Instrument Kontakt Player
Why Kontakt ?
Kontakt is the reference sampler developed by Native Instruments from 2002. Kontakt is currently for sure the most innovative and powerful instrument of the market in its field. It stands as the avant-garde of the sampling technology, with its own advanced scripting Scripting anguage, extremely powerful and flawless time-stretching and pitch-shifting algorithms. Kontakt has a level of depth and playability close to those of a real instrument in real conditions.
Kontakt allows to use instrument soundbanks from independent creators.The range of instruments is enormous. Moreover, Kontakt allows to customize each -instrument according to the creator’s need. Lots of those instruments were made for the free Kontakt Player : the complete Kontakt version (paid) is not required to use them.
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Developing a virtual instrument
A virtual instrument is a software musical instrument, that is to say an instrument allowing to play music on a computer by generating electronic sounds or by trying to recreate the sound of real instruments.
Use:
Many virtual synthesizers are controlled with the mouse, but most of them are piloted thanks to a digital controller (thanks to the MIDI protocol for example, like a hardware synthesizer). A score can then be played by a sequencer, or a keyboard (or any other control surface) can be connected to the computer to play is like a hardware instrument. They are welcomed in recording studios and even more in home studios given the gain they offer in term of room. Indeed, sounds from the heavy and cumbersome digital synthesizers of the beginning of the 80s, can now be generated by a virtual synthesizer, thus freeing physical space in the studio. Virtual synthesizer softwares coupled with powerful sequencers installed on laptops brought some kind of nomadism for lots of musicians.
Virtual instruments can run standalone (as an autonomous application), or as a plugin loaded from a host digital audio workstation ( Cubase , Ableton Live !, Logic Pro , Pro Tools , etc.).
This type of virtual instruments covers a wide range of use, in term of style of music as well as sampled instruments. Full orchestra sets (like Vienna Symphonic Library including several dozen of gigabytes of samples) can be found. Most of virtual instruments are commercial products because meticulous sampling of a real instrument is costly: the process is very long and
requires a high quality recording equipment.