[New release] KONTAKT 7 is here

dougieb

First gripe is that they named it Kontakt 7 rather than Kontakt - so it doesn’t load in older projects. But that’s a good thing because K7 is still buggy and crashes easily, so I’m glad it didn’t write over K6.

The major issues with crashing have to do with the population of the quick load sub menu in the load/save drop-down.

I do hope they make this a priority though and rename the app as well.

BroHah@

There are a lot of cool, helpful features introduced in Kontakt 7. I'm liking the new browser - curious to see how it might evolve, over time. Here's a browser suggestion. I'm not sure how doable it is. Though the sound previews make it quick and easy to select favorites, they don't tell the full story of what a preset will sound like, across its playable (keyboard) keys. To get a sense of that, one currently has to load the preset, ultimately spending a lot of time bouncing back and forth between the browser and the traditional Kontakt 6 style UI. That's pretty time consuming, and rather awkward.

It would be great if one could try out the various presets across their playable keys, while still in the browser. That might involve temporarily loading the preset, while still in the browser, while allowing users to trigger the applicable keys, perhaps via an onscreen keyboard that only includes the playable keys for that preset.

A huge time-waster that I had hoped would have been fixed: there is no good reason to ask users if they want to save a preset, if it's a stock preset that hasn't been changed. Furthermore the implementation of that 'feature' is arbitrary. Happens most of the time, but not all the time.

It would be great if users were allowed to choose amongst various various options for disabling the 'nag'. When I'm experimenting with, or searching for, instruments and presets, I would rather save presets that I've adjusted, only when I choose to save them. Perhaps an optional 'let me try stuff' mode would be a good option. Given the abundance of Kontakt instruments in Komplete, the vast number of third-party Kontakt instruments, and the vast number of Kontakt users, giving users the ability to control, and even disable, the nag could save a collective total of a year or more worth of user hours, currently wasted by needing to click on 'No', in response to "Do you really want to replace the instrument? Any unsaved changes will be lost!"

One last suggestion... why does the Post Comment button below this 'Leave a Comment dialog box keep flashing as I'm writing this? That's definitely distracting and annoying. IMO, that flashing doesn't seem the least bit helpful or necessary.

Thanks for the great work done by everyone at NI, on Kontakt 7 and the entire Komplete 14 offerings. I hope that some of what I've suggested here ends up being helpful.

Monochrome

"One last suggestion... why does the Post Comment button below this 'Leave a Comment dialog box keep flashing as I'm writing this? That's definitely distracting and annoying. IMO, that flashing doesn't seem the least bit helpful or necessary."

Nothing to do with Kontakt 7, but to answer it anyway:

The forum automatically saves what you write as a draft every now and then. In case you wrote a long post and suddenly something happens (e.g. internet gone, tab closed accidentally, browser crashed, etc), you can go right back to where you last were without having to start over. And no, there's no way to turn it off.

E.rex

you cant even get kontakt 6 working properly on monterey and you want my thoughts on 7? then you only have support for registering new products or harware but i cant reach you about this problem for lontime exixting users?

🤦‍♂️👎

Jade81

Greetings,

I appreciate the effort, but below are 6 things I noticed after using it for less than 5 minutes, and frankly after waiting years for meaningful updates, I’m a bit disappointed.

Overall, I cannot stress enough that you guys really need to get the User Interface (UI) of this entire system up to modern times. I don't even like using the stuff I've purchased because the Kontakt container is such a buzzkill to work with.

