Review of Kompakt
Soft sampler that's easy on the Budget
By Tweak
Pros:
- Ergonomically designed for setting up a multitibral sampler in your sequencer
- Loads Akai, Gigasampler, EXS
- Comes with a decent Library of more than 200 instruments. Something for everyone here.
- Works in Win XP and Mac OS X
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Cons:
- Making keymaps is simple, but crude and there is no way to edit the maps
- No sample looping facility
- Balks loading Kontakt instruments
- Poor documentation
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Native Instruments Site |
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Official Product Description and Comparison to Kontakt |
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Native Instruments Kompakt Software Sampling (Macintosh and Windows)
Kompakt is a streamlined sampler that ships with a comprehensive library and can import the most common sample formats. Powered by the efficient Kontakt engine, Kompakt combines intuitive handling and a capable architecture with excellent sound quality. The factory library contains more than 200 instruments, from detailed and convincing pianos, to basses, loops, drums, guitars, strings, and more from the outstanding East West and Zero-G libraries. Kompakt is the quickest way to build a production-ready instrument collection, and it can also import Kontakt, Gigasampler (tm), EXS (tm), AKAI (tm), and other common formats.
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Native Instruments Kontakt (Macintosh and Windows)
Kontakt was designed by Native Instruments to be the most powerful sampler ever created. Kontakt fuses an innovative design with an advanced sampling engine. The result is an inspiringly fast and intuitively flexible sampler with exceptional sound quality.
See Tweak's Review |
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Native Instruments Intakt Software Sampler (Macintosh and Windows)
 Intakt is a state-of-the-art sampler specifically designed for rhythmic loop playback, manipulation, and mayhem. Intakt’s convenient one-screen interface features tremendous sound shaping abilities without disrupting the creative flow. Using multiple algorithms, Intakt automatically syncs to tempo, while an outstanding library of loops from Zero-G and East West provides sample source material for nearly any musical style. Naturally, Intakt provides a wealth of sound shaping options, including a first-class multimode filter, an envelope follower, two LFOs, effects, and more.
See my review
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Soft samplers are the rage today. They
have successfully taken much of the market from their hardware counterparts and
for good reason. Soft Samplers are cheaper, are easier to set up, can
quickly access any .wav file on your computer and can sometimes load the same
quality cd roms that the hardware samplers do. And that's not all, when
used in a sequencer as a plugin, you can add a chain of effects to your sampled
instruments with other plugins that you could never do in hardware.
Gee,
it sure is a sunny dream is it not? Almost. The rain on the parade
is that soft samplers have a veracity for eating up the power of your CPU.
The heavier the soft sampler, the worse it gets. Gigasampler and Kontakt
are heavies. Yes you can do incredible things with them but you will pay with
your CPU. Enter Kompakt. Native's latest softsampler is designed to
take the lead out of soft sampling and provide you with a nimble, fully
tweakable soft sampler that will fit right into your sequencer of choice.
I would not call Kompakt small. The
screen layout is rather large. You can close parts of the display, like
the keyboard, effects, envelopes and the browser so that only the top
2/5ths of the window you see above is showing.
Real-Time tweaking possibilities are great. But
lacking are the hundreds of filter, envelope and eq presets of Kontakt.
Also missing is the Tone Machine and Time Machine, a mapping editor, looping
editor, internal busses, insert effects and a lot of Kontakt's standard goodies.
Thankfully, Native did provide presets for the effects. You get Reverb,
Chorus, Delay and a Master filter that works like a parametric eq. Just
fine for sample tweaking. Tape saturation, compression, lo-fi, distortion,
enhancers...are NOT part of the Kompakt package. Also, there are no BPM or time stretching functions in Kompakt as there are in
Intakt.
But there are advantages
that try to recapture the losses. In Kontakt you might have to spend some
time opening and closing little + and - buttons till you get to the effects,
making a simple mouse tweak a several minute operation in Kontakt. The joy
of Kompakt is that its right there on the screen.
The Joys of Kompakt
The interface is set up for making a multi.
You can do several instantiations if you want, but why? You can load up to 8
instruments in a Multi, assign each to a different midi channel.
Instruments can be accessed from a drop down panel, once they are saved in
Kompakt format, making selection easy. You can also find sounds in
the browser. There is no user-definable "favorites" menu implemented in
Kompakt, so be sure to save instruments to the Kompakt directory.
I loaded lots of EXS instruments with no hitch
at all Nice! I can now use my thousands of EXS instruments in Cubase
SX, and they sound really good. With the master filter (eq) I can actually
make them sound a little better. I didn't try any cd roms yet. E-mu
stuff is not supported--I hear it someday may be. But because I was able
to translate emu to EXS by Chicken systems Translator, I can load all those
translations into Kompakt. Nice Again! That made me happy because
now I have samples by the tonnage in Cubase. Of course I could have loaded
them into Kontakt, but the truth of the matter is that Kompakt, at this juncture
loads EXS better than Kontakt (which seems to typically get the EXS filter
wrong.)
Compatibility with Kontakt--Not
always so
I've used Kompakt in 2 songs with success.
I was happy with its performance for the most part. But Imagine the
surprise when you try to load a Kontakt instrument and are greeted with the
alert "CAUTION: This patch is in Kontakt format and is unlike to sound as
intended". Its true Kompakt does not particularly like Kontakt
instruments. Makes sense as Kompakt doesn't have half of Kontakt's features.
But! Worse yet, Kontakt cannot load Kompakt patches! "The Patch cannot be
loaded (unknown error). Uh Gee, guys, this should be possible. But
it is not in version 1.01.
So who should get Kompakt and who should get
Kontakt?
Here's my take on it:
Kontakt is for people that want to build
quality instruments from their samples. If you are thinking of building
carefully tweaked drum kits and instruments, go for the real deal. The
lack of keymap editing in Kompakt and no undo means if you make a mistake laying
down the 57th drum in a map, you are sunk.
If loops and drum kits are really important to you look at Intakt.
Using Other Native Instrument-based
Libraries
Some sample libraries now come with a Kontakt
or Kompakt "player" that allows you to load the instruments and do some global
editing of filters and envelopes, but not remap the samples. For example
the Garritan Personal orchestra uses a Kontakt player and StormDrum uses a
Kompakt (and Intakt) player. To get the most out of these sample libraries
Kompakt makes a lot of sense. With it you can get into mapping the samples
the way you want. With other soft samplers (Halion, EXS, etc.) you can't
access the wave files in these collections, but with full versions of Kontakt or
Kompakt, you can.
Kompakt is good for loading instruments already
made with other soft samplers and from some cd roms. Its also good for
quick and dirty mapping of a few wave files, particularly dragging in a wave
file of a whole track and tweaking it down. Kompakt will stream from disk,
so larger samples are not a problem. So consider Kompakt for what it is--a
lite version of a soft sampler, designed for fast work in a sequencer.
About Soft Synths and Samplers
Kore 2
Logic Studio
Ableton Live
GarageBand
Cubase
Reason
Sonar
Project 5
Digital Performer
Sony's Acid
Kontakt
Kore
Sound Forge
Waves Platinum
UAD-1
Komplete 4 and 5
Massive
FM8 and FM7
Absynth
Battery
Korg Legacy
MiniMoog V
Stylus RMX
Atmosphere
Trilogy
Garittan Orchestra
Stormdrum
Altered States
Motu MX4
Motu's Etno
Symphonic Choirs
Albino
Guru
Soundtrack Pro
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