Native Instruments Releases Free Kinetic Treats (Kontakt Player)

Native Instruments has introduced Kinetic Treats, a free Kontakt Player library featuring the sounds of vintage children’s toys. The library will be available as a free download from the Native Instruments website until January 4th, 2017.

Being a Kontakt Player compatible library, Kinetic Treats is basically free for everyone at the moment (not just owners of the full version of Kontakt), as it will work without any limitations in the free Kontakt player. It might not be the most mind-blowing Christmas gift we’ve ever received from Native Instruments (that title either goes to Replika or Supercharger), but it’s actually a nice little Kontakt noisemaker, once you dig a bit deeper underneath its unique looking interface.

The user interface is completely unconventional – there are no knobs and sliders to tweak, nor are there any buttons to push. Well, actually there are, but they’re masked into toy trains, robots, glowing space invaders, origami cranes, and a spinning ballerina of all things. Obviously, a bit of exploring, as well as a fair bit of trial and error is required in order to get the best out of the Kinetic Treats library. It’s a fun little instrument to experiment with, though, and it goes to show how much can actually be done with Kontakt’s scripting language. The product page offers a few hints on which buttons need to be pushed in order to achieve certain effects, but your best bet is to hook up a MIDI controller to your setup and spend some time with the instrument, tweaking the controls and listening to the resulting sounds.

The library is available as a free download for everyone interested, although registering for a Native Instruments user account is required. To grab your free copy of Kinetic Treats, you’ll need to add the library to your user account (visit the product page linked below for more info), and then download the latest version of NI’s new Native Access license manager. This is a good thing, though, as Native Access works far more smoothly that the old Service Center app (the updates are now less of a pain to install, as is registering and downloading new products). Once you’ve installed Native Access, enter your Kinetic Treats serial number (it should arrive via email) and proceed with the installation. Kinetic Treats will show up as a new library in Kontakt’s browser.

On a related note, Native Instruments is offering $25 vouchers to their email subscribers. These are only valid for a single purchase and are not transferable. I’m not sure if new subscribers will also receive the voucher after signing up.

Kinetic Treats is available as a free download via Native Instruments. The offer ends on January 4th, 2017 (420 MB download size, instrument library for NI Kontakt).