1. We can't use up and down keyboard keys to preview sounds. We're required to click on every single item to hear it. When you're working, it's important to be able to move quickly and keyboard keys are best for this.
2. The Kontakt container is scalable, but what does this do for us in terms of using the actual plugins/tools? They still aren't scalable. So, we basically get a larger view to see the hero/card art for each instrument and that is it. That's not much of an improvement, and that's not a true scaling UI when you look at the overall experience. The plugins are stuck at a tiny outdated low resolution size, and blurry at that.
3. When in the Library view, we can't click on a hero/card to launch the plugin. Instead we have to click on the preview patch/setting in the list to the right.
4. When the Side Pane is open we can't access previews.
5. Plugins (even NI's) are not Retina/HIDPI-friendly. I spent $200 on Analog Strings, another $100 on Electric Mint, another $100 on Picked Acoustics, and more, and they are all way too small to enjoy and are blurry on my 27" Retina Display.
6. There is a bug/glitch when loading plugins into the Kontakt container (Analog Strings, etc). Rainbow-like static imagery appears for 1-2 seconds. This is on a strong 10-Core Mac (i9) with 72GB or RAM, SSD, 16 GB AMD VRAM - 27” 5K Retina.

I would scrap the whole Kontakt system, and plan something new that makes sense to end-users (not just partners that want to piggyback off the NI name and customer list), and figure out something that is enjoyable to use, as a UI should be.

I honestly don't see any strong reason to require something like Analog Strings to play in Kontakt (for the end-user). Kontakt is basically a clunky plugin launcher at this point. That and previews (also clunky in K7), which should just be part of each plugin anyway. If you want a partnership with these other plugin developers, that can still exist, but why force users to deal with Kontakt when it's not necessary and is antiquated?

I hope this helps in some way. A lot of the stuff sounds great, but the UI leaves a lot of room for improvement.

JD

swan jay

So for me on my rig windows 11, kontakt 6 started to crash on Cubase 12 pro in the beginning of the year and both companys would blame each other for the crashes. (Companys should work together for the music community always.)(selfish,greedy humans.)

Kontakt 7 is solid as a rock in Cubase 12.0.40 and am so happy. Kontakt 6 has been deleted all together and every thing is back to normal for me.

Kontakt 7 is rock solid and all the updates are super kool. Feels like a new instrument and i am in love again..

Thank you native instruments for getting this right.....

outlieraud

Kontakt 7: Great ideas, VERY POOR implementation, TONS of BUGS.

I think the browser in Kontakt 7 has the potential to be a good beginning, but there's also a lot of weird choices. It isn't clear if some of these 'choices' are bugs, or are by design. Issues listed below. However, I can't emphasize the word "potential" enough, because what could be the basis for decent browser ultimately results in a browser far more warts than not; at least so far.

There are also a TON of design choices that disregard the users content.

For example: Non-player libraries will not preview. This could simply be resolved by the browser playing a midi note behind the scenes as a means to offer a preview for non-player libraries, but unfortunately this wasn't given any thought. The database could scan the nki for the note parameters used in the patch, and offer a midi-note-based preview that will trigger a sound in the patch as a preview, but no such thought was given. As complicated as this may sound, the fact is Omnisphere does this. Spectrasonics were smart enough to design this into its preview feature a decade ago. NI gave no such consideration, which defeats the entire purpose of a browser intended to allow you to locate content quickly. Overall a very very poorly thought out implementation that results in a ton of scenarios where previewing a file simply will not work.

Snapshots created on a previous, different, or a developers machine will not preview. Custom snapshots I made on my previous machine cannot be previewed - EVEN IF MADE IN AN "OFFICIAL" NI LIBRARY - E.g. Ashlight, Straylight, Lores, etc - these custom presets cannot preview because they were made on a previous machine I have since replaced. In terms of 3rd party developer presets - some of the best example I can think of would be - Ethera Gold 2, Elements Modern Scoring Synth, etc. These libraries can have HUNDREDS of snapshot presets. these presets can NOT be previewed. This is a HUGE DESIGN FLAW. This has, by far, been the biggest let down of the new browser.

