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Native Instruments Reaktor 5 Price Paid / Price New: $150 upgrade from v4/$449 Year Manufactured: 2006 Specs: Virtual instrument performance tool and authoring environment. Load up synths, beatboxes, and loop mangulators at will. Can process live sound. Graphical authoring tool enables making virtual audio gear from scratch, or just replace the filters on that synth. Likes fast CPU's. Runs stand-alone or as a plugin in various DAW packages. Freakin' unbelievable library of noise-making virtual gear. Sound: 5/5 Hard to rate, as Reaktor does not use just one method to make sounds. The analogs are plenty fat, the samplers as clear and punchy as what you feed them, and the weird stuff sounds plenty weird. Additive, subtractive, FM, sampling, and granular resynthesis are among the possibilities. Subjective sound quality is excellent. Instrument Quality: 5/5 (variable) Reaktor is not one instrument. It ships with over 100 virtual instruments, and there are over 1000 more free for the downloading at the NI user forum. Hundreds of parts for building are included. The NI-supplied instruments are of very high caliber, use thrifty amounts of CPU, and sound great. The user-made ones vary. So, you'll load up one, and hate it, load another, and have a very different experience. Minus the trips to the music store, and the accompanying shoveling of cash. Playbility: 5/5 (variable) Reaktor adapts well to your MIDI and audio set-up. Use whatever controller you like. You can feed audio from any instrument through Reaktor, so it's as playable as anything else you have. Mapping physical MIDI controllers to virtual controls can get a bit tedious, and could use a batch mode of some sort. Overall Value: Example 5/5. Nothing less than the best value in music technology, period. Reaktor replaces rooms full of synths, and rackloads of gear. Once you are registered, new toys appear on the user site every month, for free, supplied by the community. Many of the creations have no equivalent in the physical world, and Reaktor is known for being a resource for sound designers. Can be a cure for Gear Lust, at least in the synth/sampler/rack gear department. Downsides: • Get ambitious enough, and you will run out of CPU. You can lower the sample rate to decrease the load, but your imagination will trump your machine eventually. I will spend hours fiddling, and when I get something good, I'll save an audio file of it. This way I can layer the output of several Ensembles in my DAW program, at the cost of near zero CPU. Then I can load up one Ensemble as a daw plugin, and improvise in real time over the loops. • The keys/synths part of any music store or catalog will start looking real boring to you. • Looking at walls of knobs and indicators, trying to figure out what the gently caress is going on, can be challenging. Any other information you'd like to add, please feel free to do so. There are different levels to Reaktor. I don't know enough to make instruments, so I load up what others have made and have fun. I do know enough to take ready made parts, and drag virtual wires between them to route audio and MIDI. Routing a beatbox through a granular audio mangler and a reverb is cake, listening to the resulting audio mulch, maybe not so much. :-) If you want sounds no one else has, load up some instruments and start tweaking. You can record presets, and you can record audio to disk with a built-in recorder. Reaktor is not a recording package or DAW, but it comes close to being the only program you'd need if you are into any form of electronic music. A MIDI controller with numerous sliders, knobs, or what have you is highly recommended. A free demo version can be downloaded from Native Instruments at https://www.native-instruments.com. The program can be purchased stand alone for $449 MSRP or as part of the large Komplete arsenal of most/all NI products for $1449. I have not popped for Komplete yet, but the rest of the NI line gets sexier every year...
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Dec 10, 2006 23:24
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