Reviews and opinions on Kontakt 8?

donmaddonald

Hi guys, so, how is K8 so far?

how good or bad are the new tools? I'd like to hear from someone in this community, please try to be objective, I am asking this questions because I am a sucker for unique tools but I am broke at the moment, I have to really cherry pick instruments or plug-ins until new orders (bank account haha).

I own plug-ins such as arcade and scaler, on top of the most common plug-ins. will I gain value if I invest on it? something that only K8 will offer me right now? or K7 it is just fine? (given the scenario) ps if any NI employee is feeling some sort of way about this no worries I am broke because I just bought a S61 MK3 ;) hahah

Ewan Reid

I'd be careful. K8 not installing for a number of users so perhaps not a great time to upgrade.

donmaddonald

@Ewan Reid ok I might wait, it looks great but I am scared to spend money that I don't have in something I don't need. that's my biggest concern.

Cove

kontakt 8 crashes every time you change your preset in the leap category

donmaddonald

@Cove thank you for the info, it is exactly what I was looking for.

I think I will wait few months, to save up a bit and to let NI fix the day zero bugs.

dougieb

Kontakt 8 Seems really half baked. Once again, not backwards compatible and I don't see the point if you need to leave Kontakt 6 and Kontakt 7 installed. It fails to recognize a lot of libraries that show up in Kontakt 7 - even NI Libraries. NI has seemingly abandoned Reaktor and FM8 and previously Absynth which was probably their most unique product. I don't know going forward if there is any reason for me to continue with NI at this point, but I'm willing to give it a little more time. I think once the founders were gone and the investment group came in, they don't understand what users actually want.

DunedinDragon

I'm on Windows 10 and got my Kontakt 8 installed and running with all it's add-ins as well as updates to Komplete Kontrol and the firmware upgrade to my S88MK3 in about 2 1/2 hours. I've been systematically checking the functions and features and they all seem to work perfectly so far. Of course I haven't yet gotten to applying them in depth yet but I'm pleasantly surprised at how solidly it's been performing right out of the chute. All my libraries both from NI and 3rd party are there and appear to be working, but they were all fine and working on Kontakt 7 as well.

There's a lot of useful things here and it's going to take some time to find uses for everything, but I couldn't be more pleased so far.

Maciej Repetowski

I'm using Kontakt 8 Player at the moment. Very good improvements to GUI and functionality (persistent browser, scalable interface). New toys (err, Tools) are quite inspiring and a lot of fun. I had no problems with compatibility, all my libraries were found and work fine (they were Player compatible, though). I am positively surprised.

Paul B

I've not had much time with it but so far I am happy.

Did I need it? I did not. I have Scaler so probably won't use the chords tool. I'm undecided whether Leap is a toy or useful. I think Phrases is a great concept, but I'll have to get into it more to see if it offers something I couldn't already do with other tools (maybe easier with Phrases).

I'd say there's nothing anyone who owns Kontakt 7 needs in Kontakt 8.

I understand the lure of the shiny new thing. I fight it and sometimes lose and sometimes what I buy was worth it and sometimes it wasn't.

Yet I bought Kontakt 8. But there is one very important factor to be considered: I could easily afford it. So because I was about to migrate my old Kontakt 6 sets to Kontakt 7 (not having needed to until recently for reasons not relevant to this discussion) I thought ‘might as well go straight to the latest’.

If you still really want it, do what I did with Kontakt 7 where I had other things to spend that money on when it came out – wait for the next summer sale. It's not that far away.

donmaddonald

Thank you all for the feedback.

@Paul B you exactly nailed my question, thank you for the reasoning behind your comment, the appealing thing from K8 is that I am mainly in the NI ecosystem and having a scaler like function in my ecosystem it is very appealing (especially paired with the MK3 keyboard), even tho I often play my parts (just to learn how to play keys) but I use scaler as a guidance to get the feeling of a music genere. I will follow your advice, I will wait when I have extra cash to invest in improving my workflow or next summer.

@dougieb I understand your point of view, with NO hate, I agree with you, I felt the difference since the new company took over, I feel that NI plug-ins (especially maschine and KK) became less stable and reliable, as the company seems focusing more in releasing more products instead of making the existing product top-notch as they used to do, having less releases but much more quality instruments instead of generic sounds. HOWEVER.. I understand that now the competition (even indie developers) is getting stronger so they have to stay relevant, on top of that, there are 2 things that NI still has on it side,

1) a great community with great moderators, experts and NI employees that are often more helpful than opening tickets (witch also got worse IMO in metter of quick of response, two of my old tickets been completely ignored, instead moderators and employees helped me over here).

2) I believe that NI is getting back on track now, they are actually fixing stuff now, and delivering what they promised (slowly but steadily). Now they have the money, and the partnerships (eg. Izotope) to deliver exceptional products. I guess we wait and see. (maschine 3.0 probably will be very very very different 🤞💪)

@Maciej Repetowski @DunedinDragon thank you guys, I really can't wait to be able to test it myself.