Komplete 14 Review: Native Instruments Music Software Is An Even Bigger Bundle

Lot's of new things in this bundle! But are they worth the price? — Lot’s of new things in this bundle! But are they worth the price?

Native Instruments Komplete bundle has long been one of its flagship products. Bundled with some of the most potent and most frequently-used products in the production space, Komplete always has been a one-stop shop for all things music production.

Komplete 14 by Native Instruments is a powerful upgrade to the toolkit and is built for sound designers and music producers. It includes 139 products, over 84,000 preset sounds, and 770GB of music production goodies.

Some of the spotlight features include the Kontakt 7 sampling engine, Massive X, Session Guitarist, Symphony Series Collection, and 62 expansion packs that go beyond any genre, allowing for endless musical exploration. This article will be discussing some of the many software upgrades and improvements included in Komplete 14, like iZotope’s Ozone 10 and offerings from Brainworx, that are available for music producers.

Download Free Kontakt Libraries For Native Instruments’ Sampler Here

What Is New In What Is Komplete 14

The bulk of the Komplete bundle will see the return of Native Instrument’s classic synths and plugins (albeit many with a few well-deserved improvements). Overall though, the new things offered in Komplete offer some seriously unique tools for you to use in your next track.

First, there is a fresh new Kontakt in its seventh iteration. This award-winning sampler allows you to craft full-spectrum orchestral, other-worldly bohemian melodies and almost any other sound and texture you’d imagine. Komplete 14 also comes with a handful of fresh new libraries (but I’ll save that for a later section).

This version of Komplet also comes bundled with a couple of other site plugins. Yes, you heard that right: whole SUITES of production tools. For the first time, purchasing Komplete gives you access to Ozone, a powerful mastering suite, and also Izotope RX, which is a phenomenal audio-repair tool for post-production.

And while many other minor inclusions are included, I’ll mention this one final big one; the sheer number of extra instruments you can now access in this bundle. You’ll get over 84,000 presets spread across 139 different devices. You’d be hard-pressed even to scroll and audition that many sounds in a lifetime, let alone use them in your productions (and I mean that in a damn good way).

What I Liked About What Is Komplete 14?

Playbox is… simply….awesome

This bundle has so many new things to get excited about, but I will narrow it down to my favorite three things. Let’s dive into what I am most excited about upon opening up this bundle.

Playbox

This new instrument playable on Kontakt is damn insane. It randomizes different sounds and plays them in sequence when feeding MIDI notes. The result is a dreamlike and sporadic chord progression that feels familiar.

It’s an absolute inspiration machine just scrolling through the presets, and the randomizer features allow you to keep pouring gas onto the inspiration streak once it’s started.

More Ambient Instruments!

Okay, so I know I am a bit biased here as an ambient producer and composer, but the near inclusions here are to die for.

Komplete has better choirs, pianos, more-nuanced strings, and many other FX and soundscape instruments. These instruments are great to include as the first thing in a blank project to set a vibe or just to layer into the background of a fully finished track to add more depth and texture to the production. Overall, it’s insanely inspiring.

More Tools Than Ever Before!

I was pleasantly floored when I read the initial announcement that Komplete would include Ozone and RX. It was one of those things that the company probably didn’t have to do at all but chose to do so for the betterment of the community. There are so much many excellent features in Ozone alone that if this doesn’t put you over the top and convince you to snag this bundle, then I don’t know what will.

Because while it’s billed as a mastering suite, you can also use every plugin individually. Their exciter is one of my go-to standalone harmonic exciters, and their imager is powerful too.

What I Wasn’t Crazy About

Battery 4 might need more than a facelift if it will ever be usable…

The list of what I wasn’t a fan of is a bit shorter, but I would be remiss not to share what drove me a little crazy with this bundle.

Battery

Battery 4 is Native Instruments drum sampler and programmer. In its day, it was mighty and still has the potential to be so today, save for some glaring issues.

Simple quality-of-life issues like the inability to undo are deal breakers for me. You can spend an hour working on a custom drum kit and then accidentally bump the file name of a preset and instantly undo all your work without any way to revert it. And that’s just one feature of a handful that drove me a little crazy.

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I feel so passionate about this because Battery has a lot of potentials. Like, a lot. I was almost ready to ditch Ableton’s Drum Racks entirely. But alas… a missed opportunity for Native Instruments.

It’s REALLY Big

Looking at the product description of scrolling through everything you’ve unlocked once you type in your license can be incredibly exciting. Eighty-four thousand new sounds are almost at your fingertips.

The only problem is that some of these libraries are massive. Native Instruments Access told me a string library alone said it takes up 30+ gigs, and when I tried to install my Macbook, it required even more!

So while there is a ton included, you need to be quite choosey about which instruments and sounds you can afford space for on your computer.

Of course, you could bypass this if you have a ten-terabyte hard drive, but I’m guessing most of the readers do not.

Who What Is Komplete 14 Is Meant For

Native Instruments

This can be a tricky question to answer cause the easy answer would be that it’s built for any music producer. And while there’s a little truth to that, let’s unpack that a bit more.

I’ll start this section off by saying that you don’t need to upgrade every time a new Komplete bundle comes out. Usually, version-to-version upgrades don’t warrant the price tag, and most producers I know wait for one or even two versions of Komplete before making the change.

With this in mind, I would say that Komplete 14 is suitable for one of two producers.

The first is for newer producers looking for a one-stop shop for all their production needs. If you don’t have a library filled with synths you know like the back of your hand and are simply looking to invest a chunk of money that you know will get a TON of use for years to come, this option is perfect.

The second would be for season amateurs who know how to put a tune together with classic popular synths like Serum and a few drum samples and are now looking to add a new level of detail and texture to their tracks. The number of high-quality models, sounds, and tools in this bundle might be the tool that gets your productions to the pro level.

And speaking of professional producers, those are whom I don’t think would find as much value as the price tag warrants out of this bundle.

Why?

Because while many of the instruments and sounds in this bundle sound amazing, there are third-party Kontakt libraries that are considered more of the industry standard (and if you are a professional composer I am sure you likely even have them on your hard drive already).

Because while the instruments and sounds in Komplete are certainly quality, they don’t offer many new things to the conversation that professional composers don’t already have access to. Most producers and composers at this level also likely don’t need to rely on mastering tools like Ozone to get quality end results.