ORIGINAL: jcleaver
Can anybody give me the lowdown of the advantages DimPro has over Kontakt?
I do have Kontakt already, and am getting DimPro with the upgrade special that Cakewalk is offering. Just curious what people here think.
John
I have both. I find Dimension Pro more generally useful for my music but it is very nice having both. The advantages of sfz have already been talked about. Dim Pro has limited multi-timbral support but that isn't very important and I prefer to use multiple instances anyway. Obviously the sound libraries that come with them are different and both have some good stuff in them. Kontakt supports a much wider range of sample formats so that is a plus on its side.
Personally, I have some issues with freezing tracks and Kontakt. It doesn't always render properly in Sonar and Project 5. Just last night I had to bounce a track to audio instead of freezing the track to get it to render properly. No such problems in Dimension Pro.
I like the way in Kontakt you can see on the keyboard the keys for doing articulations and such. I'm not sure Dim Pro even has the equivalent. It might. (For those who don't know, in Kontakt if you hold down one key, it can change the samples that you get when playing other keys. So you could have one key for a Clarinet with the sound rising in volume, another for more stacatto notes, etc.) It wouldn't surprise me if the SFZ format allows this but you would have to then dig into the sfz file to see how the patch is setup.
At this point, I think I generally prefer Dim Pro for the pads, dimensions, leads, etc. and Kontakt for playing real world instruments.