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A more than impressive bundle of goodies.

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Take a look at the list of individual software titles currently available from Native Instruments and it's not really stretching the truth to suggest that many would make it into a Who's Who of contemporary production tools.

Think first of synth powerhouses like Massive or the DX-clone FM8, which both provide killer sounds out of the box but which also reward those with an appetite for sound-building as much as any other synth available today.

Or, switch focus to the more 'out there' titles such as Reaktor, the seminal modular synthesizer once described as being capable of producing any sound you could think of, or the mercurial Absynth 5, with its collection of evolving soundscapes, flexible breakpoint envelopes and phenomenal internal effects.

"Komplete 7 provides such a powerful solution to modern music production as to prove inspiring."

Then consider Kontakt, which is now established as the most popular sampler through which third-party manufacturers are bringing their new libraries to market, to say nothing of the increasingly huge native library NI are building for it themselves.

As far as beat-making is concerned, there's the evergreen Battery 3, which has a staggering number of musical genres covered through its library and again, rather than simply providing collections of drum hits, the interface through which sounds can be manipulated rewards invention.

Oh, and did we forget to mention effects processors such as Guitar Rig, which is swiftly morphing from being simply one of the most popular guitar amp simulation plug-ins into a host for all sorts of effects-based jiggery pokery?

So, what if we were to tell you that NI's new 'Komplete' bundle, now at Version 7, offers all of these titles, plus many more for less than 500 Euros to new users and much less to upgraders? Yes, something told us you might want to read on.

Seventh heaven

Despite the impressive summary above, the titles listed represent only a few of the Komplete 7 pie, which actually comprises 24 separate instruments, libraries and effects collections.

While Komplete bundles have been offered before, it's fair to say that in terms of value for money, this one blows its predecessors away as the total cost of buying the individual titles within this bundle would represent an outlay several times greater than buying Komplete 7 itself.

Compared with Komplete 6, version 7 provides 17 additional 'packages', provides 3,000 more sounds (the total is now 10,000), provides an additional 30GB of sample data (a total now of 90GB) and, in case you needed any further convincing, even bundles a 50 Euro e-voucher which you can put towards any purchase you fancy from NI's online store.

Needless to say, you'll need to carry out some serious installation before you're up and running but NI's Service Centre makes activation of software libraries very easy and, for newbies, this application is the place to which you'll return each time any of the titles within your collection requires updating.