You have to "hack" you're way into creating images for 3rd party/"non-player" libraries. It's a lot of work, (and because it's a hack there's no guarantee that the hack will work forever...) IT COULD HAVE BEEN AS SIMPLE AS DRAGGING AN IMAGE FILE ONTO THE FOLDER, THAT FILE BEING REPLICATED TO THE WHERE IMAGE PREVIEWS ARE STORED. It really wouldn't need to be any more complicated than that. Logic for example does this with track icons - simply grab a png or jpeg, drag it to a track, now you have a permanent new track icon you can use to locate tracks easily in Logic. Kontakt 7's browser could have been designed with the same simplicity and ease of use, but no such considerations were made ahead of time.

So while the new browser may look nice, if you own the full version of Kontakt and have many 3rd party "non-player" libraries you will find hundreds to thousands of presets that show up in a search, but cannot be previewed. What is the point of having a preview feature if ever file associated with the libraries you use cannot be previewed?!

Adding user tags is INCREDIBLY LIMITED. Any "Player" libraries show up as Read Only and cannot be tagged! With 10's of thousands of files user tags are essential in locating content. Currently tagging is severely limited. It SUCKS, and as simple as that AFAIC.

FINALLY: KONTATKT 7 HAS DEPRECATED KONTAKT'S DATABASE. On paper the new browser would explain this, and offer a solution by way of making tagging easier. But as described in the paragraphs above, this is more limited than not, and has a ton of caveats that still make the case in favor of keeping Kontakt's database.

REGARDING BUGS HERE IS A LIST OF BUGS I HAVE ENCOUNTERED SO FAR.

(IT'S UNCLEAR IF SOME OF THESE ARE THE RESULT OF BAD DESIGN CHOICES):

1. The new browser will randomly create duplicate folders of libraries. For example I have both Cinebrass Core and Pro, but there are 3 Cinebrass folders. The 'extra' folder is a generic folder icon, and sandwiched between the Core and Pro folders that both have icons. I also have a second Albion folder. The only GUESS I can make is that this may be related to the libraries having two versions of presets, E.g. the latest Cinebrass update as well as Cinebrass 1.6. It's a guess though.... And these aren't the only two libraries behaving like this. Several other users on VI-Control have experienced the same issue, so this is not an edge case.
2. There are a few libraries where the browser displays presets that don't even exist on this machine, and never have existed on this machine! These were on previous machines, have been deleted or moved, and the only guess I can make is that Kontakt is looking at a RECORD of OLD FILES MIGRATED IN PREVIOUS MIGRATIONS - BUT WERE NEVER ACTUALLY TRANSFERRED TO MY CURRENT MACHINE. This is completely weird, and incredibly annoying.
3. You can't REMOVE these redundant folders. Kontakt 7 created them by default the 1st time Kontakt 7 was run, and they will not go away, even though they're redundant, or - as described in issue 2 - in some cases don't even exist! Updating Kontakt 5 or 6's database does't fix the issue. Rescanning Komplete Kontrol's database does not resolve the issue! I'm stuck with multiple redundant folders, and multiple "ghost" folders.
4. These "ghost" folders - folders that don't actually exist on the machine - will show nki files that don't physically exist. If you attempt to right click on an nki to reveal the files in Finder (macos) - in hopes of finding out where they are located - you're taken to your front-most finder window with no physical files to show. This confirms that the files do not exist anywhere on the machine. Further more, I did a thorough search of the entire machine which revealed these files simply do NOT exist. The bowser still thinks they do, and I can't do anything to correct the errors!
5. The browser appears to ignore changes if corrections have been made. In one instance I found a folder of several "legacy" patches (nki files for instruments that have been archived and removed). I deleted these files but the browser still lists them as being available. TO BE CLEAR, These "legacy" files do NOT constitute/comprise the sum of all of the mysterious "ghost" files and duplicate folders. So in addition to there being mysterious "ghost" files and duplicate, the browser also disregards changes made by the user that may attempt to correct some (not all) of the errors the new browser makes. Why it finds files that never existed on the machine is a complete mystery!
6. Some folders simply will not add to the file browser. Why is unclear. Some folders contain libraries that contains player libraries, others don't, so there is no logic behind why random libraries refuse to be added.
7. I'm not convinced the 'Read Only' tagging issue isn't a bug. (I sure hope it is). If this is a big this needs to be resolved ASAP. But again, this still comes with the nasty caveat that any 3rd party non-player libraries, and snapshots made on previous different machines will not preview.

