Native Instruments today launches a new version of its flagship Kontakt sampler with new filters, effects and processing, improved sound quality, and sound design features. NI also refreshes Komplete – including, at last, a Komplete bundle that really does include kompletely everything. And we see new products covering drum samples and grooves and studio effects, too, as well as a major update to the sound design and processing capabilities of Guitar Rig.

Sadly, that isn’t the Komplete Infinity package we saw lampooned last week, which promised “quite literally every sound that can be possibly be acoustically produced in free space on Earth … ” even including “the sound of one clapping on the North side of a Forest in Tanzania at four o’clock in the morning 60% humidity and low air pressure with a Neumann U87 at a distance of three feet.” But it does include a lot – optionally everything NI makes, bundled on a hard drive.

Here’s the parody ad, wherever it came from (I’m happy to provide credit if someone will step forward):

But what we do get is a Komplete I think may come closer to what users have wanted from that bundle.

Aside from Komplete, though, let’s talk Kontakt 5, which in this upgrade promises a whole host of new processing, filtering, and sound design tools, as well as worthy-looking new releases in the studio effects, guitar processing, and sampled drum groove categories.

Kontakt 5

The creator of Massive, the terrific “no, you don’t only have to make dubstep with it” synthesizer, is behind the new Kontakt. As a result, you get:

• 37 new filters, from Moog-inspired ladder filters to state-variable models to modern formant filters.
• Adaptive Resonance, which manages “excessive resonance peaks” (I assume by adjusting either gain or the resonance curve or both, but I’ll have to find out)
• TimeMachine Pro time-stretching.
• New EQ and compressor algorithms from an upcoming “Solid Mix Series,” plus a new Tape Saturator.
• Vintage sampling modes from Maschine.
• Transient Designer, available separately, is now an integrated effect. Ed.: confused here, as NI refers alternatively to Transient “Designer” and Transient “Master.” I’ll clarify. Hmmm… “Transient Lord”? “Dark Sorcerer of the Transients”?
• MIDI file support for KSP scripting users.
• 16 internal stereo buses for routing flexibility.
• New retro synth presets.

To me, it looks like the biggest Kontakt update since the sampler added scripting capability, and a very big deal. It’s really part of the challenge of NI’s product line, honestly – you could easily enough lose yourself in just Kontakt without needing a whole suite of stuff, even before you get into Kontakt’s 43 GB bundle of sounds.

If you are a completionist, though, the new Komplete is looking good.

Komplete 8

Komplete 8 is the obligatory update of Komplete that brings together the latest software releases. The standard version now includes 27 products, adding Kontakt 5, Guitar Rig 5, the West Africa percussion instrument, Studio Drummer, Transient Master, plus 1300 additional presets for Absynth, FM8, and Massive.

More interesting, perhaps, is Komplete 8 Ultimate, which packs all of the currently-available “Komplete instruments and effects” (so, the current active NI product line) onto a USB 2.0 hard drive, with 13,000 sounds and 240 GB of samples.

Clarification: As observed by reader aje of Keyquest Music, the hard disk is a convenience for installation, but not, sadly, a self-contained external means of running the software. As NI words it in their press release:

The hard drive enables a fast and convenient installation process, and also constitutes a compact and robust backup medium for the software.

To be sure, hard disk upgrades are inexpensive these days, but it’d sure be nice to have a version of Komplete you can plug into any machine and use as-is.

This note is interesting, too, suggesting NI sees Massive at the kore (sorry, poor choice of words) of its new strategy:

Both new KOMPLETE versions are optimized for Native Instruments’ groove production system MASCHINE, offering direct browser integration with attribute-based preset search as well as convenient automatic parameter mapping for the rotary knobs on the hardware controller.

So, that gives you a lot of presets. To me, the ease of having things on a hard drive is the real draw. I wonder if we’ll ever see custom hardware/OS combinations for software distribution, but that’s another discussion. (For previous examples, see early custom versions of Final Scratch, Native Instruments’ own Komplete shipping on the Linux-based, rack-mounted Muse Receptor, or, to get really obscure, Emagic’s C-Lab’s work with the Atari Falcon.)

Guitar Rig 5 Pro

I’m glad I didn’t have to write NI’s press release. Guitar Rig includes more guitar rig things. It has more guitar things in its rig than it did before, covering the things that they added to the guitar thing.

What’s new:

• New amp models, “Van51″ and “HotSolo+.”
• New effects: a new “classic” compressor model, “vintage” plate and spring reverb, studio-grade convolution based on Reflektor, 8-band filter bank, “stereo tune” chorus, “Resochord” harmonizor.
• Convolution-based speaker emulation with “Control Room Pro,” which adds 27 cabinets, 16 mics, combinations of eight cabinets (which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me relative to real world sound, but sounds interesting, at least), and mic placement and room sound controls. Since where you put mics and speakers in rooms has such a profound impact, this has been a kind of holy grail of guitar modeling; it’ll be interesting to hear how it stacks up to rivals.
• Sidechaining with modules. (Invent guitar dubstep!)
• Effect chains can be combined into macros NI calls “Containers” – very cool.

I’ve always been a fan of Guitar Rig for creative sound design, not just, you know, guitars, so this looks like a terrific combination of ingredients to me.

New Effects: Solid Mix, Transient Master

The effects developed for Guitar Rig are also being adapted into studio products. The Solid Mix Series is a 4-band EQ and compressor with sidechain capabilities, and a dynamics section and stereo compressor. Really, it’s somewhat surprising that these didn’t appear previously; it finally gives NI an entry in the bread-and-butter signal processing category for producers. (Aside from some intended for use in Reaktor, or presets based on those, I can’t think of a straight-ahead product from NI that did that.)

