Kontakt 7 Libraries quality drop

coroneddu

hey all,

I upgraded to K7 but I have to say I'm pretty disappointed by the Orchestral Tools overhaul of the orchestral library

I just tried the harp and celesta and there's a very noticeable hiss on each sample that stacks up pretty quickly which makes these libraries unusable

I've also found some pretty bad sampling on some flutes in Acoustic.

I'm a lil' shocked to be honest. Been an NI user since a decade and I've never experienced a drop in quality of this magnitude. Especially with a flagship product like Kontakt.

But I'd love to know your thoughts since I'm pretty bamboozled that all reviews never mention any of this

garfinkle

Agreed.

Sample libraries this wet are next to useless for most complex situations.

coroneddu

absolutely, just finished another exploration and, just to name one, the Xylophone is absurdly wet with no reverb on... not to mention the high noise floor on other instruments and lack of HP filtering on others.

Quite surprised by the lack of care from the Orchestral Tool side. It's a little weird to think that's the same people behind Arkhis which sounds absolutely stellar.

But quite surprised also by the fact that someone gave the QA ok to these libraries.

garfinkle

The actual OT libraries are very, very good. These cutdown versions appear to be taken from mainly the hall mics, which can be balanced with tree and close mics in the original OT libraries. Not enough for my liking (I still prefer the original LASS for dry close mic), but far more usable than these.

Personally, I think that Orchestral Tools are doing themselves a huge disservice by releasing these diminished versions of their otherwise excellent libraries.

genericerik88

I use the old Kontakt Factory library for things like triangle, celesta, timpani, and other decorative instrumentation. I was excited to get the updated library, and then immediately dissappointed at the severe drop in quality. Everything is wet and noisy. It's almost comical how bad the new samples sound compared to the old versions. I wonder how something this poor gets greenlit by QA. I assume there was very little AB comparison with what they were actually replacing.

DunedinDragon

I agree. There are some instruments that are usable in simple situations, but I rarely turn to it for anything needing more realism and dynamics. But then, I can't say I was expecting that much as I tend to use much more deeply sampled orchestral libraries most of the time. It's just nice to have an orchestra that loads quickly and that's when I use OT.

Kubrak

I guess it is targeted to users that need some classical instruments and just start. Not for serious users.

montesumolo

I totally agree! I Have to say that the strings have a nice tone, but some instruments in the woodwinds like the oboe are completely unusable; they have e very noticeable harsh hiss which you definitely hear also a denser mix. Really bizarre & underwhelming.

Jamie Hunter

I'm glad I'm not the only person that noticed this, I've also found problems with other instruments in the so called new library, about 85% of the sounds are from the original Kontakt library, just an updated GUI. I have plenty of 3rd party libraries for Orchestral stuff, which is a good job as previously stated the OT is unusable.

McClaneonfire

I came across this thread and I believe this is a bug.

Try to switch the red switches and tadaa it sometimes works!!!

This slightly reverby sound or a biiit to long forthgoing note can't be serious I thought - so I played around with the red switches for Articulation. And: This did not work on every Orchestral instrument. Just on some.

And solely pushing the FX button "off" doesn't do the trick ;) Only after using the red switches. Sadly the Staccato still seems to have the "reverb" on it. No matter what.

I do like the sound but also believe that it should have the clean sound aswell.

Please Support feed us some infos - after a deserved weekend :)

Or some other private people - any thoughts on that?

Arthur Neeman

I'm sure these factory libraries are for sketching only. For such price they cannot be super professional libraries like made by Spitfire Audio, Orchestral Tools (serious libraries), EastWest and others.

And there are not only these libraries that I don't like. Many of Play Series libraries are so bad that they cannot be used at all. Sampled with extra noise, sound engineer was drunk when he cut sample - many samples starts not from zero and makes click at start and the Attack doesn't help.

So for me Play Series and Factory libraries are less usefull than they were in earlier Komplete versions (11-13).

BTW I have Komplete 14 Ultimate Collectors Edition just to pay less for more :)