Kontakt 5: Is it possible to move pre-mapped library samples to different keys?

[bitflipper]

Building commercial Kontakt instruments is a lot more complicated than you think, even if you've created some instruments yourself. It takes great attention to detail and multiple skill sets.

The last skill a library developer learns is scripting, and because most of them have never done any programming before it's a steep learning curve. Even though I'm a proponent of giving newcomers a chance, I'm more comfortable with more experienced developers who know where the pitfalls are (e.g. hard-coded keyswitches) and how to avoid them.

I get to try out a lot of sample libraries in the course of researching topics for review, but I select only a fraction of them to write about because so many are just not ready for market. Some of those developers subsequently withdraw from the market after realizing that being a good recording engineer is only the start for a fleshed-out commercial product.

Gregg Schlaepfer of Orange Tree Samples and Tracy Collins of Indiginus, for example, are two guys who've been doing it long enough to have got the scripting stuff down. They make everything configurable, including keyswitch assignments, and rarely screw anything up. That's why I tend to steer people toward companies that have been around awhile, and who do their own scripting in-house as opposed to farming it out.