Native Instruments annual 50% discounts have begun.

[glowrak guy]

https://www.native-instruments.com/en/c ... efe3e9331c


I started slowly with Native Instruments products, free Christmas plugins, inexpensive
instruments and effects, discovered I qualified for a rare discount on Kontakt, which led to a discount
on a Komplete 12 bundle. Upgraded to Komplete 13 during a similar sale.

I had to discover and implement a few workarounds involving registration and updates,
but they are easy nuisances to overcome. I can say that I use some NI product every week,
and almost every day/every session. There are many products in the full Komplete bundle,
that are unmatched by the competition.

Beyond the sale price, I think these are needed:
wine-staging
linux and windows reaper daws
wineasio
Lin-vst or yabridge
enough disk space, including 30% free contiguous diskspace AFTER the installation
willingness to stop upgrading when a point of productivity/stability has been achieved
awareness that some things may not work as well as in a mac/windows setup.

AVLinux ships with all or most of the fundamentals, to get started.

I still have not needed to install everything, as there are a hundred or so gigabytes
of sound libs I've yet to explore, and a wide range of Grand Pianos and Kontact instruments
that are not yet needed. The included instruments and effects keep me busy,
including the core group of excellent linux native instruments and effects.

Reaktor 6 and it's amazing user library, are a darkhorse, for those understanding
modularity, wanting to create things yet to be imagined, or just implement the
great work of the community.

There is a free 30 day trial of 'Komplete Now', to verify things can be made to work,
and if happy, can be rented for $10 thereafter, and the collection grows over time.

https://www.native-instruments.com/en/s ... plete-now/

[tavasti]

For me, all their stuff costs too much, would need at least 90% discount to get interested So still using only free stuff from them.

Tip, if you are interested in Kontakt full version, get this freebie https://embertone.com/instruments/arcane.php and you will get Kontakt grossgrade for $125.

[glowrak guy]

That's an interesting point. Philosophically, as opposed to financially, when I buy a software music creation product, I'm paying for potential...paying for what might come into being, paying for enjoyment of new sounds, and whatever emotional/spiritual experience playing them might result in. The concept that something 'costs too much', implies one can know 'how much potential there is'. And to the extent that a given products value is it's potential, such knowledge has many variables to consider.

Financially, there's an old saying, 'fools and their money are soon parted', so knowing prices and those of competing products is always an advantage. Trying to imagine a software that costs 90% less than Komplete, that offers even a small fraction of the potential...not finding any.

Among many varied purchase considerations, are ones likely lifespan, daily free time, monthly budget, propensity to learn, willingness to practice, and recognizing how these can change over years and decades amidst often life-altering experiences.
Vastly differing use-case scenarios exist, so one size won't fit all.
Cheers

[tavasti]

That's an interesting point. Philosophically, as opposed to financially, when I buy a software music creation product, I'm paying for potential...paying for what might come into being, paying for enjoyment of new sounds, and whatever emotional/spiritual experience playing them might result in. The concept that something 'costs too much', implies one can know 'how much potential there is'. And to the extent that a given products value is it's potential, such knowledge has many variables to consider.

Financially, there's an old saying, 'fools and their money are soon parted', so knowing prices and those of competing products is always an advantage. Trying to imagine a software that costs 90% less than Komplete, that offers even a small fraction of the potential...not finding any.

Yeah, I am not questioning potential they have. For myself, I have plenty of synths and other stuff that have great potential, but my track record on utilizing them is much weaker. Therefore I think spending money on getting more potential is pretty much cheating myself.

Other thing is that I am not willing to pay much for windows software. For Linux-native software it is somewaht different.

Among many varied purchase considerations, are ones likely lifespan, daily free time, monthly budget, propensity to learn, willingness to practice, and recognizing how these can change over years and decades amidst often life-altering experiences.
Vastly differing use-case scenarios exist, so one size won't fit all.

Yes, I am not to say that my point of view is the right one. Just for that reason I wanted to point out possibility to get stuff cheaper, regardless that even cheaper one is not my thing.

