Search for the best Kontakt libraries and the lists all read the same way: a column of free orchestral freebies, a column of expensive cinematic giants, and a strong skew toward film composers writing trailer cues. That framing leaves a beginner stranded at the single most expensive mistake in this corner of music production — downloading a “free Kontakt library,” loading it, and watching it fall silent fifteen minutes later with no explanation. It also answers the wrong question for most producers. You are not scoring a film; you want a quick lush string bed, a felt piano for a hook, a drum kit that sounds like a record, or an evolving texture under a lo-fi loop. The best Kontakt library is not the most cinematic one on a list — it is the one that runs in the Kontakt you actually own and covers the job you actually have.
So this guide is built around the two axes that matter and that the listicles bury. The first is compatibility: which of these instruments run free, forever, in the free Kontakt Player, and which ones need the full $299 version of Kontakt and will quietly time out in the Player. The second is the job: keys, strings, drums and percussion, textures, world flavor. Group the field by those two axes and the right pick falls out fast — and you stop buying a film-composer’s tool to do a beatmaker’s work. If you are weighing the sampler itself first, our Kontakt 8 review and the Kontakt 7 vs Kontakt 8 upgrade breakdown cover whether the current version is worth it; this page is about what to load it with.
A note on who this is for. If you are a beginner, the most valuable thing here is the section on the Player-versus-full-Kontakt trap, because understanding it is what saves you from the timeout that makes people give up on free instruments entirely — and the free picks below are genuinely enough to finish records. If you are an intermediate producer who already owns Kontakt or is weighing Komplete, the by-job sections will tell you which paid instrument actually earns its money for the kind of music you make. And if you have been buying cinematic libraries to make pop, hip-hop or electronic music, the producer’s-lens framing here will probably save you from the next one.
The trap nobody warns you about: Player-licensed vs open-format
The only compatibility question that matters, as a flow. Whether a library runs free is about licensing, not price — and the amber branch is where beginners get caught. Illustrative; mechanics verified at publication.
Native Instruments ships Kontakt in two editions, and the difference is not what most people assume. The full version of Kontakt costs $299 outright and lets you build, edit and save your own instruments. The free Kontakt Player costs nothing and plays other people’s instruments. The catch is in what “plays” means, and it is the source of nearly every “why did my free library stop working” question on the forums.
Here is the actual rule. The free Player runs any library that has been officially licensed for Kontakt Player with no restriction at all — you install it through Native Access and it works forever, exactly as if you owned the full version. But if you load a library that is not licensed for the Player, it runs in demo mode: it plays for fifteen minutes, then the sound cuts out and the editing controls lock until you reload the plugin. Reloading resets the timer, so technically you can keep going, but you cannot finish a track that way. That fifteen-minute timeout is the trap, and the cruel part is that it has nothing to do with whether the library was free or paid.
Read that again, because it is the single most useful fact on this page: the demo timeout is about licensing, not price. A free library can be fully Player-licensed and run forever — Audio Imperia’s GLADE is free and never times out. A library you paid real money for can be an unlicensed, open-format instrument that demands the full version of Kontakt and times out in the Player. Free does not mean licensed, and paid does not mean licensed; the only thing that determines whether you get the timeout is whether the developer paid Native Instruments to license that specific library for the Player. Most indie sound designers who give away free instruments do not pay that fee, which is exactly why so many “free Kontakt” downloads time out.
The good news is that you can tell before you download, and it takes ten seconds. Look at the library’s store or product page. A licensed library carries a badge or a line that says it works in the free Kontakt Player; an unlicensed one says, usually right next to the file-size and system requirements, that it “requires the full retail version of Kontakt.” Licensed libraries install and activate through Native Access and show up with proper artwork in Kontakt’s Library browser. Unlicensed open-format libraries are raw NKI files you load by hand through Kontakt’s Files tab, with no artwork — and in the free Player, those are the ones that count down. When you load one and see small red “demo” text next to the instrument name, that is the warning that the timer is running. One further shortcut settles it for paid libraries: Native Access will only register a serial for an instrument the free Player is actually licensed to run, so if your serial activates cleanly and the library appears in the Library browser with its own artwork, you already know it will play without the timer.
