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When I bought Mach Five 3, I expected to be able to load K2000, NI and EXS 24 instruments. K2000 and EXS 24 loads are OK, but not Kontakt. There was a later note saying effect that V5 instruments would not work, implying V4 would, but nothing I've tried works other than a couple of V2 and 3 instruments.

So, just what sort of NI patches work? Is there a way to tell beforehand? I don't want to buy anything for NI without some way of knowing if it will load.

Related, I noticed someone here recently bought a stripped down version of Kontakt 5 (not the free Player). I can't find that post, but does anyone know where to get this (can't find it on the NI site) and whether it is equivalent to the full V5 in its ability to play K5 instruments?

I've found the NI stuff to be hit and miss in terms of loading into MachFive 3 and haven't found a rationale as to why some instruments load and others with the same extension don't. It probably has to do with how it's programmed and whether or not certain aspects and parameters are unique to the Kontakt player.

FWIW, I've found the Kontakt 5 player to be well worth the money since I can also buy a few instruments that are not to be found anywhere else. Most recently I bought two slide guitars from Wavelore and a killer banjo from Bolder Sounds. Nothing like this exists currently for MachFive and they won't load into anything but the Kontakt player.

The slides were 1/2 price and the banjo was only $40. Wavelore also offers a free brush kit which, while limited, is also very useful and sounds great.

I guess I'll have to look at K5 again. The thing I was thinking of was Kontakt Essentials and it is not for sale any more.

No, it's not. The full version is required for these 3rd party instruments. Well worth it, IMO.

IMO the beauty of Kontakt besides it's capabilities are all of the available 3rd party libraries & Softsynths,
Mach5 looks like a great app but the lack of 3rd party choices with Kontakt already having all of these 3rd party library & Softsynth options makes it hard for me to check out Mach5.
The growing community of Kontakt scripters have improved these sample based libraries beyond what most of us could have imagined possible a few years ago.
Rob from Tronsonic asked last week if there were any Mach5 scripters available to try porting a library into M5, he doesn't know any & got no response.
If he posted the same question on VI-control for Kontakt scripters he'd have a line of scripters wanting the work.
Mach5 by many reports might be the better soft sampler having a nicer GUI & it's superior time stretching/synth capabilities but Kontakt's universality makes it the better choice for me.
It's become the standard soft sampler platform.

As far as function, M5 beats K5 hands down. Just the IRCAM stuff is worth every penny. But if you're not doing advanced sample editing and just playing back presets, then K5 is fine.

Mach5 I'm sure is great and might be the better app but there are hundreds of 3rd party libraries written specifically for the Kontakt platform and it's become most developers platform of choice.
Until Mach5 starts getting other companies to develop libraries for it like NI has with Kontakt,Mach5 it will continue to be the superior app with less 3rd party options.
Most developers still make libraries for Kontakt even if they acknowledge Mach5 is better because Kontakt has a much larger user base.
If they release a library in Kontakt they have a much larger pool of potential clients.
It would be great to see developers like Cinesamples that are MOTU users embrace Mach5 for their libraries but I just don't think the Mach5 user base is large enough at this point in time for it to make sense financially for most developers.

I think I'm going to leave K5 down low on the priority list for now. Between GPO, IKM, Mach 5, EXS24 and Redmatica, I have most of what I'll use. The stock NI sounds don't add much, and I find the NI interface annoying at best. Being able to load free NI patches was a bonus feature of Mach Five for me, not an essential one.

I was wondering about this also. According to the Mach5 manual, M5 can open Native Instruments .nki files, which are Kontakt samples supposedly. However, Mach5 3.14 won't open .nki files AFAICS. (I have Kontakt 5 Elements).

Has anyone solved this? Not a big deal, but I'd like to be able to do this if possible.

thanks - John D a Mach5 noob.

machfive is NOT opening nki samples.... just got true stike today and mach5 will not open up anything!!!!

Some Kontakt library samples, native and 3rd party, are protected, proprietary. Even though a .nik Instrument file exists, you won't be able to load the samples unless you have a license, and then only in Kontakt itself. For the same reason, you cannot load M5 libraries into Kontakt.


Frank Ferrucci

http://www.motu.com/products/software/m ... specs.html

Kontakt 1/2/3/4.0

So until N.I have changed their presets format.