[Largos]

I've never seen the point of Kontakt's existence, let alone why it should cost money.

[glowrak guy]

The purpose of Kontakt and competitors is to bring the sound of the worlds diverse music instruments to the fingertips
of those with a midi controller and a computer.

The equipment and expertise needed to access, house, sample, and integrate the sounds in a computer based interface
costs a lot of money, hence a price determined by Native Instruments business office. A bargain if you love using a diverse
range of music instrument sounds.

The cross-platform DecentSampler from the Pianobook community, is a good and improving option for sampled instruments if money is tight, and the number of sampled instruments is growing at a good rate. They recently established a Discord page.

[glowrak guy]

Yes, I am not to say that my point of view is the right one. Just for that reason I wanted to point out possibility to get stuff cheaper, regardless that even cheaper one is not my thing.

I agree, it's not a right/wrong thing, but a musicians choice of intruments thing. I don't buy fast-food, cigarettes, street drugs, or booze, so could easily afford some software music products.

There are free soundsets for linuxsampler, DecentSampler, sFizz etc and many various sampled instrument vst plugins,
and some people love the inexpensive TAL Sampler.

I doubt the bundled sounds that come with any far cheaper Kontact competitor, arrive in the numbers and quality of the default Kontakt libraries. Some of the best competing alternatives in the same price/quality range, are dongled, with no chance to be used in linux, and with a much smaller base of instruments to access. The third-party Kontakt libraries are it's main selling point, with tremendous creative energy and genious unleashed on hobbyists and professionals the world over.

There are quite a group of Kontakt libraries advertised as requiring the full version, that will actually work in the
free Kontact Player, for around 13 minutes, before needing to be reloaded. As well as many free DecentSampler sounds
that also come in Kontact and exs24 formats. And Hydrogen is not allergic to playing kits made with non-drum sounds,
copy a kit, replace the existing wav or flac samples, and rename the kit.
Cheers

[Largos]

The purpose of Kontakt and competitors is to bring the sound of the worlds diverse music instruments to the fingertips
of those with a midi controller and a computer.

I'm not talking about it's competitors, I am just talking about Kontakt. It's some standard for consuming sampled instruments and it's as far I can see the worst, most expensive way to do it.

[glowrak guy]

Please list five or more competing products that are either linux native, or at least

1. work in linux via wine, yabridge, and in popular linux daw software

2. List their default content, their superior value, in real terms.

Kontakt provides over a thousand sampled instruments, 43 gig in seven categories,
Band, Choir, Orchestral, Synth, Urban Beats, Vintage, and World.

There are also three libs with a custom gui known as The Play Series: Hybrid Keys, Ethereal Earth,
and Analog Dreams, and then Retro Machines, with 16 sampled classic synths in a unique
shared gui. Adds up to another 12 gig or so of samples.

There are 600+ licensed commercial libraries available, and thousands more done by independant samplists,
including plenty of free ones.

https://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/na ... -kontakt-6

[Largos]

Please list five or more competing products that are either linux native, or at least

1. work in linux via wine, yabridge, and in popular linux daw software

2. List their default content, their superior value, in real terms.

List five reasons why I should first.

Kontakt provides over a thousand sampled instruments, 43 gig in seven categories,
Band, Choir, Orchestral, Synth, Urban Beats, Vintage, and World.

Stuff like this? Mediocre to bad instruments. Which is what you'd expect at 43gig divided by 1000+ instruments. Not really a boast. There aren't even that many videos about Kontakt's factory presets, they're that good. Quality>Quantity.

There are 600+ licensed commercial libraries available, and thousands more done by independant samplists,
including plenty of free ones.

Which is the actual draw. Third party libraries where you pay hundreds of dollars/pounds/euros for the privilege of consuming them through the kontakt "eco system".

[mdiemer]

What I see in this thread is that some people like Kontakt, and some don't. Well, since we're individuals, not robots, that shouldn't come as a surprise.

