Yesterday I purchased a copy of Native Instrument's Kompakt sampler. I
couldn't see that I needed the authoring capabilities in its big
brother, Kontakt, and I knew it would play back velocity-layered
samples.

However, I hadn't anticipated that, as far as I can see, there's no
way within Kompakt of assigning samples to velocity layers (or
modifying the assignments when loading a predefined sample set). This
is a big disappointment. Sure, I can import pre-defined sample sets in
a variety of formats, but I can't take a bunch of, say, .WAV files,
and define, for a single key, the velocity thresholds for each sample.
I can drag and drop a sample onto a key but that's it.

(gripe: its damn difficult when purchasing software to find out in
advance exactly what it will and won't do. And once you purchase it,
you're stuck. With a piece of hardware at least you can take it back
to the shop but once you've opened the box and installed the
software... tough luck. Therefore I don't even have the option of
going back and saying, er, sorry, can I upgrade to Kontakt instead, I
suspect....).

Does anyone know of any easy way to create these special header files
e.g the .NKI file used by Kontakt, or one of the other formats, like
Soundfont or EXS24 or Halion (which it can import), or are all these
formats top-secret?. (I wouldn't be surprised if they were
undocumented; the open source movement doesn't seem to have gotten far
into this area.

Effectively I just want to assign a bunch of, say, .WAV files to a
single key with different WAV files for each velocity range (e.g
0-20,20-40 etc), that's all.

PS: Native Instruments product registration site really sucks!. I have
been completely unable to register the damn thing, since the site
keeps asking me for a password, for some reason, midway through the
registration process. As for the product 'manual', let's just say,
underwhelming. I really expect better for a couple of hundred
bucks....

Andrew Mayo in :

[NI Kompakt]
once you've opened the box and installed the
software... tough luck. Therefore I don't even have the option of
going back and saying, er, sorry, can I upgrade to Kontakt instead,

You do have this option, for all practical purposes: Upgrade from
Kompakt to Kontakt costs $229, so getting both Kompakt and Kontakt
(in that order, Kompakt first) is only marginally more expensive than
Kontakt alone.

PS: Native Instruments product registration site really sucks!.

That's not the only thing that sucks about Native Instruments, IMO.

CG

Andrew Mayo in :

[NI Kompakt]
once you've opened the box and installed the
software... tough luck. Therefore I don't even have the option of
going back and saying, er, sorry, can I upgrade to Kontakt instead,

You do have this option, for all practical purposes: Upgrade from
Kompakt to Kontakt costs $229, so getting both Kompakt and Kontakt
(in that order, Kompakt first) is only marginally more expensive than
Kontakt alone.

PS: Native Instruments product registration site really sucks!.

That's not the only thing that sucks about Native Instruments, IMO.

CG

carrion gasping wrote in message . ..
Andrew Mayo in :

[NI Kompakt]
You do have this option, for all practical purposes: Upgrade from
Kompakt to Kontakt costs $229, so getting both Kompakt and Kontakt
(in that order, Kompakt first) is only marginally more expensive than
Kontakt alone.

PS: Native Instruments product registration site really sucks!.

That's not the only thing that sucks about Native Instruments, IMO.

CG

mmm. well, I *could* have bought Kontakt on special at GBP210 from
another music shop down the road, which compared to GBP140 for Kompakt
might have been a good deal - but I don't need sample mangling
facilities. Because the machine I'm using (my laptop) is not exactly
cutting edge (PIII 850/384M), I also felt Kompakt would probably be
lighter on memory - less code to load.

Now, I have to say it does work very well and appears to be rock solid
and the direct from disk stuff works extremely well - I can get, with
reverb turned on, polyphony of around 28 notes, which is more than
enough, and latency of 5ms, which is really marvellous.

I tried re-registering the product from an internet connection at work
and this time it worked - why? who knows.

I've ordered the PMI Bosendorfer 290 sample set (just the dry samples,
I don't like the wet samples, there's far too much hall ambience in
there and if I want ambience, thanks, I'll use reverb - besides, I
don't think my poor little laptop would be able to handle a mix of the
wet and dry samples at 16 velocity levels, somehow).

