You knew there would be an 808 — photo (CC) Charlie Evatt. But there are some other, rarer goodies in there, too.

If you haven’t been following the Kore Soundpacks, NI has steadily been releasing soundware packages for Kore. The sounds themselves are built on the sound engines in Kore — that is, the guts of the instruments you get in Komplete, like Massive, Battery, Kontakt, and Reaktor. (And that’s another reason to dig deeper into those instruments — more on that in a moment, Kontakt users.) On the Kore side of the soundpacks, the packs add variations on those sound, built in the Kore environment using internal effects and modulators from Kore itself.

The latest addition, the US$59 Kontakt Retro Machines, gets extra credit for including lots of juicy retro gear. NI tells us that included in the samples are the:

• Crumar Orchestrator and Roady
• Korg Minikorg
• Linndrum
• Moog Minimoog and Memorymoog
• Oberheim DMX
• an RMI 368 Electra
• CR78, TR-808 and 909
• Sequentials Drumtraks
• String Melody II
• Yamaha CP-11 and Roland EP-10/20 vintage electronic pianos

So, there’s actually some different stuff in there, in addition to the expected staples. The Yamaha and Roland pieces are pretty rare-sampled electronic pianos.

What about Komplete users?

Kontakt and Komplete users may be wondering which soundpack to get — especially if you got Kore 2 and haven’t yet spent your “free soundpack” offer.