Kontakt Player is a free app from Native Instruments that allow you to load Kontakt Libraries, either from Native Instruments or licensed 3rd party developers. Non-licensed libraries can be used for 15 minutes at a time in demo mode and without the ability to save your work. Kontakt 5 and the Kontakt 5 Player are essentially the same application. We also get a huge amount emails with questions around Kontakt, it's file formats, and general usage, so I'm going to try and hit all of the notes in reasonably bite-sized chunks in this article.
More and more developers have embraced Kontakt as a tool with which to give huge control to end users in their virtual instruments, instead of programming custom VSTs. Native Instruments Kontakt is an incredibly powerful sampler and shell.
