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Native Instruments Kontakt - Future developments?

As far as I'm concerned, Kontakt will soon be a dead format if they don't make their GUI fully scalable (it feels more and more like Best Service's Engine as the time goes by). Come on guys, this is 2022!!

The VSL Synchron Player is setting the new standards for the lazy developpers.
 
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I generally prefer to interpret a company's visible and tangible activities rather than pay much attention to rumors without accompanying evidence.

And what have I seen Native Instruments do over the last little while? Make Kontakt 6 with quite a bit of additional capability, release Creator Tools for Kontakt developers, and make Kontakt 6 available as a VST3 plugin. All of that activity seems very inconsistent with a dying platform.

And those actions speak even louder to me than the assuring words of @Faheem Hasan, which are nonetheless much appreciated.

p.s. Large and successful library developers creating their own platforms, thus reducing external business dependencies is a routine business evolution in pretty much every industry I know of. Once you're big enough you tend to bring more things in-house.
 
Obviously, even if all the other developers depart, Kontakt will still be used for all of NI's products (as their proprietary player). That's a pretty vast range of content. So, Kontakt isn't going anywhere.

I do wonder, though, about the viability of NKS, if it only runs on NI hardware. I struggled with an S88, and then an S88 MkII. The interface stuff is nice, but those keyboards aren't professional grade in any way shape or form. Horrible Fatar actions.
 
homie said:
Last year i bought several Kontakt libraries being fairly sure the Kontakt engine will be around forever. But now i see all kind of new proprietary players pop up everywhere and comments like this:



Since i'm not interested in all these new players/romplers i'm eager to have some clarification on the future of Kontakt.
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I first heard this rumor in 2008 or so. I panicked spread it around made others panic, including one very well known developer that was about to release his very first product. I know where the rumor started too. After nearly 15 years it's safe to assume it's just a rumor.
 
Just consider a couple things before we all laugh at the wolf blowing on the brick house. Kontakt is software, very good, very complex and that means nothing unless you have an audience. It will not be around forever because the ecosystem is changing. Before you blast me, hear me out: I'm old, but I'm new to MIDI Orchestration. There are a plethora of new young guns arising who have zero emotional attachment to the long fruitful journey that many of the seasoned pros and longtime members have on this forum with Kontakt. That includes me. I'm thrilled that I now can use Synchron and SINE and the Spitfire Player. I develop software, I know these apps will improve and I'm fine with that. The Kontakt UI is not great, it's a mass of a bazillion amazing choices that requires mouse clicks galore, along with archaic navigation like Play (that's subjective, you may love it). But the upcoming new generation is seeing Spitfire and even OT be really involved in offering GREAT libraries plus a plethora of low cost and freebies, plus the enormous social presence with walkthroughs and tutorials galore, straight from the owners. Tthat's what's going to capture the attention of the incoming and upcoming crew and the need for Kontakt will dwindle due to market-share. But wait, Kontakt lets you build sample libraries, right? With all that has emerged in the last 8 years as far as choices out there, how much of a consumer base will there be for making your own stuff? I may be way off but I believe the trend is heading over to the completed library side, and the uncountable amount of music pieces being shown and played on social media is being consumed by the up and coming who are hearing about these newer companies, so that's all they know. When the experienced composers were going through the development of all of this from floppies to GigaSampler to Kontakt, it's all you knew and there wasn't a mass distribution of that experience on our Motorola flip phones.

There's a lot of great stuff out there now. Expensive and complex will start to fade. Are recording studios the mecca of all music now, or are we home working successfully in the box? The next wave of composers aren't going to know the journey nor see the need. In fact, the millennial generation has done a couple things I absolutely love... the whole car buying process that will never go away? Ha, they ditched that and now we have Carvana and others like it. Real Estate insanity and expensive realtor fees? See ya! Hello OfferPad.

I know... I've over-made my point again. I just see the landscape changing. Music stores on 47th St in NYC like Manny's and Sam Ash were the absolute hotspot of the current music scene back in the 80s. That street is now abandoned like most shopping malls. So the current need for Kontakt CAN change, and I personally think that the OP asking the question proves the slow slide, but it's just conjecture... I know you want to throttle me right now.

On the other side, EDM/Pop/Hip-Hop and Rock get everything they need with a full Komplete library. But IF it's changing for film scoring, it can change there also. I just suggest we don't take the Titanic approach, that "no way will this ship sink"... new stuff is coming at a rapid rate.

But I will say this, if we didn't have Kontakt, I wouldn't have Mike Greene's awesome RealiBanjo, and that really would be a bummer. Srsly.

