Embertone has announced the release of Arcane, a spooky free Kontakt Player sound library / mini-game inspired by the Halloween spirit. Please note that this is a free Kontakt Player instrument, which means that you can use it without any limitations even if you don’t own the full version of NI Kontakt. Sweet deal!
We don’t get a free Kontakt Player sample library every day. As a matter of fact, the only free Kontakt Player instrument that I’m aware of is the fabulous DrumMic’a acoustic drum kit by Sennheiser. With that in mind, Arcane already seems like an unusually valuable gift.
Under the hood, the library contains over 2500 individual samples (16-bit stereo), which will take more than 2 GB of space on your hard drive. Make sure that you have enough free space on your HDD before you start extracting the downloaded RAR archive.
Now, here come the bad news. The library includes some sort of puzzle mini-game which you’ll need to solve before you start using the library. I’ve managed to reach a screen with two candles and a circle of fifths, but Kontakt keeps spawning errors when I load the library and I have no idea if I’m really stuck on this screen (not able to solve the puzzle) or if Kontakt is stuck.
I totally appreciate the challenge (it’s really cool to have a mini game hidden in a sample library), but it really sucks that I get an error half way through solving it and impossible to figure out what’s going on. If anyone gets this one to work, please report in the comments section below!
UPDATE: Apparently, the issue is caused by the lack of available RAM on my machine (I’m using 32-bit Windows and that doesn’t help at all). If you have more than 3 GB of available RAM, you probably won’t have any issues loading Arcane on you machine.
Installation Process
To download your free copy of Arcane, visit the product page linked below and add the item to your shopping cart. Proceed to free checkout and enter the required information (name, address, etc.). The download link and your personal serial number will appear in your browser window after you click the SUBMIT button. There’s no need to verify your email address, although a confirmation email containing your serial number will be delivered to the email addressed which you’ve entered during checkout.
To install and activate Arcane, launch Kontakt Player (or the full version of Kontakt) and click the ADD LIBRARY button on the LIBRARIES tab. Browse to the Arcane folder on your hard drive (make sure that you’ve extracted the archive prior to this) and click OK. After that, click the ACTIVATE button and enter your serial number when prompted. That’s it!
It’s also worth noting that you’ll need to update Kontakt Player to the latest version in order to use Arcane. This can be done automatically through the Service Center application, or you can manually download the latest installation package from the NI website.
Audio Demo
Check out the Arcane audio demo:
Download
Arcane is available for free download via Embertone (1.33 GB download size, RAR archive, instrument library for Kontakt Player, serial number protection).
Last Updated on November 3, 2014 by Tomislav Zlatic.