OVERALL: If you're a previous Kontakt user, and the new browser is the thing you find luring you toward Kontakt 7, give all of the points raised in this reply some serious thought. You'll find many scenarios where the browser ultimately fails to be of any service to you.

Even with easy searchability, you're likely to run into search results with various (if not many) presets that cannot be previewed. Becuase you can't preview any/all files in Kontakt you'll find that you still lack the ability to tag many presets you would like to unless you want to load each preset one by one, then tag. With 10s of thousands of presets? Good luck with that!

I'll end where I began. It's a potentially good idea, but in actual use there are just as many, if not more pitfalls than there are perks. Don't let the browser be the only reason you're interested in Kontakt or you're likely to be disappointed.

Lowkus

I do not own Kontakt 7 because I am still boycotting NI until they allow activation of older products. However I can say from videos I have seen of Kontakt 7 the software looks extremely underwhelming, and that's about as polite as I can be about it.

Glenn Rueger

Another NI product I cannot use. Just because I make a living with writing and producing music doesn't mean I rush out and buy the latest macihines. My cMP has 12 cores at 3.46 with 96 GB of RAM and there's no need to throw it away. Not just for NI anyway. I guess I'll be using either Kontakt 6 for a while or I will abandon ship; I will jump off the sleek, billionaire-centric Native Instruments yacht.

Donkey Oaty

The first thing to say about Kontak 7 is that it’s a significant improvement over Kontakt 6.x.

The library view and search facility are great. A vast improvement on all priors, including Komplete Kontrol. In fact, I wonder what Komplete Kontrol’s function is now? Do I need it to run my A series keyboard? Back to the library view. It’s picking up all my NI Instruments, the full Kontakt 3rd party instruments and a few 3rd parties that are Kontakt only, but not full Kontakt with serial numbers. Great.

A search on funk, soul, jazz, pop, trap, classical, chamber and orchestra brings up a far more relevant list of results than prior Native Instruments products. It’s not perfect, a search on ‘classical’ brings up no classical music instruments. It even misses the wonderful Kontakt Factory Library 2 – with its Orchestral Tools instruments. ‘Classic’ delivers some guitars. Orchestra provides more results than orchestral, which you’d expect. Chamber delivers Session Strings 2 and a piano. ‘Orchestra’ demonstrates how good the search can be. The character section shows up a range of orchestral instruments. It will probably grow in usefulness as new Native Instruments and 3rd parties utilize it and more keywording takes place. Keywording and categorization will be critical.

But let’s be clear, it’s a massive upgrade on all that was prior. And it needs to be. The top Komplete 14 Collector’s Edition (way beyond my limited financial means) “includes 148 instruments and effects, plus 103 expansions”. Some of those ‘instruments’ are complete orchestras. In a commercial environment, if you cannot easily find the piccoli, or solo violin with staccato articulation, size becomes counter-productive, unless there’s a good cataloguing and retrieval system. Kontakt 7 is showing a good future direction here.

Adding 3rd Party libraries was initially frustrating. I’d previously done this from within my DAW. Kontakt 7 allowed me to create new folders in Quick Access, but resolutely refused to let me rename them. The solution was to launch the desktop version. That facilitated me. As you can also drag and drop NKIs from their folders – setting up my instruments was quick and easy from there.

Disappointments are few. I was really hoping I’d be able to scale the instrument window from within my DAW. If this is possible I can’t do it, because there’s no drag handle on the smaller display. That’s the only major area I was hoping would improve. The larger one shows just the upper tip of this, in both library and instrument view, with the grabbable region buried beneath my desktop task bar. This was a major negative with Kontakt 6.x – some interfaces are detailed, and trying to work on an ostinatum the size of a postage stamp is bad for both posture and eyes. I hope this can be improved. I also can’t see the all the names and full names of some of the individual NKIs within some of my larger VSTs – but can work around that and suspect this niggle will be sorted over time.