Why does this matter so much for the picks below? Because it completely reorders the usual free-versus-paid thinking. Almost every commercial Kontakt library from a serious developer — Native Instruments’ own instruments, Heavyocity, Audio Imperia, ProjectSAM, Sonuscore, Impact Soundworks — is a “Powered-by-Kontakt” instrument that is Player-licensed and runs free in the Player forever. That means you do not need to own the $299 full Kontakt to use most of the libraries in this roundup, free or paid. You need the full version only if you want to edit and save instruments yourself, or if you specifically want a library from a smaller developer who never paid for the Player license. For the vast majority of producers, the free Player plus the right licensed libraries is the entire setup — and knowing that is worth far more than any single plugin recommendation.
Is it even Kontakt? The libraries that only look like it
Many big “orchestral library” names are not Kontakt at all — they run in the developer’s own player and never load into Kontakt. Illustrative platform map.
Before any pick, clear up a confusion that costs people money: not every famous sampled-instrument library is a Kontakt library. Several of the biggest orchestral and cinematic developers left Kontakt years ago and now ship their instruments in their own proprietary players. If you buy one expecting it to load into Kontakt, it will not — these runtimes only play their own developer’s libraries, and they never load a third party’s.
The ones to know: Spitfire Audio runs its instruments in its own SF Player (and the free LABS app), so the entire Spitfire catalog — including the free, excellent LABS instruments and BBC Symphony Orchestra — lives outside Kontakt. Orchestral Tools moved to its SINE player; Vienna Symphonic Library uses its Synchron Player; EastWest uses Opus and Play; 8Dio went proprietary; Soundpaint and UVI’s Falcon are their own ecosystems too. None of these is worse than Kontakt — many are superb — but they are a separate decision. If your goal is specifically to load instruments into the Kontakt or Kontakt Player you already run, a library from one of those developers does not qualify, however much its interface resembles a Kontakt instrument in screenshots.
The practical upshot is simple. When you are shopping for “a Kontakt strings library” or “a Kontakt piano,” confirm two things on the product page: that the instrument is genuinely a Kontakt instrument (not SINE, Synchron, SF Player or Opus), and that it is Player-licensed if you are running the free Player. Every paid pick in this guide clears both bars — they are real Kontakt instruments and they run in the free Player — which is exactly why they belong in a producer’s Kontakt roundup rather than a film composer’s gear list.
Pick by the job, not the orchestral tier
The producer’s lens: a top free pick and a top paid pick for each real job. Every instrument here runs in the free Kontakt Player. Picks reflect current 2026 versions verified at publication.
The reason most Kontakt roundups feel useless to a producer is that they are organized by orchestral tier — solo strings, ensemble strings, divisi systems, full orchestras — which is how a film composer shops and how almost nobody making pop, hip-hop, electronic or lo-fi music thinks. A producer reaches for an instrument by job: I need keys, I need a string bed, I need drums, I need a texture, I need some world flavor. So that is how the rest of this guide is organized. For each job there is a top free pick that runs in the Player and a top paid pick worth the upgrade, and the section explains when the free one is genuinely enough — because very often it is.
One orientation before the picks. If you own nothing yet and want the fastest possible start, install the free Kontakt Player and two free libraries: Native Instruments’ own Kontakt Factory Selection 2, which is the official free starter pack and covers a broad spread of usable sounds, and Audio Imperia’s GLADE, which is the single strongest free library of this cycle and covers keys-adjacent textures, strings, woodwinds and world instruments in one instrument. Those two are licensed, never time out, and will carry you a long way before you spend a cent. Everything below tells you where to go from there, job by job. For the broader picture beyond Kontakt specifically, our roundups of the best sample libraries and the best sample packs cover formats this page deliberately leaves out.
Keys: pianos that sit in a mix
Keys is the job most producers hit first, and the trap here is buying a giant concert-grand library built for classical recital realism when what a track needs is a piano that already sits in a mix — felt, intimate, slightly dark, ready to print. The picks below are chosen for exactly that: character and mix-readiness over exhaustive sampling, and all three run in the free Player.
