Normally, pricing announcements and sales press releases bore me to tears, but this is actually news – Native Instruments is selling Komplete for July only at just US$/EUR 399, instead of $1139/EUR999.

That means if you were looking for Reaktor alone – about as good a desert island music software choice as you can find – this would be a good deal. You also get Absynth, the absurdly deep (if sometimes baffling) synth with surround sound envelopes and a workflow that could change how you think about sound, the very nice effects and loop recording in Guitar Rig, and the scriptable sampler Kontakt, as well as the Battery drum sampler and lovely Massive synth.

As recession specials go, this is a tough one to beat.

http://www.native-instruments.com/komplete5.info

In other news, we’re opening up more discussion of tools like Reaktor (among many others) to the community here on noisepages; check out Peter Dines’ recent modulations blog for thoughts on Reaktor (and the free and open source SuperCollider), or his just-formed Reaktor group, on which he asks, “what problems are you solving with Reaktor?”

“It’s kinda ghetto”, notes creator Cousin Throckmorton, but a series of pennies becomes a touch interface for Ableton Live and drums in Battery. Apologies if you’ve seen this; I hadn’t. (That or else I had, and they didn’t push the whole “pennies and popsicles” angle.)

The $.08 Ableton Live Controller

His MySpace blog, 13unluckysongsaboutlove, is filled with more video goodies like this. And we thought MySpace had no redeeming qualities. Ableton Live scene control after the jump.