Native Instruments Kontakt 3.5 (Mac/Win) Review

Sep 2, 2009 1:54 PM, By Michael Cooper

           
 

SOFTWARE SAMPLER BREAKS THE RAM BARRIER

Kontakt 3.5 can now access 32 GB of physical RAM. Here, a 3.69GB Mixosaurus drum kit is loaded into Kontakt.

A new dawn for virtual sampler-based production has arrived with the release of Native Instruments' Kontakt 3.5. Its completely rewritten sampler engine gives a huge performance boost and lets you gain access to 32 GB of RAM.

A number of other important functions and enhancements add to Kontakt 3.5’s appeal. These include full browser integration with Kontakt Player, a MIDI Learn function for all sliders and knobs, individual bypasses for effect slots, scripting for aftertouch interpretation, true multiprocessor support in stand-alone mode, support for Pro Tools Leopard (7.4.2), and reduced sample-loading time and memory usage for DFD (Direct From Disk) mode.

Kontakt 3.5 is a free update for owners of Kontakt 3 and higher. Kontakt 3.01 was reviewed in the March 2008 issue of EM. For my review, I’ll talk about Kontakt 3.5’s new features. I tested Kontakt 3.5’s stand-alone version and the AU plug-in in Digital Performer 6.02 using an 8-core 2.8GHz Mac Pro loaded with 6 GB of RAM and running Mac OS 10.5.4.

Breaking the RAM Barrier

Kontakt 3.5 incorporates full support for 64-bit memory addressing in both Mac and Windows. This breakthrough blows away the theoretical 4GB RAM limit that Kontakt had been hamstrung by until now. (Due to memory requirements for the operating system—and for the DAW host with plug-in versions—the practical RAM limit has actually been closer to 3 GB.) Kontakt’s opening of the RAM floodgates is especially great news for composers who must have simultaneous access to multiple articulations for large virtual ensembles such as orchestras, string sections and high-end drum kits like Mixosaurus, which can require huge amounts of RAM.

How Kontakt accomplishes its RAM-access breakthrough is different for Mac and PC. For the PC, special stand-alone and VST plug-in versions of Kontakt 3.5 support 64-bit Windows Vista and DAWs. These 64-bit versions are bundled with 32-bit RTAS and VST plug-ins that can only access 4 GB of RAM. The RTAS version is only 32-bit because Pro Tools doesn’t yet accommodate 64-bit operation.

Kontakt 3.5 vanquishes the Mac OS’s historical 32-bit RAM bottleneck by running the new Kontakt Memory Server (KMS)—a separate application—in the background to load and manage samples. KMS allows all versions of Kontakt 3.5 for the Mac (stand-alone, AU, VST and RTAS) to access 32 GB of RAM.

Whether you’re a Mac or PC user, you’ll only be able to take advantage of Kontakt 3.5’s turbo-charged RAM-access capability if your CPU, motherboard and operating system meet certain requirements. For more on these system requirements and how KMS works, see the sidebar, “Take It Past the Limit.”

In addition to providing far greater access to sample RAM, Kontakt 3.5 reduces the amount of memory used for DFD mode by using a dynamic allocation scheme for DFD channel buffers (aka, voices streaming memory). Kontakt no longer allocates any DFD memory on startup.

In Play

Kontakt 3.5 features improved auto-mapping.

As mentioned earlier, Kontakt 3.5 incorporates Kontakt Player. In fact, it’s not even possible for Kontakt 3.5 owners to install the new Kontakt Player 3.5, which now provides all of Kontakt 3.5’s performance-related improvements (extended RAM access, greatly reduced memory footprint for DFD and so on). And, as in the past, all your Kontakt Player, Intakt, and Kompakt instruments and Multis are directly accessed via Kontakt’s Library Browser. The big news is that users who own Kontakt Player but not the full-featured Kontakt can load all of their libraries into one instance of the new Kontakt Player.

Kontakt 3.5 doesn’t add any new sample content to the Kontakt 3 library, which boasts roughly one thousand instruments. However, an additional installer updates library patches to include Performance views that were missing for some instruments before. (Performance views provide convenient access to parameter controls for instruments in Kontakt’s Rack.) The only instruments that don’t have Performance views now are the third-party Vienna Symphonic Library (VSL) ones that ship with Kontakt.

You can map all controls in Performance views to MIDI controllers using Kontakt 3.5’s MIDI Learn function. Multiple controllers can be mapped to one Kontakt knob, and you can program macros by assigning a MIDI controller to multiple parameters.

Importing third-party and custom sample libraries is easier in Kontakt 3.5, thanks to improvements to auto-mapping. In the drop-down menus in the Auto-Map Setup dialog, you can select Set To Single Key for any token in a file-name string (see the figure above). The new Apply button speeds up workflow by letting you make several mapping adjustments in turn without closing and reopening the Auto-Map window.