Good reading thanks Larry.

cclarry - thanks, these are both quick and good reads.  Helpful!  

edrummist

cclarryI agree, Kontakt is a major major player...easily do a book on all of it Dave...

Seeing as that ST 3 is trying to sell at the "same" price...they better be up to the task...

At least Kontakt DOES have a FREE Player....

 
I haven't seen anything from IK that makes me think they're even attempting to position ST3 as being in KONTAKT's league. I don't suspect they're trying to compete feature for feature with KONTAKT, but are more interested in staying a simple load and play ROMpler that is more like hardware/synth workstations than modern samplers. For all of NI's flaws, KONTAKT is still the best sampler on the market in my book. It's updated frequently enough (imo), allows for complex scripting (that makes a giant difference in today's libraries) and it doesn't require iLOK.

Remember when Kontakt was a minor player, an also-ran in a market dominated by Gigastudio? Fortunes can change fast in the software world. SampleTank's weakness has been its closed format, while Kontakt's native format was standard wave files and it could load any file format known to man. Now, Kontakt's all about closed file formats and libraries that have zero backward compatibility. NI's riding high now, but who knows if their dominance will last?
 
Admittedly, I don't see any contenders on the horizon - yet. But there are a couple that could be Kontakt-killers if they played their cards right, starting with ditching their frickin' dongles.

Yep...I remember....GigaStudio taking a nosedive helped Kontakt alot...

There are indeed some contenders out there who, if they played their cards right
could "deseat" the champ.  Only time will tell...

It's hard to look at Kontakt and not want it. Once you've got that sort of draw you're on to a winner.

A bit of research and you know it will be 50% cheaper at least twice a year. Plus, you can resell it for the same price you bought it if you ever upgrade to Komplete or whatever.

It's win win and win some more!

bitflipper
Excellent article. I hope they expand on it - you could write a book on the subject!
 
There is a fourth option they didn't mention for extending CPU and RAM limitations, and that's using a separate computer to host Kontact as a standalone program. If you have another computer handy, perhaps an old one that's not powerful enough for DAW duties, it can be given new purpose as a virtual instrument host.
 
 
 
 
 
 

What would be the best way to set this up? Would USB connections between computers suffice, or would there have to be a more complex way to do it?

Milt
I have my network connected as a normal Ethernet network, then use the Vienna Pro to allow whatever programs that are on the Slave computers (in my case all 32 bit machines XP) to be used as a normal Vsti on  my main machine - I originally set this up to help with 32 bit limitations and general CPU concerns, but now mainly use it to help 32 bit programs work seamlessly in my windows 7 64 bit Main DAW machine.
Nigel
 

Thanks for the info, Nigel. Both of my computers are the same as yours. I'm thinking about using my internet computer as the slave, it's already on my home network. I'll have to look into Vienna Pro. Now if I can just find the time.......

bitflipper
 
Admittedly, I don't see any contenders on the horizon - yet. But there are a couple that could be Kontakt-killers if they played their cards right, starting with ditching their frickin' dongles.

I think Halion 5 could be a contender, at least technology-wise, if Steinberg would lose the dongle.  I don't have first hand experience with Mach 5, but it's my understanding that is as good if not superior to Kontakt.  Once again, the dongle keeps a large population of candidate buyers away.  So, yeah, there's two coulda-beens but for dongles.
 
It's probably dangerous to even suggest it here, but ST 3 might be that condender.  No dongle, and presumably a registration/activation procdure that's no more onerous than NI's.

I would think most developers would be wary to develop anything for IK given their track record of infrequent updates to straight up flirting with abandon ware. Not many developers outside of sonic reality have created much for sample tank, probably for good reason. NI, to it's credit, have continually supported and improved Kontakt. Time will tell.