(oh boy... I'm going to get shredded on THIS post, lol)
 
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In terms of the product's health, I predict Kontakt is not in the ICU, hasn't even been admitted into the hospital, and probably hasn't even made an appointment with its doctor in years. Maybe it's taking Tylenol 3x a day for "migration pain" but that's about it.

• As others have pointed out, Kontakt is a sampler - and an amazingly powerful one at that. With the various time-stretching and beat-slicing modes, wavetable stuff, Creator Tools, built-in effects at the per-voice level, and the mind-boggling possibilities of the scripting engine, it's waaaayyy out in front of any competition. Even my beloved Logic Sampler must sit down and shut up when big daddy walks in the room. Any dev that wanted to directly compete with Kontakt on features would have years of work in front of them.

• Even if every third party dev that pays a royalty to NI so they can have an encoded Player library were to stop tomorrow, NI still has a massive and impressive hunk of in-house content in Komplete that would make it worth continuing to support the engine.

• The third-party non-Player world is beyond immense. Take a scroll through Loot Audio sometime, but you'd better set aside a week of time to do it! Even if NI's sole income from Kontakt was from end users who were buying the full version just so they could access all those $49 - $99 libraries on Loot Audio, it would be worth it for them I reckon.

• Comparisons to GigaSampler aren't directly applicable I think. Although they basically invented disc-streaming for samplers - and for that I hope they never need to work another day in their lives - Nemesys was a single-product company who eventually sold the product to Tascam (?!?!), who let it wither on the vine. Shades of the Gibson buyout of Opcode anyone? And to a large extent, GigaSampler was almost a ROMpler engine, much like Play/Opus/Sine/Spitfire are. Or at least it was positioned as such even if its feature set was more open than the modern ones.

• All of the in-house ROMpler engines may improve and even turn into more full-featured sampler engines, but the same factors that would seem to endanger Kontakt affect them as well. They, too, need to be constantly updated, improved, made Apple Silicon native, etc. - and those in-house teams are probably a bit smaller than the NI covert ops team down at Langley. On the upside, they're not facing the same legacy codebase issues and fragile apple cart of potentially delicate third-party content that they don't want to upset, so they can be more nimble in those regards, but any issues NI is facing with adding HiDPI or AS support will affect the in-house ROMpler devs as well.

• And, as others have pointed out, all of the recent in-house ROMpler engines are just that - ROMpler engines, and pretty basic ones at that. Other than the built-in content shop and mic-mixing stuff, Sine is like a freeware SoundFont player from 1997! Even though the content is top-shelf, you can't do much more with Sine than play some MIDI notes in and listen to the output. Others, like Opus and Spitfire, are approaching the functionality you'd get from a well-scripted Kontakt Player version, but lack any ability to get under the hood and mess with stuff as you could with a Full Kontakt library. Of course, they do offer the devs Complete Control™ over their content, at the expense of the added workload of developing their own freakin' codebase, but only the biggest players in the biz can take on that challenge. (SoundPaint is a bit of an outlier, offering stuff that others don't have, but it was a multi-year effort for sure.)

After collaborating with Spitfire on Hammers I could see that an in-house codebase could be an advantage in that they could implement the features I was requesting from scratch, as opposed to trying to figure out a way to drive Kontakt's engine with elaborate scripting in order to produce the desired result, but this was not a trivial exercise even though the stuff I was requesting was not really that far-out. In the end it worked spectacularly, and now that those features have been figured out Spitfire can implement them in other products if they wish, but it wasn't trivial - and I was banging a gong pretty loud on that stuff...

So.... yeah, I predict a rosy future for Kontakt as it continues to sit on its throne atop a mountain of third-party libraries and both high-end and beginning users.
 
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charlieclouser said:
In terms of the product's health, I predict Kontakt is not in the ICU, hasn't even been admitted into the hospital, and probably hasn't even made an appointment with its doctor in years. Maybe it's taking Tylenol 3x a day for "migration pain" but that's about it.

• As others have pointed out, Kontakt is a sampler - and an amazingly powerful one at that. With the various time-stretching and beat-slicing modes, wavetable stuff, Creator Tools, built-in effects at the per-voice level, and the mind-boggling possibilities of the scripting engine, it's waaaayyy out in front of any competition. Even my beloved Logic Sampler must sit down and shut up when big daddy walks in the room. Any dev that wanted to directly compete with Kontakt on features would have years of work in front of them.

