Is anybody else obsessed with buying little bespoke Kontakt instruments that sound like a broken organ crossed with a shortwave radio?

^^^^^^^^ max level bespokeness.

i bought kontakt

it begins..

Okay, so I bought this, it was super cheap though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnTzrIrSUsU

Kontakt is half price atm and I am tempted.

Is it worth getting as a stand-alone if you already have sampling / sample pack access in Ableton?

It probably depends how you plan on using it. Why standalone? I like it mainly for the huge number of free and paid libraries and utilities rather than as a sampler. But then I'm a sampling imbecile.

I was thinking stand-alone in the sense of not packaged with Komplete / Maschine - i am just not sure how great the sample library that comes with it is. That said, a lot of the free / paid libraries look very cool.

Gotcha. I've got to admit I had forgotten about the factory library, which maybe says something about it? I just had a quick get reacquainted session and it's...ok. I don't think its highly regarded but it is NI so it's clearly not rubbish.

Each different instrument having its own GUI makes kontakt a different way of working than sampler/simpler .

I think there's a steep learning curve if you're thinking of using Kontakt as a classic sampler; nothing impossible, but I think it has a rep of being a little complicated for easy/quick sampling needs. However, using it for paid/free instruments and sample libraries (or, eventually, making your own instruments) is pretty easy, and it's not difficult to find instruments/libraries that sound great and are easily tweakable.

Excellent. Thanks both.

Kontakt 6 on the way: http://www.synthtopia.com/content/2018/09/06/native-instruments-intros-kontakt-6/

A trend I've seen in the run up to Bandcamp Day tomorrow: "buy my album of modulated electronics on Bandcamp and you'll receive the AU/VST plug-in I authored to make it with"

I've got a couple of Puremagnetik things like that and tbh they're pretty useless

pianobook.co.uk is good for free community made sampler instruments

Hollow Sun has a free library if you buy TAL Sampler (retro sampler) that has a lot of good stuff

There a little bit of Hollow Sun's SOTU in my track on the latest ILX comp.

cheers for pianobook milo, just grabbed a bunch to play with.
any ones to particularly look out for?

I haven't gone back and downloaded many again since I switched computers but I was a fan of several of the guitar/bass ones that aren't just trying to be a straight sample library - thrumming guitar textures & bass harmonic chimes, ambient guitar tremors all quite good IIRC.

Pianobook looks insane, I don't use Kontakt though (although I think I do have Kontakt Player installed?). It seems like a huge wormhole to go down and is very appealing on one level, but also it feels weird to plug-and-play other people's homemade samples. Better to record my own to keep the personal touch and limit option paralysis.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1Tcp6ld2KVfVlonh-X2-83TFaOd1_8qhB

Tried making a Kontakt instrument last night to see if round robins are a pain in the ass - apparently they are without scripting, and my guitar is noisy as hell

12th fret harmonics, six round robins per string

lol just realized that doing this at 3 in the morning I inverted the guitar strings vs keyboard so the high E is on the bass side and the low E on the treble side

Not Kontakt, but does anyone mess with the Reaktor user library?

I finally got over my annoyance with the NI infrastructure to start learning Razor (which is amazing), and I think at this point I could delve into the infinite number of user-created synths if I wanted to (only have Reaktor Player, not the full version).

I guess I could delve into Kontakt too, but it still feels weirder to me to fully use someone else's samples rather than making my own, whereas I'm definitely not going to make a synth from scratch.