Being able to find a trombone, or a guitar with wah wah (Mint) is great – you’re no longer presented with every patch of every synth that has the letter combination ‘wah’ in it. Of course if you want those synth – the search allows you to find them. For those who used Komplete Kontrol’s search to throw them ‘curve balls’ for creativity, Komplete 14 contains ‘playbox’, which should enable that. A search on random also worked and the character window went down a list of specific ‘feels’/types as I narrowed down. So a win-win here.

Performance wise – instrument loading is slower than Kontakt 6.x. But if you have that, you’ll retain it. It remains an option, so there’s no problem. Once loaded, 7 seems to be putting a lighter load on CPU (this could be a figment of my imagination).

Have I mentioned the Kontakt Factory Library 2? It’s pretty amazing. As is Kontakt 7. I bought Kontakt in May, Komplete 13 in June and Glaze in July. I was going to grumble about the upgrade cost. I went so far as to work out the costs of the instruments I’d use.

Kontakt 7 and its instrument upgrade were under-sold by Native Instruments. Nice move. No cognitive dissonance here – just delight with the breadth and quality of what I’ve received. It’s great value for money.

abnegative

The artwork in Native Access 2 is clear, but the artwork in Kontakt 7 is blurry.

cpr_evo6

Sorry, I’m so unimpressed. Kontakt 7 was a major reason for me to upgrade to K14 and it turns out to be just a thin, badly integrated browser on top of that awful, tiny non-resizable window for our instruments. I know NI can’t deliver a resize option for 3rd party instruments but at least provide a scaling window maybe (it might not be pretty but at least we could read the text!!!)? Easy!? Also, the bug that’s existed forever when the instrument window doesn’t resize from normal size for a wider tool (like Ashlight) is still present too. Pathetic… Kontakt 7 is a thin smear of new code on the old beast, which is a great product and why I’m still using Kontakt 6 (as the right-click ‘quick menu’ is way better than the Library interface still).

in summary, IMHO, the only upside to Kontakt 7 is a preset browser (that’s kind of already in Komplete Kontrol and now doubles up) with a single star rating. Whoopy Doo, other solutions have had this (and much better) for years…

There better be some proper, free Kontakt 7.1 update coming soon that warrants the fees NI have already charged us for Komplete 14. Sorry but that’s how I feel…

cpr_evo6

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/33858#Comment_33858

I’m sorry but Not true IMO, especially when they are charging this much for sham of a UI update (PS. I’m a software developer and I can see this is a bodge on top of the old beast) that adds nothing. I spend 5% of my time browsing for instruments and 95% using an instrument, so 95% of the time the K7 ’benefits’ are non-existent and I’m stuck with text that is illegible! That is a priority 1 UI no no…

AlessioRoma

First of all, I am pleased with the new factory library, it gave me the feeling that the first kontakt factory library gave me many years ago, which to me seemed revolutionary as a transition to the NI world. Then for the new version of kontakt, I feel good, even if the changes are not radical. I would have preferred better management of libraries, such as folders by grouping by genre or shortcuts for unofficial libraries. I like the graphics of the hdpi libraries and I hope that all the others will be updated as soon as possible.

Kymeia

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/34478#Comment_34478

Hi Kaiwan I understand fully why libraries are a longer term goal but to me the logical and most doable next step would be to make the rest of the Kontakt gui HDPI. It seems messy to see the crisp fonts and graphics of the browser contained within a toolbar that has a mix of crisp and blurry items including the Kontakt logo, all dialogues are decidedly loDPI with pixelated tiny bitmap fonts and tiny windows and worst of all the sample editor and mixers are also loDPI and too small on my 5k screen

to me these are all within NI’s domain to fix and not dependent on third parties getting up to speed with the libraries so should be the next priority (tbh I think those should have been completed before release but what is done is done)