Wow, Native Instruments is releasing Kontakt 4. Is this the quarter of lets release useless upgrades? In the past months we saw Logic 9 come out which really didn’t seem all that remarkable. The change from Logic 7 to 8 was a big change as well as the change for Pro Tools going from 7 to 8. Those were some good upgrades.
I choose not to upgrade to Logic 9 for a few reasons. The first reason was there really wasn’t anything that special. Other than adding a couple of audio feature that are already present in Pro Tools 8 and some guitar effects I don’t see anything eye catching. I’m doing fine with out all that and I believe there are better guitar effects available by other companies. The other thing that was a big turn off was that I don’t want all those jam packs. I already got them with Logic 8. I might be more enticed to pick it up if they just dumped those stupid jam packs. I barely, more like almost never, ever use them for anything. Why not just make an upgrade version that doesn’t come with those jam packs. I mostly use logic for composition then I mix in Pro Tools. Main reason is I just don’t like the logic mixer that much.
Now lets get on to why I’m not going to upgrade to Kontakt 4. Well I have Kontakt 3. 3.5 to be exact. From what I have read on the NI website about it, there is nothing really impressive. It looks like some new dsp, reverb impulses and ease of use improvements. Personally I think Kontakt is one bloated sampler. I really liked version 1.5. It did everything I wanted. I don’t even use half the things in 3.5. In fact the only reason I upgraded to version 3 was because 1.5 did not work on my Intel mac. Another reason but very petty for not upgrading is that I don’t need an extra 10 gig addition to the Kontakt Sample Library. As if 33 gigs of samples I barely use plus the several dvd’s of jam packs inclluded with logic wasn’t enough. At this point time I am more focused on making my own samples to use.
Let’s recap, I’m not interested in bloated software or software that should have been the next minor revision, or software that includes a gazillion gigs of sample content. Because of those simple reasons I don’t see the point in upgrading to Logic 9 or Kontakt 4.
I guess I’ll wait until Kontakt 5 or Logic 10. However that Cubase 5 looks kind of nice. The only problem with that is I was perfectly happy with Cubase SX2 which does not run on my macbook. If Kontakt 1.5 and Cubase SX2 worked on my Intel mac I would never even switched to logic or upgraded Kontakt or upgraded to logic Studio.
For this round of music software updates I give the Apple and Native Instruments a nice grade of BOO!
