Kontakt 6 & Cakewalk -- prepurchase thumbs up or down?

[Steve Harder]

I'm thinking of jumping into the NativeInstrument pool by purchasing Cinesamples bundle 75% sale.

 

I've downloaded free player and it seems to behave well with Play, Sine and Synchron; including freeze synth.

 

But would like comments from others re Kontakt and Cakewalk behavior before committing my bucks.

[Starise]

They play well together.  In fact Cakewalk recently made a few updates to the instrument  section allowing easier use up multi instruments, or putting 16 tracks in each Kontakt shell. Once you learn how to "point" the audio to the right places you can save a template and reuse it over and over again. If you wanted to be more specific you could make a brass template, a strings template, a small ensemble template etc. This allows for more control at the beginning of projects that might not resemble one another with respect to instruments selection. Or for unique combinations in larger works.

 

[Billy86]

Once you figure out the routing it’s super efficient. Here’s one of the best vids I’ve seen on it. This guy does a ton of Cakewalk-specific vids. Here’s the one on using Kontakt. 

 

 

[bitflipper]

A large percentage of CW users are Kontakt users. More than a few use it almost exclusively for their virtual instruments. I use Kontakt in almost every project that's not a simple audio recording, and have done so since c. 2005.

I'd urge you to cough up the dough for full Kontakt. Using the free player will restrict you to only those instruments that are compatible with it, and they are nearly always much more expensive due to licensing costs that developers pay to Native Instruments. Full Kontakt opens up the huge world of Kontakt instruments that are not compatible with the player, and therefore far less expensive.

[Alan Tubbs]

As above, Kontakt is about about as necessary as any soft synth.  And the full version  really ups the usefulness.  It is a bear to program, but the libraries are great.  Wait until the middle of summer or their winter sale around Christmas.  If you can, pick up one of the NI packs, when it is easy to get kontakt for $200 or their packs with it and other synths for $400.  A great investment if you don’t have a lot of softsythns.

[Steve Harder]

Thanks for the replies.

 

The Cinesamples toolset price is really hard to pass up, so the thumbs up here are helpful.  Devil is always in the details and I  wanted to do due diligence.

 

And full Kontakt can be on my watch for it list.