All things considered, it wasn't a bad buy. Admittedly, of the bundled
1.5G of samples (which,annoyingly, there doesn't seem to be any way of
selectively installing, as they are munged into huge files), most are
crap. But the picked acoustic guitar, the harpsichord, the rhodes
piano, the harp and the double bass are rather nice, as is the full
string ensemble. The brass and electric guitar stuff is just awful -
my dear old Roland MV30, which is now 13 years old, has better samples
for these. The acoustic piano is, er, ok, but a bit odd in the bass,
the timbre is wrong. My Technics master keyboard (SX-P30) has a better
piano sound.

I think NI should provide some facility for mapping samples to
velocity ranges, but other than that, Kompakt certainly did what I
expected of it - and if the PMI sample set works well, I'll have a
very nice piano for GBP200 all up, which strikes me as a pretty
reasonable bargain.

carrion gasping wrote in message . ..
Andrew Mayo in :

[NI Kompakt]
You do have this option, for all practical purposes: Upgrade from
Kompakt to Kontakt costs $229, so getting both Kompakt and Kontakt
(in that order, Kompakt first) is only marginally more expensive than
Kontakt alone.

PS: Native Instruments product registration site really sucks!.

That's not the only thing that sucks about Native Instruments, IMO.

CG

mmm. well, I *could* have bought Kontakt on special at GBP210 from
another music shop down the road, which compared to GBP140 for Kompakt
might have been a good deal - but I don't need sample mangling
facilities. Because the machine I'm using (my laptop) is not exactly
cutting edge (PIII 850/384M), I also felt Kompakt would probably be
lighter on memory - less code to load.

Now, I have to say it does work very well and appears to be rock solid
and the direct from disk stuff works extremely well - I can get, with
reverb turned on, polyphony of around 28 notes, which is more than
enough, and latency of 5ms, which is really marvellous.

I tried re-registering the product from an internet connection at work
and this time it worked - why? who knows.

I've ordered the PMI Bosendorfer 290 sample set (just the dry samples,
I don't like the wet samples, there's far too much hall ambience in
there and if I want ambience, thanks, I'll use reverb - besides, I
don't think my poor little laptop would be able to handle a mix of the
wet and dry samples at 16 velocity levels, somehow).

All things considered, it wasn't a bad buy. Admittedly, of the bundled
1.5G of samples (which,annoyingly, there doesn't seem to be any way of
selectively installing, as they are munged into huge files), most are
crap. But the picked acoustic guitar, the harpsichord, the rhodes
piano, the harp and the double bass are rather nice, as is the full
string ensemble. The brass and electric guitar stuff is just awful -
my dear old Roland MV30, which is now 13 years old, has better samples
for these. The acoustic piano is, er, ok, but a bit odd in the bass,
the timbre is wrong. My Technics master keyboard (SX-P30) has a better
piano sound.

I think NI should provide some facility for mapping samples to
velocity ranges, but other than that, Kompakt certainly did what I
expected of it - and if the PMI sample set works well, I'll have a
very nice piano for GBP200 all up, which strikes me as a pretty
reasonable bargain.

(Andrew Mayo) wrote in message . com...
PS: Native Instruments product registration site really sucks!. I have
been completely unable to register the damn thing, since the site
keeps asking me for a password, for some reason, midway through the
registration process. As for the product 'manual', let's just say,
underwhelming. I really expect better for a couple of hundred
bucks....

I believe it's asking for your NI account password. If you don't
have a NI account, you can create one on the site (hit support /
online registration)

(Andrew Mayo) wrote in message . com...
PS: Native Instruments product registration site really sucks!. I have
been completely unable to register the damn thing, since the site
keeps asking me for a password, for some reason, midway through the
registration process. As for the product 'manual', let's just say,
underwhelming. I really expect better for a couple of hundred
bucks....

I believe it's asking for your NI account password. If you don't
have a NI account, you can create one on the site (hit support /
online registration)