Nexus or Kontakt

[Flange]

Im wondering if some users of nexus and kontakt plugins could give me some feedback about which they prefer and why. The nexus looks cool but having to buy yet another stupid f***ing licence dongle puts me off. Do these companies think we all have endless USB ports? Why can they not all just use one? Even having to use an online licenser for many different plugins is highly annoying. So yeah Nexus is coming second choice so far for me because of the physical dongle. Kontakt is a higher starting price though. More than twice as much. I have the free kontakt player but recently purchased a pack to use with it and I only found out after my purchase that it works with full version only. It was not clear on the company website about this and so I argued with them about it and finally got a refund.

[sana48]

What music are you wanting to produce?
Kontakt and Nexus are two different beasts.

[beats me]

Producers are still using Nexus?? AFAIK that was (is?) an EDM staple. If that is what you are looking for I'd step up to the present and get Serum and/or Spire. Spire also has a ton of quality reasonably priced third party preset libraries available that covers every sub genre of EDM imaginable. Also no dongle required for either of those.

Kontakt is great too but you are going to fork over a lot of money for quality libraries.

[Flange]

What music are you wanting to produce?
Kontakt and Nexus are two different beasts.

House and chillout

[Flange]

Producers are still using Nexus?? AFAIK that was (is?) an EDM staple. If that is what you are looking for I'd step up to the present and get Serum and/or Spire. Spire also has a ton of quality reasonably priced third party preset libraries available that covers every sub genre of EDM imaginable. Also no dongle required for either of those.

Kontakt is great too but you are going to fork over a lot of money for quality libraries.

Thanks I will have a look at those. I bought rob papen blue a while back and I get a lot of use out of it but its very difficult to understand and barely any tutorials etc. I need something that I can learn online

[beats me]

I'd say Serum is one of the easiest synths to wrap your head around. Spire, not so much.

[sana48]

House and chillout

For house check out the Korg M1 vst, it has many of the bread and butter house sounds and its only 50$.

[Wakeon]

Kontakt is pretty good for orchestral and "real" instruments. Sounds good
Nexus is not bad, more dance with pianos, not very orchestral, a little bit more electronic but it's good

[legbiter]

Have you tried Massive or Reaktor? They are both powerful and there are tons of free preset libraries for them.

Massive presets can be purchased at producer loops for pretty cheap and there are tons of EDM preset libraries for it.

If you just want one of them, and you want something creative, buy Reaktor, why? there is so much experimental stuff available for (effects and presets) and some of it is mouth-wateringly good. There are over two thousand files on the NI community website including emulations of nearly all the popular synths.

Massive is a great "out of the box" synth, it also has brilliant presets. If you buy a second- hand NI Machine then you also get the full version of Massive and komplete selection. The Machine presets are also really useable, especially for EDM. You can buy a second-hand Machine these days for 200 EUR and it is packed full of goodies.

[Division Monarchy]

For a sampler, I would just stay with Kontakt. It seems to have the most sample libraries in its format... As far as soft synths go, Reaktor is popular, but the time that goes into it with learning to build your own synths can distract from making actual music, unless you use their libraries. I have both Massive and Serum, but I think Serum is far superior in every way. Great developer too who deserves the support, where as NI acts like they don't care if you want to buy their products. Spire sounds nice too, but for wave table synthesis, Serum is king, especially with the ease of importing one's own wave tables and modulation options to draw one's own LFOs. Massive and Spire don't offer that.

[mholloway]

Why are you comparing a Synth ROMpler mostly used for dance music to a Sampler mostly used for, you guessed it, Sample based instruments... ?

Apples Vs Oranges and all that.

Other response: since you have to ask this question in the first place, just go buy Nexus.


-M

[login]

For house and chill out look in to u-he Diva, it is great for chords, stabs, basslines, leads.

[sana48]

It's what you do with the sounds that matter; Nexus receives a lot of hate because it is a rompler but fundamentally it is a tool for music just like everything else.

[sana48]

For house and chill out look in to u-he Diva, it is great for chords, stabs, basslines, leads.

+1

Diva is amazing, by far my favorite soft synth.