Martin Gumucio

Det verkar som om IMF chefen har haft fullt upp de senaste 24 timmarna.

http://www.native-instruments.com/en/products/producer/kontakt-player/

For those of you that don’t know Native Instruments Kontakt is one of the biggest softwares out there for music production. It’s a software sampler, and one of the most important ones.

Now maybe I am naive, but when I see the word “free” on a download page in 2011, I assume that the software can be used for it’s intended purpose, in this case to playback samples, and that it will probably be limited but that it will work and not cost me money.

Yesterday I bought a third-party kontakt library and was eager to check it out, using the free Kontakt player of course! I am familiar with Kontakt but I’m not a current user, so I was interested to see what had happened with it since last time

Well here are my experiences..

- The download link requires your email, aww I really don’t like to give it out unless I’m buying something.. all right then..
- the download link mail never arrives, 10 minutes later I give it another email (both gmail) and that works.. Ok I’m downloading .. Over 300mb? Wow!
- the Free Kontakt Player turns out to also be the demo of the full Kontakt package. Hmm..
- noticing that I’m also installing “native instruments service center”… Uh oh..
- it’s working! But.. What on earth happened to the gui? While in demo mode it seems that Kontakt looks like something running on a monochrome Mac Classic. You think this wants me to buy the full version NI?
- Now I’m playing with the samples I bought and having fun. Yay!
- after 15 or so minutes everything stops and Kontakt asks me to activate the demo version, the “NI service center” springs into action.
- Now NI means business, my full contact details are needed and I get an account on their website. I click activate, and I can see the Kontakt instance showing up as activated.
- Kontakt never activates, and for a simple reason.
- Discovering that the free Kontakt player is not for playing Kontakt files at all, but only for libraries labeled “powered by Kontakt”, the difference I’m guessing is a fat chunk of cash to NI from the people making the libraries.

So in the end i had a terrible experience in the hands of Native Instruments, and I’m sticking to plan A, import my new samples into Ableton Sampler instead.

Congrats NI, you have successfully driven me to the competition.

Working at SLU, the Swedish Agricultural University has its upsides. For one there is a good amount of fun research going on. One of those projects use special GPS collars fitted on moose, that allow researchers to track the habits of the swedish king of the forest.

It’s from this project that the following astounding piece of data comes:

Apparently it’s quite common that when the female moose are about to give birth to a new little moosling (I wonder what the proper term is), that they swim out to a small island, free from predators. 400 meters of swimming in this case. Pretty cool, but more amazing is that it did the return trip in the company of the calf, when it was only three days old. Well done little fella!