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....