.

Mark your calendar. This livestream will take place on Friday May 19, 2023 at 5 PM CET/ 11 AM EST/ 8 AM PST. A link to the livestream will be posted here before the event starts.

Drop your questions in the comment section below, and join the livestream to chat all things KONTAKT on May 19!

GentleThud

Can we please get more options for reordering the browser list in both Kontakt and Komplete Kontrol? I've never understood why there isn't an Alphabetical order option, or a more sophisticated way of grouping instrument/plugin types. At last count, I've got 116 instrument libraries in Kontakt and 194 inside Komplete Kontrol. The default ordering of the browser lists is unwieldy and makes no sense, forcing us to endlessly hunt for what we want.

Ed M

Will the livestream be made available for later watching?

LostInFoundation

Since many users use Kontakt just to load prebuilt instruments, not really profiting of its sampler aspect or own instruments builder, and now we also have Komplete Kontrol, do you have any plans about making NI instruments “independent” from Kontakt (being them built with it or not)?

Second question: any interest on giving to Kontakt more play styles? (I’m thinking granular, reversible live playing (maybe using mod wheel), live playback speed variations, live movable looping points, MPE,…)

TORLEY

Thank you for doing this! 🙌

(1) What is the timetable for MPE support 🐙🎹 in Kontakt looking like? It could add so much expression to the existing wealth of orchestral and other deep-sampled instruments, and many more to come.

(2) Could Kontakt please add a 🎲🔀 dice shuffle button to choose a random preset from the current search results? Including any snapshots. This would make it so much better to discover surprises in one's vast library, instead of just going by alphabetical categories. Some NI individual instruments like Lores already have "Randomize preset" in their internal snapshot browsers, so wouldn't it fantastic to expand this to a global level?

DJRO47

Can you add the ability to create and add your own chords to the chord library?

Vagus

What I'd really like to see, is a drag and drop editor for creating instruments. Is that on the horizon?

Creator Tools is fine, but only really useful for those with knowedge of KSP. With a little more investment, a drag and drop editor would allow literally anyone to create insturments.

We've seen some instruments using Native UI being released to the public - do we have a timetable for non-native instruments products will get access? Basically, is this close to exiting closed beta?

Finally, which product do you think pushes the envelop of what's possible with Kontakt, and why should everyone own it? (I'm thinking Choreographs, or Playbox, for example).

Allang123

Hi: would really like to know when you will be updating your keyboard line? Especially the S series. Great keyboards already. Will be exciting to see what improvements you can make to them.

Thanks.

Chris6003

Would be amazing if the Komplete Kontrol and Kontakt would just scale sufficiently across different screens - it’s weird that in 2023 I’m having to strain my eyes to look at loads of detail in a tiny UI

psemme

I think a huge upgrade would be to make the Kontakt sampler much more user-friendly and approachable. Like others have said, the current UI is outdated w tiny fonts and elements that don’t scale up. Revamping the sampler UI to make more accessible its amazing capabilities would be a big benefit for all users and open up the possibility of community-driven sample catalog.

Aaron McPherson

I would like to see more synthesis engines added to Kontakt so it can be more competitive with Falcon and Halion, as well as instruments like Arturia’s Augmented series.

jsepeta

Why did Native Instruments abandon Absynth? Was there no way to update the codebase to support future efforts? What about other products you've discontinued: any chance we could see a fresh version of Vokator or Spektral Delay?

jsepeta

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/70874#Comment_70874

I second this recommendation. During Covid I got a job which required working from home, so I upgraded to 2x 28" 4k displays, which means the existing UI for Kontakt is kind of sad and dated.

Monochrome

@jsepeta "Why did Native Instruments abandon Absynth?"

I highly doubt the KONTAKT team can answer that for you. It is an entirely different product. The reason can be found here, however.

Lowkus

My theory is that NI fired most of their programmers and now they don't have anyone to support Absynth, nor will they support a bunch of other software hence why they haven't updated MassiveX, FM8 and other products for a long time. I expect NI will eventually have only two products they support, Kontakt and Maschine, and they'll make all their money by selling sample packs for those products. That's why it's important for the musical community to find other companies to buy music software from, where those other companies won't replicate NI's behavior of shutting off activation servers to prevent people from using older software.

Monochrome

Let's not derail this thread, meant for asking questions to the KONTAKT team, with speculations and wild theories about NI. There's a better place for it.