• Even if every third party dev that pays a royalty to NI so they can have an encoded Player library were to stop tomorrow, NI still has a massive and impressive hunk of in-house content in Komplete that would make it worth continuing to support the engine.

• The third-party non-Player world is beyond immense. Take a scroll through Loot Audio sometime, but you'd better set aside a week of time to do it! Even if NI's sole income from Kontakt was from end users who were buying the full version just so they could access all those $49 - $99 libraries on Loot Audio, it would be worth it for them I reckon.

• Comparisons to GigaSampler aren't directly applicable I think. Although they basically invented disc-streaming for samplers - and for that I hope they never need to work another day in their lives - Nemesys was a single-product company who eventually sold the product to Tascam (?!?!), who let it wither on the vine. Shades of the Gibson buyout of Opcode anyone? And to a large extent, GigaSampler was almost a ROMpler engine, much like Play/Opus/Sine/Spitfire are. Or at least it was positioned as such even if its feature set was more open than the modern ones.

• All of the in-house ROMpler engines may improve and even turn into more full-featured sampler engines, but the same factors that would seem to endanger Kontakt affect them as well. They, too, need to be constantly updated, improved, made Apple Silicon native, etc. - and those in-house teams are probably a bit smaller than the NI covert ops team down at Langley. On the upside, they're not facing the same legacy codebase issues and fragile apple cart of potentially delicate third-party content that they don't want to upset, so they can be more nimble in those regards, but any issues NI is facing with adding HiDPI or AS support will affect the in-house ROMpler devs as well.

• And, as others have pointed out, all of the recent in-house ROMpler engines are just that - ROMpler engines, and pretty basic ones at that. Other than the built-in content shop and mic-mixing stuff, Sine is like a freeware SoundFont player from 1997! Even though the content is top-shelf, you can't do much more with Sine than play some MIDI notes in and listen to the output. Others, like Opus and Spitfire, are approaching the functionality you'd get from a well-scripted Kontakt Player version, but lack any ability to get under the hood and mess with stuff as you could with a Full Kontakt library. Of course, they do offer the devs Complete Control™ over their content, at the expense of the added workload of developing their own freakin' codebase, but only the biggest players in the biz can take on that challenge. (SoundPaint is a bit of an outlier, offering stuff that others don't have, but it was a multi-year effort for sure.)

After collaborating with Spitfire on Hammers I could see that an in-house codebase could be an advantage in that they could implement the features I was requesting from scratch, as opposed to trying to figure out a way to drive Kontakt's engine with elaborate scripting in order to produce the desired result, but this was not a trivial exercise even though the stuff I was requesting was not really that far-out. In the end it worked spectacularly, and now that those features have been figured out Spitfire can implement them in other products if they wish, but it wasn't trivial - and I was banging a gong pretty loud on that stuff...

So.... yeah, I predict a rosy future for Kontakt as it continues to sit on its throne atop a mountain of third-party libraries and both high-end and beginning users.
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Oooo, what timing, your very well-written post is smack up against mine with two diametrically opposed takes on this. I like it! ;)
 
K6.7 will be native apple sillicon compatible....Okay ? Dying ???' Official NI forums and beta testers....
 
It's not going anywhere, because it has no real alternative and brings in money.
This market really really needs a good competitor. If there was one, we would probably already have had m1 and high dpi support.
 
charlieclousers take makes very much sense I think. While all eras eventually end and Kontakt definitely will be replaced by younger alternatives someday, I don't think much points to that time being close. Also, it looks like making your own sample player engine isn't easy at all, Sine still has huge problems and cannot yet deliver what they promised it would.

Let's hope NI continues to develop Kontakt and add exiting new features, I believe that's what's needed to eventually get sample libraries that are truly next generation.

EDIT: as Ivan points out, a real competitor would be great to accelerate progress. Right now there isn't any real alternative.
 
I don't think that Kontakt will go out of style anytime soon despite the fact that most of us use it primarily as yet another engine rather than as a comprehensive development tool. Speaking of which, the ecosystem of products based on this platform is simply too large for some dramatic changes to happen in the foreseeable future. Especially with the fact that NI themselves actively develop libraries for their own products.

I'm not a developer myself, but I'm guessing that it makes more sense for many smaller boutique outfits out there to stick with an "industry standard" as a basis for their products, rather than trying to develop their own platform or embracing something free instead, but not as nearly as widespread and popular. Of course, I won't comment on the possible licensing costs (I'm assuming there are none if the library remains in an open format).

