Kontakt On IPadOS

Guys it is time to release a IPad Compatible Kontakt player…

I am a huge fan of Native Instruments and have spent good money on many of your products.

My home setup for the kids is on an IPad and I want to use my Kontakt libraries on it.

I am spending money on your competitors now, because you wont support IPad use. I have no choice. Why do you refuse to do this for so long? I want to give you money for crying out loud!

Find more posts tagged with

Kontakt 6

Comments

Vocalpoint

No iPad anywhere is capable of running Kontakt.

VP

D-One

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/253700#Comment_253700

How come? Theres Logic and Davinci Resolve for iPad… lol

iPads can have the same CPU's very capable Macs have… M4 and whatnot, why would it not be capable of running something as simple as Kontakt? I have just an M2 Mac Mini and can run like 80 instances of kontakt…. Maschine Plus with an 20$ Atom CPU runs Kontakt.

Now if it's worth the development time and effort.. well, probably not.

Dubalab

NI’s strategy is wait for Apple to merge OSs. NI lied off the people behind Traktor Dj2 app whose were the ones with the knowledge for deploy universal apps.

ATM even if an iPadOS compatible app could be used in desktop M-series macs, it’s the developer who must adapt and activate that option. Probably NI will not do it never due its commercial strategy so as D-One pointed out, not worth it in their roadmap from any POV.

Vocalpoint

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/253703#Comment_253703

"iPads can have the same CPU's very capable Macs have"

But outside the Pro series - they don't. The CPU in a typical "round the house" iPad is not anywhere near ready to handle Kontakt.

The bigger issue I see is that the Kontakt universe is immense.

Like the never ending Linux argument - no one in this "commercial" universe would ever want to take chance on rebuilding all their products - just to find out there is no market for an "app" version of Kontakt that sells for $100-$200-300.00?

Without a built in market that has say - 500,000-1,000,000 users - that are willing to spend whatever an "app" version of Kontakt might cost PLUS buy all the libraries that go with it - this will never happen.

Matthew_NI

We've looked into it at a high level only.

Although all are factors, memory and storage (more so than CPU) are the technical constraint here.

The typical Kontakt instrument takes up a large amount of storage, and it's possible just 1-3 instruments consume almost all the storage of a typical iPad. This alone would fall far short of the experience users would expect. The world of users with high GB to low TB of storage and/or the world of users willing to continually on/offload instruments to/from their iPad are very small worlds.

Added to which, most would expect not to have to buy Kontakt again, or that it would be extremely low priced on iOS, such that the commercial prospects are very very small.

We've made intentional forays into iOS plug-in development with products like Trash, just to test the waters. Having done so, we have no plans to continue at this time.

ALDREAD

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/253718#Comment_253718

iPad pros have M5 chips , thats the latest version, also in the MacBook Pro

Vocalpoint

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/253724#Comment_253724

Good to know. Do not dabble in the high end Pro level.

ALDREAD

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/253725#Comment_253725

yeah they’re expensive, especially if you want max ram / hdd , which you’d need for kontakt , so not for the casual user , I’d imagine most people would prefer the MacBook Pro if they were spending that much money

Dubalab

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/253721#Comment_253721

There are some developers showing it’s possible to handle big sample-based AUv3 and even using direct disk streaming etc… but that’s just one point of many. The price model makes it a no-go for most desktops developers. I see the strategy from devs like Gospel Musicians more complementary than substitutive as I pointed in my first comment.

I just want to point out that kontakt could be possible from technical side but not easy or worth from ROI.

https://youtu.be/s6Qf4VZ6DEI?si=0hmmbtgZsCoy2pqD

The iPad version is more or less the desktop version.

https://gospelmusicians.com/products/splat-to-clat?srsltid=AfmBOopdnWP_7p9bkIxm3dYx5VRgc9g4kgPW_F7VaHZEIuogxKe7_Eui

From their site…

1.25 GB Library Compressed to 787MB

iPad version probably more compressed and selectable downloads, folder route possible from external hard drive…

Another is Chomplr

https://youtu.be/MxHPid0QMTo?si=OIjMU4F25J8X782H

Said that the best approach for these (and maybe the concern to Kontakt) are virtual modeled instruments from Swam

https://youtu.be/LfIuMx0gIdo?si=RJtwjhAm7r_lV8x0

I hope NI some day will implement those technologies (hardware audio coding/decoding realtime from BionicAI part inside M-series) so those Kontakt (alongside Maschine itself) could be optimized so no limitations from ram/storage but maybe it’s not possible at all…

Logic for iPad (and Alchemy) point towards Apple taking seriously these tablets for professionals. I hope Mainstage also cames to iPad soon.

End offtopic.

D-One

@Vocalpoint
"iPads can have the same CPU's very capable Macs have"
But outside the Pro series - they don't. The CPU in a typical "round the house" iPad is not anywhere near ready to handle Kontakt.

