Luftrum Lunaris Review
Luftrum a company known for its Diva, Omnisphere 2, and Zebra 2 patches launched their first leading Kontakt library. Lunaris is in line with the current trend of Kontakt libraries where you can blend many sound sources into something new. Lunaris is a 4-layered instrument containing analog, ambient, deep, lush, and cinematic pads plus field recordings which can be combined with absolute sound happiness. Luftrum did send a review copy with no strings attached.
Installation
After download you register and add the library in Native Access, do a quick Batch resave in Kontakt and you are ready to use Lunaris. Lunaris is NKS ready and designed for use with Komplete Kontrol keyboards.
Sound
Lunaris is all about pads that work great for underscoring or modern rhythmic patterns. Overall I enjoyed playing with Lunaris, and you can experience the dedication, careful design and sampling that result in an exceptional Kontakt library.
At the core, Lunaris consist of multi-sampled pad sound sources and nature field recordings, and synth. Combined they create these wonderful pads.
This Kontakt library comes with useful presets you should spend some time going through them. The more than 400 presets created by Arksun, Bigtone, Himalaya, Luftrum, Michael Lyon, Martin Walker, Adam Pietruszko, Twolegs Toneworks, and Brandon Clark.
The presets come with a prefix relating the name of the creator.
- AP = Adam Pietruszko
- ARK = Arksun
- BC = Brandon Clark
- BT = Bigtone
- EH = Himalaya
- LUF = Luftrum
- TT = Twolegs Toneworks
- WLK = Martin Walker
After launch Luftrum did release an update which brought Lunaris to Version 1.2, this update did enhance the end user experience through a new UI and more importantly added 150 new presets created by Michael Lyon. You can change the UI by clicking the LUNARIS text on the top of the screen.
I want you to take a quick sidetrack with me as I want to talk about Luftrum as a company as such. Luftrum cares about their customers not only showing that by adding substantial content and new UI to Lunaris, but also going the extra mile when it is not needed. For example, Luftrum designed in 2017 for the Netflix movie ‘What Happened to Monday’ some new patches and decided to include those into existing already sold libraries and send the updates to all customer who have bought Luftrum 13 and Luftrum 14. Other companies would have taken this opportunity and included those patches attached to a Netflix movie and promoted a new library to boost their sale. Luftrum is also a Corporate Member of Save the Children and has initiated annual fundraising campaigns from 2011 to 2015 on KVR Audio that raised over $90000 for the organization.
The Lunaris engine offers a high degree of customizations options and supports you with a perfect UI, either version that was part of the launch or the more cleaner version available with Version 1.2. You can mangle the sounds within the engine and manage how the four different sounds/pads are merged. The standard features like chorus, distortion, phaser, EQ, delay, and reverb are available.
User interface & Usability
The UI was recently updated to be cleaner and gives you access to all critical parameter and effects.
Rating: Five out of five stars
Lunaris is the leading pad machine with excellent material and presets to allow you quickly to shape pads you need for your scoring. It sounds beautiful and combines analog, ambient, thick, lush, and cinematic pads into pure sound ecstasy. I can listen and work with many different libraries, and Lunaris is standing out as a precious library that you should add to your template.