I don't see the need to diss something, however, just because you don't need or like it. Great multitudes of people like Kontakt, and consider it indispensable. Some are professionals. some are hobbyists.

I'm in the second group. Kontakt has allowed me to finally realize a dream I thought might not happen in my lifetime, namely that I can now compose classical music on Linux. Because of Wine, Linvst and Reaper for Linux, I can now use Garritan Personal Orchestra. The Aria player works great on Wine. It also pulls in all the sounds from my Cakewalk Dimension Pro synth. Or any sfz file you want.

Finally, through Kontakt, I can use my world-class string library, Cinematic Strings. Plus any number of other third- party libraries. As well as the Kontakt Factory Library, which is an older version of Vienna Symphonic Library.

My needs are not your needs. We all use what works for us. Why go beyond that?

[Largos]

Not sure about needs, most classical music was composed on a sheet of paper.

Many of the third party kontakt libraries sound great, that's not the point. They could be done without the need for kontakt. It's like a tax for someone else's convenience and/or failure to investigate better alternatives, I am not sure.

[glowrak guy]

I set up a new Ubuntu Studio system last week, on a drive large enough to hold all of Komplete 13.
(less than 300 gig) I installed the same wine-staging 7.9 that I had in a Bodhi linux setup (it's a ubuntu spinoff distro)
and copied over it's populated .wine folder and yabridge items etc. As it only had a partial portion
of Komplete, I fired up Native Access to install and authorize and update as needed.

NA usually wants a software's registry keys removed before updating, and they have a handy little
app for that purpose. So for each install, I make sure that is done, then create a correctly named folder,
Next I extract the software's archive somwhere on a backup drive, and launch it's .exe with wine.

The install process chugs away at whatever number ,pkg content files exist. Restarting NA will
show it as registered, or query for a serial number.

If NA has listed a software as in 'repair' status,, complete the above process, and when you click the repair button,
a button is present to 'Locate' the results you just achieved. Press locate, and when it's done, restart NA.

Another scenario I've encountered, is when doing an update, the download completes, and is found in

/home/you/Downloads,

but NA is unable to complete the update, because it can't find the earlier version. So once I've found that earlier version,
or downloaded from my account, I run the above drill, installing the prior version, and then run the update .exe.
I did this with both Raum and Kontakt.

In the case of the 'Form' synth, in the Bodhi setup, I had forgotten to copy over it's sample content,
which NA was smart enough to detect as a separate issue, corrected by dragging over the folder,
and pressing the 'locate' button.

Native Access might fail to auto-update itself, in which case you install whatever is the latest
version on the Native access page, even if it's the same one

The coders are so impressive these days. Great world class music tools, and then working in linux,
with wine able to make sense of the sometimes serpentine whims of Native Access.
Or is it the other way around? Or both?

As Canada's premier songwriter might say, "Long May You Run"!

[mdiemer]

Sure, you don't need kontakt to compose anything. but if I want to hear it, I do need stuff like Kontakt. My preference would be Native Linux for everything, and I hold out some hope it may happen in my lifetime. But that lifetime is fast running out on me, so I need to use what works now.

Re: Bodhi: it's my favorite light distro. I'm running it on an old Gateway desktop, circa 2009, which came with Vista. It's an amazing distro, with a full desktop, not just a windows manager. I've thought about using it for music. It's a very basic install, and you could put the Ubuntu Studio installer on it, with just the programs you need. I just spent some time getting rid of most of the non-audio stuff. That put me at about 90GB, which is great as I have Ubuntu Studio on a 250GB SSD. Plenty of storage on other hard drives, however.

I'll use the older Ubuntu Studio for another year or so. Then I'll probably go with Ubuntu or Xubuntu, and install Studio over it. If I choose Ubuntu, I have 5 years before I need to worry about installing again. Xubuntu only gives you three years. but I don't need to do anything till Spring, so for now I can work away, and away from Windows.

Canada's foremost songwriter? Hmm, tough call between Joni and Gordon. And ol' Neil is not far behind.

[glowrak guy]

Long...
https://youtu.be/NRSyW-qs2mc