Transient Master is basically a dynamic-reshaping envelope follower.

Studio Drummer

Sampled drum kits meet a groove player in the newest drum product from NI. It’s an old idea – simulate what a drummer does by combining sounds with patterns – but the twist here is integration with Kontakt. The actual drum samples sound interesting, too, based on Pearl, Sonor, and Yamaha kits sampled at Berlin’s Teldex Studios and an 18-mic array for 17 GB of velocity-layered samples. That means I could see some people using the samples minus the grooves – and you do get some modern-sounding kits. Otherwise, we’ll just have to hear what the 3500 rhythmic patterns sound like.

In fact, my only real complaint is that the interface to me looks absurdly like the interface in Cakewalk’s Session Drummer. (Heck, they have almost the same names.) The sample content is very different – Cakewalk’s offering even includes electronic drum machines, which gives you the odd experience of looking at an acoustic kit and hearing a LinnDrum.

Anyway, that was just my first impression. Upon looking closer, you can see that the Studio Drummer UI has no rug, and parquet hardware floors instead of hardware floors.

Enough of nit-picking the UI. NI has cowbell and tambourine. Advantage: NI.

Putting it all together…

Pricing and availability, in short:

Komplete: US$559 ($229 update)

Komplete Ultimate, US$1099 ($559 update) with hard drive

Kontakt 5, US$339 ($119 update)

Guitar Rig Pro: US$199 for software, US$449 with pedalboard controller; US$79-only software update

Solid Mix Series: US$229 for the set or $119 a la carte effects

Transient Master: US$119

Studio Drummer: US$169

Everything’s available in September, and all the software is now included in Komplete.

Yes, that’s a lot of software. I hope my few months in Berlin this year prove to be this productive. I’d better chug the Club-Mate.

The word on the street I’ve been hearing is that a lot of users are curious in which direction NI is headed. A lot of users are, understandably, frustrated by seeing Kore discontinued after NI had pushed it as a central strategy, and because they worry about their own personal investment of time in tools. We also saw a shareholder reorganization in May, which returned the company to self-owned status. With the original founders and executive team now also in full ownership of the company, that could give NI freedom to focus on their priorities, and it comes at a time that they’ve seen significant sales growth. (Despite a rough economy, and past claims that music software doesn’t grow the way hardware does, I’ve heard several makers say they’ve seen healthy business right through the global recession. You can probably thank the passion of musicians for that.)

I’ll be interested to see this latest generation of NI software, and more of the company’s direction.

We live and die by hard drives for music. There’s no substitute for redundancy and backups (hey, you could be Matthew Dear and have a drive stolen during your set). But it is helpful to know whether a drive is healthy or not. S.M.A.R.T. monitoring features built into drives can help.

Lifehacker today points to a free Windows utility for the job called CrystalDiskInfo:

CrystalDiskInfo Monitors Hard Drive Health and Uptime [via gHacks]

But that got me thinking about other tools. There’s quite a range of choices for Mac, Windows, Linux, and even some obscure operating systems. The only bad news: generally you’ll only be able to monitor internal drives, unless your external drive is eSATA rather than USB or FireWire. (eSATA is where I’d like to go generally – it’s quite a lot faster, and frees up your USB and FireWire buses for other things — but that’s a discussion for another day.)

Cross-platform / Linux

The smartmontools package is a powerful ATA/ATAPI/SATA monitoring tool that runs on – well, pretty much everything. There’s a Windows package, plus a *nix version for Mac, Linux, BSD, Cygwin on Windows, Solaris, OS/2, QNX, and so on. This looks like your best choice on Linux.

Mac OS X

SMARTReporter (pictured at top) is probably the friendliest way to get at SMART data for SATA, ATA, and eSATA drives on the Mac. It even includes a handy menu bar item so you can monitor how your drive is doing at a glance. It’s free via Open Source “MIT License.”

You can also use the command line, via something like this:

diskutil info disk0 | grep SMART

Windows

In addition to CrystalDiskInfo, you have a number of options:

SpeedFan is a general-purpose monitoring and management tool for just about everything, including (as the name implies) fans.

HDD Health is a hard disk-only monitoring tool, like the others here. One thing it has going for it: friendly feedback and tidy tabs to view it.

More Information

The good folks at SpeedFan have an article on what SMART is and how to interpret data you get – well worth reading whether or not you’re a SpeedFan user.

Now, come on. This has to be a CDM reader who wins this contest, right? That or else we have to come up with our own, better idea. Or, for that matter, better recordings than these Hitachi sounds — surely some of you have dying hard driv– Bad Disk Error. (A)bort, (R)etry, (F)ail?

Hard Drive Dying Dance Track Contest [Gizmodo]

Digital music is great, but it’s struck some notes of discord among serious music listeners. Lossy compression is reducing the quality of audio, a step backwards from the traditional CD. And if you like classical music, get ready for major headaches organizing your music. Not to mention, doesn’t anyone miss their stereo system?

Enter the new Olive Symphony. There are several things about this box that are promising:

Lossless music: An 80 GB hard drive rips your CDs at full-quality (via the integrated CD, or pre-loaded from your collection for free by Olive when you buy it)

Classical music management: Special Mac/PC software uses a special database to tag classical music accurately
Integrated wireless: Wi-Fi is built in

USB and CD: Transfer songs to your iPod or burn a CD

Hi-fi: Olive promises hi-fi sound and includes digital outputs to the stereo

Sure, it’s US$899, but I have to say, finally this is a digital audio player that feels like a step forward, instead of backward. Let’s hope this is a sign of trends to come. Due mid-August.