Kontakt might be an industry standard, but it definitely has its shortcomings. It remains quite a pricey piece of software, even as a part of Komplete packages. Furthermore, despite its long history and level of maturity, it could do with some improvements. If nothing else, a few details regarding the display and the ease of use. Personally, I would like to see more keyboard shortcuts (customizable, if possible) in the future, especially those for some day-to-day actions.
 
I think even NI knows that the music industry is not a stagnant one, NI has seen a few changes in its journey with music makers and developers, VSL, East West, has long since developed their own player,

Its clear especially when you see the caperbility of the new Syncron player that there are a lot of benefits for developers to have their own identity and their own player, with their own security and or license.

One factor with joining a huge music development and using one player Kontakt is if that player gets cracked then all instruments are at risk of becoming freebies, for torrent downloads

Other factors are obvious were the developer are able to fine tune and expand and innovation of their instruments for that player, there are so many benifits.

Like wise there are benifits buy using Kontakt,

But it doesn't make sense to think that no developers are going to want to do things differently or experiment with ideas.

There will be tons of new and future developers that are going to use Kontakt, also some will want to try other means of distribution of their creation.
 
PaulieDC said:
Oooo, what timing, your very well-written post is smack up against mine with two diametrically opposed takes on this. I like it! ;)
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Hahah yeah perfect timing indeed! As much as it sounds like I'm defending Kontakt or trying to make a good case for its survival, I'm trying to think of it from NI's perspective, and whether or not THEY think it's worth the hassle of keeping it current and viable - not whether we (the old farts who still reminisce about Akai S-1000's and SyQuest drives) or the young guns (who don't give a crap about user sampling and just want to make beats using LoopCloud or Arcade) think it's viable.

As I have stated ad nauseam, it's EXS24 / Sampler that does 99% of the heavy lifting for me, and I barely even use Kontakt except as a portal to buying+exporting WAVs for use in EXS, or as a way to access locked-down legato-transition libraries. But I recognize that it's a beast, even if I prefer to use a simpler solution like EXS.

For a while there I was predicting / hoping that Apple would roll up to NI headquarters with a trainload of cash and pull a Camel Audio, leaving Win users out in the cold and perhaps convincing some portion of them to switch to Mac just to continue having access to their Kontakt libraries. Maybe they already have, and were rebuffed. Or maybe they took a sniff and said, "pass", who knows. The fact that Apple seems to be moving more toward the Arcade / LoopCloud "easy beat creation" market is another indicator that backs up your view.

But I won't be a bit surprised if us old heads who are still deluded enough to value a uber-complete feature set wind up being left behind and we end up sitting on the porch at the old sample-collectors home grumbling about, "Back in my day, samplers let you change the loop crossfades, and that's not all...."

Even though I routinely cough up hairballs about how we used to do things "back in my day" when sampling "meant something", I'm the guy who uses the bog-simple EXS because I simply don't need much more than that. So I'm a good example of "workflow trumps functionality" in that I'm fine to lose multi-mic positions and legato-transitions in return for being able to use an in-DAW browser and "save instruments and samples with project".

Part of what I don't like about the flood of in-house ROMpler engines, besides the hassle of keeping multiple engines updated, is that I forget that I have them, and forget which engine hosts which sounds, etc. Having it all under a single second-party engine like Kontakt makes it a bit easier to find and use stuff. Quickload, yadda yadda.

And to be honest, the times when I like using Kontakt are when I'm using a highly-evolved library like ArcLight or Thrill, in which going under the hood isn't practical even if it were possible, and it therefore might as well be a ROMpler engine.

Maybe I'm subconsciously trying to encourage NI to keep the fires burning under Kontakt (not that they need my help), but, as clunky and non-HiDPI as it is, every time I'm under the hood of the thing I come away impressed at just how mega a platform it is. But if it's too much hassle for even someone like me to call my home, I agree that the young guns are likely to be like, "I think my dad used to use a sampler like that..."

All that said, Kontakt really is great, even if it's greatness is lost on many / most / me.
 
EvilDragon said:
Falcon is a decent alternative (not without its own caveats), but UVI for some reason never really pursued direct head to head competition.
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I agree that Falcon is a strong competitor - on paper at least, the feature set is bonkers, especially the Ircam stuff, if sometimes a bit fiddly and obscure - and it does sound great and work flawlessly on my rig, no complaints there.

UVI seem to have at least attempted to position it not solely as a user-sample creation tool, but also to have player-style libraries with custom front panels, etc. Maybe not a huge wealth of third-party player libraries, but it's not just a token effort. I have a bunch of Falcon / UVI Workstation libraries and many are quite good. But again, due to so many engines in my plug-in menu, half the time I forget that I have them!
 
