Kontakt Crossgrade, Mac Support Announced

Native Instruments has been busy preparing Kontakt for a larger audience, adding support for the Mac with the soon to be released 1.1 version, plus making a special offer to entice users of other software samplers to use Kontakt.

The Mac version of Kontakt will be shipping by the end of August 2002. This version 1.1 will include a hybrid CD containing both the Mac and the PC installer. Customers who have already purchased the PC version of Kontakt will be able to download a free crossgrade from NI's website.

The Kontakt 1.1 Mac release and PC update also introduces some additions to the current functionality, such as EXS, HALion, and SDII file import, a greatly improved auto-search function and other enhancements. Additionally, Native Instruments is developing EMU (EIII, ESI and EIV)import which will be available later this year.

The recommended retail price of Kontakt is $399/399 Euro.

Native Instruments will also offer a crossgrade for all registered HALion, EXS, and Gigastudio users who want to take advantage of Kontakt's, semi-modular architecture, realtime time-stretching and resynthesis, graphical breakpoint envelopes, and analog-modelled filters. The direct import of HALion, EXS, and SDII files being added to the 1.1 update makes it easy to switch.

The crossgrade offer is available to owners of the following applications:

• Emagic EXS24, EXSP24
• Steinberg HALion
• Tascam GigaStudio 32, GigaStudio 96, GigaStudio 160
• Tascam GigaSampler 64

The crossgrade will cost $229/229 Euro and is available from September 1st, 2002.

All crossgrade customers are welcome to keep their previous sampler software.