Kontakt

The Berlin company released Kontakt in 2002 as a plugin sampler. What made it dominant wasn't the audio engine but KSP, its scripting language, which lets library developers program how an instrument behaves: round robins, legato between notes, articulations switched by keyswitches or velocity.

An orchestral library for film scoring can run to hundreds of gigabytes and is, in practice, a Kontakt program. The free Kontakt Player only loads libraries whose developers have paid Native Instruments a licence fee; everything else needs the full version. That has turned a software format into something of a toll road, and open alternatives such as SFZ into what people pick when they'd rather not pay it.