Is it just me, or does Kontakt 8 suck?

Matthew Lien

I am liking the Kontakt 8 interface even less than the previous! I have to switch between default and "classic" views constantly! I switch because many patches for instruments (like from Spitfire Audio) just don't show up, and are noteven searchable!!! But I can find them searching the file system in "classic" view. Ridiculous. And if I mistakenly load a second instrument without surgically selecting the next "+", it offloads the first instrument which had been set up, causing me to close my project without saving just to get the instrument back as I set it up. This sucks soooooo bad!!! And hey NI, what's up with cramming your sales pitch into the instrument viewer??? Is that helpful? Does that improve my already frustrating user experience? I would GLADSLY leave this software behind if I could.

DunedinDragon

It's always a challenge when a product gets a complete makeover as all the normal workflow you've been using gets disrupted. I still have mixed feelings about it. To be honest 90% of the time I use Komplete Kontrol rather than Kontakt so it's not as disruptive for me, but like you I have quite a number of non-NI libraries from Spitfire, 8DIO, and numerous other sources and it's been a challenge for some of them even in Komplete Kontrol. I recently had a fairly specialized library (banjo) that I could only get to load in Kontakt 7. Glad I kept a copy around.

For me I'm a bit more forgiving since I spent most of my career in commercial software development and I understand the trade-offs and difficulties in trying to achieve progress in more advanced functionality while maintaining consistency with the past. In fact I'd have to say if it weren't for classic view I probably wouldn't be using Kontakt 8 at all. Without that global access in other views, operating Kontakt in standalone mode when I'm looking for sounds that might work for a project is basically non functional. That's simply a mind-numbing decision to have been made in the design as it pretty much precludes the use of all the additional tools that they added to Kontakt which were really at the core of the advancement of new "useful" features and explains why I've not yet found a productive use for them.

I do understand the global usefulness of the underlying changes in the technology as it moves to a more industry standard spec for library access and potential advancements in MIDI and am willing to be patient to see how that might play out in the future so I'm willing to tolerate a certain amount of pain. But the lack of globally available standalone BPM access along with the inability to access some very useful non-NI libraries is going to be the two things, in my case, to preclude me from even considering the use of the fancy new tools yet.

Kymeia

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/43422/is-it-just-me-or-does-kontakt-8-suck

The annoyances regarding replace behaviour can be adjusted with these settings:

and the 'sales pitch' can also be turned off

As to the rest though I agree - it seems every new version of Kontakt brings with it at least one new browser and view. We now have:

Side browser

Library browser

Rack browser

Files browser

Quickload browser

Snapshots browser

Modules preset browsers

plus some instruments also have their own preset browsers

Please NI can we have one browser to rule them all?

Keith Cocker

Its you.I love it!!😀

Kymeia

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/216346#Comment_216346

It’s good too, in terms of what it can do

But the interface is a real ‘dog’s dinner’ at the moment. I think the problem is it’s in a transitional state between the old Kontakt and whatever the new Kontakt NI are aiming for is so it’s got GUI elements that are high and low res, some bits that are more modern like the side browser, but also many relics that have yet to be revamped like the editor especially. And the gazillion browsers and alternate views also reflect that but it makes it feel very unharmonious and disorganised as an interface.

syn_madera

In my Opinion, the thought behind Kontakt 8 is awesome, with all the additional tools in mind. BUT for now, its almost unusable when working with 3rd party libraries since they do not have Banks and Kontakt 8 is not able to read the folder-structure they deliver… so as an example: Audio Imperia Nucleus - instead of having a nice structure of a few folder where everything is sorted you end up looking to hundreds of single files/presets… same with Keepforest Devastator… messed up with Kontakt 8.
It was too early to release Kontakt 8… really leaves a bad taste in your mouth and people still use Kontakt 7 because exactly that reason… The Product Owner of Kontakt 8 did a bad Job. Or the NI Management let him do a bad job… however, Kontakt 8 is not ready yet.

Kymeia

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/216564#Comment_216564

With third party libraries that are not NKS it would be nice if users were able to have more control over how they appear in the Library browser such as being able to add tags and create sub banks

There is an option in the importer to create banks from subfolders but that depends on the original developer having organised the library that way. Personally I find the Quickview browser more efficient for browsing older and third party non NKS libraries anyway