Leap v Arcade

jacqui brookes

Leap has potential for sure, Arcade has so much more to offer. Plus the interface is more relaxed.

Vagus

Leap has only just been released, against a four year old product in Arcade, but there's a few things to consider…

Arcade is a feature complete toolkit, which I didn't keep subscribing to, for two reasons - It didn't fit the type of music I'm interested in creating (subjective) and it didn't have NKS compatability (subjective).

Had Output implemented NKS functionality, it would have likely been even more successful that it has been. But, having seen how little they've supported their kontakt instruments and plugins, and their shifting focus to AI, I doubt they'll do much innovation in tradtional plugin development; it'll all be AI based generative, and you'll start to see some of that work its way into Arcade.

Leap, however, does have NKS functionality, and is at its entry point in product lifecycle - I would expect itterative enhancements and regular pack release. The difference here, is that anyone can create a Leap sound pack, so I would hope that given the size of the Kontakt community, this becomes a thing soon enough.

Of course, only time will tell on the level of support NI provides leap, which can only be defined by customer usage. If you want more, ask for it, but I wouldn't expect huge developments if you simply wait for them to happen.

D-One

Not a fair comparison since it's a new product vs a very established one, on the other hand if they make similar products than it must be compared.

Arcade has an insane amount of content, so with Leap being new there's no competing in this aspect so far and probably for a long time.

Arcade only takes disk space when you actually hear something you like and download kits/samples, while Leap relies on having everything on your computer, so Leap will take a whole lot more disk space with tons of stuff we might never use, big con IMO.

Functionality wise it's really, really similar… small pros and cons for both.

It remains to be seen how NI will deal with selling leap content, I guess it will be like Maschine or Massive-X Expansions??

I also cancelled my Arcade sub but for different reasons, I hated the sample slicing interface, it's designed only with grid slicing in mind due to it's hold-to-loop approach, I hated that… You can't just click to slice or multi-slice to the other slots based on sensitivity or manually, like often samplers do. It's a shame NI followed Arcade so closely in this regard. Theres a lot of cool stuff in Leap's Sampler that I wish Maschine had like browsing while staying on Key and even the latch looping… But a unified fully-featured Sampler across all products would be nice instead of having to pick the pros and cons of each: Maschine Sampler, KK Sampler, Battery, Leap… sheesh.

dogbreath11

anyone know if its possible to assign each sound to a different output in leap?

thanks