Initially, you said this:

But they don't. The CPU is the nost capable iPad is not anywhere near that of a desktop Mac.

I'm guessing you did some googling, then edited your post. It's OK to be wrong my friend, no shame at all… I'm wrong many, many times. All I was commenting on was raw specs capabilities, not investment ROI, and that other stuff where Linux is also mentioned.

Benchmarks, although not perfect because they're synthetic loads are pretty close to being empirical evidence. Even tho theres nuances like sustained loads, core count, etc… this generally cannot be argued. An iPad Air M3 scores higher than my M1 Macbook which runs Kontakt just fine — Albeit, very high-end libs that eat ram like crazy and arent suitable on neither low end Macs or iPads.

I dont think musicians understand how much more demanding 4K video editing is compared to typical Audio stuff, modern iPads edit 4k quite well. We gotta stop spreading myths at some point…

Vocalpoint

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/253755#Comment_253755

"It's OK to be wrong my friend, no shame at all"

Understood - @ALDREAD set me straight. I stand corrected.

But then Matthew basically brought it all home.

D-One

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/253721#Comment_253721

I really appreciate you chiming in, people tend to only believe some things when it's said by an NI offitial account, so yeah…. thanks.

With that said the storage argument is quite weak when most mac users have 500GB of SSD internal storage… A gigantic portion Kontakt users use external storage, do they not? Who in their right mind gets a mac with 4TB when that costs an extra 2000$ when you can get super fast external nvme storage for 200$ ?

Having to buy things twice is indeed a huge issue on iPadOS, theres quite a few things I own on Mac that i refuse to pay again on iPad, then again i don't use the iPad for music, nor am I advocating it should be a priority.

Again, I completely understand that the data points to a very low likelihood of the dev time and R&D investment on iPadsOS giving the company it's money worth back, no need to use CPU specs, storage or other BS as an excuse… It's OK to say it's not profitable in terms of ROI.

Lets not forget the Linux based Maschine Plus with an Intel Atom 1.6 GHz CPU, 4GB RAM runs Kontakt (with many limitations) and has a tiny userbase, I wonder if that userbase is bigger or smaller than the iPad one… I am willing to bet theres less standalone users than potential iPad users but of course, i cannot prove this + it's x86 so maybe it's less of an effort (?) this last one might be debatable.

Pretty soon Apple will release an MacBook with a iPhone CPU, A18 which should run Kontakt just fine apart from ram intensive libs, so we are at a point when a iPhone could run Kontakt, let alone iPad and everyone claiming otherwise might get embarrassed…

ALDREAD

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/253764#Comment_253764

I think I’ll grab one of those new MacBooks

ALDREAD

@D-One as that MacBook will run MacOS and there’s also a rumour of a touch screen MacBook Pro , and as iPads use m chips , do you think Apple will unify macOS and iOS

Matthew_NI

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/253764#Comment_253764

Storage argument isn't weak at all.

I used to work in iOS development, and can tell you unequivocally that almost all users (per our data tracking) of iOS devices are on the entry level / lowest GB storage tiers. It's just not something most people tend to pay extra to increase.

For the most recent iPad (not the Pro, or the Air, or the Mini, just the regular one most people buy) this is 128GB, just for example.

128GB disappears very very quickly. You lost a chunk to the OS from the get go. Then you lose a chunk more (and quickly) to various app data chunks, such as iMessage or Whatsapp or Facebook, and then a chunk more to Photos.

Imagine that you had between 50-80GB available. Now imagine you downloaded a few flagship Kontakt instruments. In some cases, a single instrument might be upwards of 40GB. Whereas the user expectation for Kontakt on iOS would be that it works exactly the same way as macOS, the reality is you'd have to make cumbersome decisions about which instruments in your library to load and unload to the device storage. Each time you open a project such decisions rear their head once again. It's far from a seamless experience of seeing your entire collection and loading it as and when needed. Kontakt technically does run on Maschine+ but as you know, it's heavily curated and limited.

Yes iOS users can buy more storage. Yes users can pay for cloud storage to offload storage. Very few do. Also only serious high end Kontakt users buy external hard drives for their music collections. Most users just work with the machine that they have.

And yes, I'm well aware of ways to optimize the way we use storage like @Dubalab mentions. But direct from disc streaming … does nothing to solve the problem of the disc itself having limited capacity. And sure, there may be ways to compress certain libraries. But the examples they give are 1.25GB. The typical Kontakt instrument is significantly larger than this.

My point in bringing up storage was only to bring clarity to the technical constraints, that until my message, were focussed on CPU (which is less of an issue). If we implemented this, users would largely reject it.

I also said in my original message that the commercial outlook simply isn't there. Both can be true.

Quick links

Unanswered questions