Native Instruments had a busy week, apparently. They’ve announced three new products (well, one new product and two upgrades) that you should probably know about.

The first is Maschine Drum Selection which is a new sample library for your Maschine setups.

MASCHINE DRUM SELECTION contains 20 full drum kits adapted from the acclaimed factory library of MASCHINE, Native Instruments’ groundbreaking groove production system. As a KONTAKT-Powered instrument, MASCHINE DRUM SELECTION is ready to play both as a standalone instrument and as a plug-in in all major instrument hosts, giving instant access to a practical assortment of gritty urban kits, heavily processed acoustic drums as well as vintage analog samples for various electronic music genres.

What’s also great about this is that you can use any of the kits in Kontakt, Kontakt Player, Kore, Kore Player, or Battery without any fussing. It’s $59 from NI’s online shop.

Speaking of Konakt Player…

Kontakt Player is a free (yes, free) virtual instrument based on NI’s oh-so-wonderful Konakt 3 engine. According to NI, Konakt Player is “also the basis for a new category of “KONTAKT-Powered” instruments that establishes a unique price-performance ratio for sample-based instruments.” Read: powerful software on the cheap.

According to the press release, Kontakt is aimed at being much more efficient, making it possible to use it in live and studio settings. You can also use any Kontakt library inside Kontakt Player, making it much easier to use/transition to. Although, if you already have Kontakt 3, why would you need this? You probably wouldn’t.

As far as the technical stuff goes:

The new KONTAKT PLAYER is based on the latest KONTAKT 3.5 engine, and utilizes all its technological achievements including 64-bit support, extended memory addressing, advanced DFD streaming, true multiprocessor support, and more. It provides comprehensive playback functionality with full Universal Import and convenient sound manipulation via the Performance View panels, and only omits the in-depth editing features of the full-featured KONTAKT 3.5 version. All sound libraries are managed in a convenient graphical library browser, providing overview for even the most extensive sound collections.

Visit the link above for more info.

Now for what I think is the best product I’ve seen in the last few months: Evolve Mutations.

This thing looks beastly. It’s a new Evolve library that will work inside Kontakt 3 or the new Kontakt Player and is designed for use with TV, film, and video game composers/sound designers in mind. You really need to click the link above and watch the demo video. I think you’ll be pleasently surprised.

You can get it for $119 on NI’s shop. But really. Go watch the demo video.

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