Finale 2007 to ship with Kontakt Player 2

[Richard Berg]

http://www.finalemusic.com/finale/features/new/kontakt.aspx Anyone else see this?

As I begin to outfit my new project studio I've been looking hard at Kontakt, but the high price of entry ($225 Kontakt 2 academic vs $59 Giga 3 Solo) has kept me away so far. An attractive bundling deal with Finale would tip the balance.

Of course, it all depends on what features they remove from Kontakt Player. Certainly we won't be able to tweak samples, which is fine by me (no way I'd have time to do so). On the other hand, the expressive power of the K2 macro/scripting language is what drew me to it in the first place -- hopefully it's included.

[NeoDavinci]

I think the feature you would miss is the ability to use it with anything but Finale. At least, that's what I'm taking "integrated" to mean.

[tgfoo]

Yeah, it says Kontakt 2 player. My guess is that you'd only be able to use it in Finale with the instruments that it came with.

[Richard Berg]

That would be quite a bummer, eh. Are apps that ship with Finale (e.g. SmartMusic, GPO) traditionally crippled in this way?

[kitekrazy]

Yeah, it says Kontakt 2 player. My guess is that you'd only be able to use it in Finale with the instruments that it came with.

It's just a player basically to replace the Windows midi whatever it is when playing back your music.

[RiffWraith]

Bear in mind, you are purchasing Finale, with K2 included - you are NOT purchasing K2 with Finale included. It does mention the KONTAKT script processor, but I would be very surprised if this integrated version of K2 is the same as the full-blown version.

Cheers.

[Bill]

I think the word “integrated” is purely marketing speak to mean “easy to use”. It’s still a VSTi, and Finale can still use any NI VSTi.

[Richard Berg]

I'm leaning toward Bill's interpretation, though I guess we'll have to wait & see (or call MakeMusic, but that's too easy). The real test is whether KP2 can handle the complex scripting needed for new & upcoming libraries like SSV.

[Garritan]

We have been working closely with Finale and Native Instruments with regards to the new Finale/Kontakt 2 player.

The Finale Kontakt 2 Player is a player version of the full Kontakt 2. It is bundled to play the GPO Finale Edition. It will have the ability to do scripting and convolution but they must be programmed in the library. There will be no editing capabilities per se.

As I understand it, this Player will also play other Kontakt 2 Player libraries that are encoded for it. It will not play regular Kontakt 1 or 2 format or other formats. So far only GPO and JABB have the autoload feature and the Human Playback integration.

The Stradivari and Cello libraries are being encoded and will use the autoload, human playback, advanced scripting and convolution capabilities. The upcoming Marching Band and General MIDI collection will also take advantage of the new engine as well.

Gary Garritan
http://www.garritan.com (http://www.garritan.com/)

[DrH]

Gary,

The question I posted elsewhere was whether or not Studio 2 (or maybe a new version of it) will be able to load the Kontakt 2 player like it now does with the 1.x player. That way, we could still use the GPO libraries with other sequencers after exporting our scores out of Finale as midi files.

Thnx!

DrH