Faheem Hasan said:
We are continuously developing the KONTAKT Platform and evolving it to suit the needs of modern music makers. Rest assured, there are no plans underway to "kill" KONTAKT in any way.
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Hi, and thanks for chiming in! I don't think anyone suspect NI for not wanting to keep developing Kontakt – the concerns some of us have are related to the fact that an increasing number of sample library makers now are making their own players (now also including CineSamples and Light & Sound), combined with the fact that an Apple Silicon version of Kontakt is still not out – and some worries, from some users, about Kontakt is being so far behind where it should be that it could take a lot more time before the release of a Kontakt version that not only was updated to run natively on Apple Silicon, but also have much better specs than today. One of these concerns have been posted in one of the M1 threads, with statements like "I personally doubt that even once we get a native version of cubase/nuendo + kontakt (or just kontakt, inside logic) that there will be significant performance increases for disk read and write actions within kontakt" combined with claims that even in new computers which can read data at 7+ gb /second, Kontakt still reads samples @ only 150 megabytes/sec.

A main issue for many of us is that in many countries, it takes a month or two from someone orders a M1 Max MacBook Pro until it arrives. Therefore, due to the secrecy about what we can expect from a new, AS compatible Kontakt version, some of us wait with ordering an Apple Silicon Mac. What if eg. this statement from @colony nofi is true "All the testing was done when loading samples at the point when you load a project. It doesn't do them concurrently. The figures we got were the ACTUAL speeds reported while the nuendo projects were loading. The 150MB/s is the total speed. Not times 50." (This was a response to a question about whether each of the Kontakt instances would read samples @ 150mb/Sec, or if the total load time for all Kontakt instances in a project would load data @ 150 mb/sec only.)

I understand that companies like NI sometimes need to maintain a high level of secrecy, but I doubt that NI would lose any customers, sales or any trust from their users if you would have posted anything about these matters – especially since NI now have shared that an Apple Silicon version of Kontakt probably will be released in February.

It has also been mentioned that Sine already read samples at 1 tb/sec. I have many Kontakt libraries, and have no desire for charging my system with 6-7 different sample players. It would be great if NI could share some info about what we can expect from the next Kontakt version.
 
Vik said:
It has also been mentioned that Sine already read samples at 1 tb/sec.
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This is kinda misleading. Because those very high SSD speeds are sequential read speeds (and they are not tb/s but gb/s), meaning if the sectors you're reading are literally next to each other on the drive.

In direct-from-disk streaming scenario, that is practically never the case once you start playing polyphonically, so what you need to look at is random read speeds, and they are definitely not in the gb/sec realm.

Then, there's the concept of "queue depth" in SSDs, basically the larger the queue is, the faster SSD reads data. This is not a thing with regular old rust drives (they have "queue depth" of 1), so Kontakt will work like that. When you do SSD benchmarks (i.e. CrystalDiskMark) you will see random read 4K/QD1 and random read 4K/QD32. QD32 is where SSDs perform best. QD1 is how Kontakt will perform. DFD code would need to be deeply overhauled in order to support SSDs, and this is extremely tricky business with a lot of pitfalls and potential for bugs and performance issues downstream.

By the way, even if Kontakt reads things at 150 mb/sec (also what is "mb" - is it megabit or megabyte? 8 times the difference!), that's enough for well over a thousand of stereo voices streamed. Let's do the math: your DFD buffer is set to 18 KB/sec (kilobyte). So let's say we're reading at 150 MB (megabytes) per second random read time, that's enough for around 8000 simultaneous DFD requests. They don't necessarily have to belong to all the different voices (certain voices would request next sample chunk faster or slower depending on i.e. repitching of the sample), but that is a lot of throughput there.

Vik said:
"I personally doubt that even once we get a native version of cubase/nuendo + kontakt (or just kontakt, inside logic) that there will be significant performance increases for disk read and write actions within kontakt"
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Yeah, an OS/CPU compatibility update has little to nothing to do with disk streaming code of Kontakt.
 
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PaulieDC said:
Oooo, what timing, your very well-written post is smack up against mine with two diametrically opposed takes on this. I like it! ;)
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Funny - I thought both takes were right on the money actually, describing both contrasting sides of the situation perfectly.

I think NI are smart enough to realise people are going to come at Kontakt from completely different angles. Deep sample code ninjas sure, but also those who don't go beyond the "Play" series.

And I'm just gonna pretend that Charlie didn't dump on EXS24 a little there..;)
 
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