Native Instruments is now offering Komplete Kontrol for free and I'm curious if this is worth downloading. I know very little about it. Is it worth bothering with?
What are the advantages of using Komplete Kontrol?
Well, it's a free stand-alone plug-in player, so there's that. And you can load effects now as well, so if you want to mess around with your VIs without needing to fire up the DAW, it's kind of convenient for that. It also allows you to tag and audition sounds, so there's a theoretical utility to that, but I personally don't find that it is organized in a way that is really all that helpful to discovery. It also has a built in arpeggiator and maybe some other midi effects, which I never use. They've just added a sample player (different from Kontakt) for loading one shots and maybe other things. I haven't had a chance to play with it yet.
If you have a Komplete Kontrol keyboard, it offers a lot more, including the light guide, the ability to browse your sounds on the keyboard, and automatic assignment of knobs. The light guide is marginally useful, especially for VIs with complicated sets of keyswitches and such, for instance, the Sonokinetic stuff. But mostly I find the lights to be just a nice ambience. And I don't use the KK software inside a DAW, even with the automatic mapping. I prefer to just create my own presets. I feel like KK is just adding another level of complication without a lot of clear benefit when I'm working. It can be useful when learning a new VI however to have everything mapped out that way, with the lights marking ranges and keyswitches, and the knobs all clearly labeled. I'm not sure how much of that utility is available if you don't have a KK keyboard, however.
That said, the latest update of the software has created problems using my S61 in Logic even when I don't use the software. Indeed, it now causes problems in Logic when I don't have a dummy instance of KK in my project. That's frankly kind of disturbing.