Native Instruments Noire — the paid felt piano
If you buy one piano for Kontakt, Noire is the producer’s answer. It is a handpicked, custom-intonated Yamaha CFX nine-foot concert grand, sampled by Galaxy Instruments in Saal 3 of Berlin’s Funkhaus and voiced after pianist Nils Frahm’s signature sound — which is to say it is slightly darker and rounder than a typical sampled grand, the tonal territory that flatters modern, intimate, cinematic-leaning music rather than fighting it. It ships in two distinct versions from the same instrument: a pure grand and a genuinely separate felt-dampened sample set, the latter being the soft, close, attack-reduced sound that anchors so much lo-fi, ambient and singer-songwriter production. You can shape attack, release, resonance, overtones and velocity curve on either.
The feature that earns Noire its place over a plain piano, though, is the Particles engine: an arpeggiating, evolving texture generator that listens to what you play and spins clouds of related notes around it. For straight classical playing it is the wrong tool, but for one-chord evolving beds under a vocal or a scene it is close to a guilty pleasure, turning a held chord into motion without you writing a line. Noire runs in the free Kontakt Player (version 6.0.4 or higher), so you do not need full Kontakt to use it. Pricing is sale-driven — it street-prices roughly in the hundred-dollar range and drops further in Native Instruments’ regular sales — so check the current price rather than a quoted figure. If your music wants felt-piano intimacy and a little built-in motion, this is the pick; if you want to build that felt sound from a layered patch instead, our guide to layering synths applies the same stacking logic to keys.
Heavyocity Foundations: Piano — the free cinematic grand
Foundations: Piano is the strongest free piano for cinematic and hybrid production, and it is a real instrument, not a teaser. Heavyocity deeply sampled the soft dynamics of a grand and paired it with their trademark sound-design layer — a textural, synthetic companion you can blend in under the acoustic tone — wrapped in an engine with ARP, Gate, Space and ADSR controls. The result is a piano that already leans cinematic out of the box, which is precisely what you want under a trailer-style cue, a moody intro, or an ambient bed. It is a “Powered-by-Kontakt” instrument that runs free in the Kontakt Player, with no timeout, for nothing but a free Heavyocity account. For a producer making cinematic music on a budget, this single free download covers the keys job convincingly.
The Felt Seiler – Free Edition — the intimate free upright
Where Foundations leans cinematic, the Felt Seiler Free Edition leans intimate and close — a felt-dampened upright captured with the mechanical noise and softness that make felt piano feel human rather than sampled. It is the free pick for lo-fi, bedroom-pop and singer-songwriter material where you want the piano to sound like it is in the room rather than on a stage. Between Foundations: Piano for cinematic and the Felt Seiler for intimate, a producer can cover most of the keys job for free before ever considering Noire — and that is the honest order of operations: try the free pair first, buy Noire when its felt sound and Particles engine specifically pull you.
Strings: a quick bed, not a divisi system
Strings is where the film-composer skew of the SERP hurts producers most. The default recommendations are enormous divisi systems with separate first and second violins, dozens of articulations and a learning curve to match — overkill and over-budget for someone who wants a lush, immediate string bed under a chorus. The producer’s string library is the opposite: fast, pre-mixed, designed to sound finished the moment you play a chord. These picks are chosen for that, and both run in the free Player.
Native Instruments Session Strings — the producer’s paid strings
Session Strings is the string library built for exactly the music most producers make: pop, R&B, hip-hop, dance and modern scoring rather than period-accurate orchestral realism. It comes in two sizes. Session Strings 2 is an eleven-piece ensemble with an intimate, contemporary sound; Session Strings PRO 2 doubles that to a twenty-two-piece ensemble — eight violins, six violas, four celli, four basses — with individually accessible sections, more articulations and far more mixing flexibility. Both share the features that make them so fast to write with: a Smart Chord system that voices chords for you, a Rhythm Animator that turns held notes into rhythmic patterns, and play-assistance that gets you a convincing part without programming every note.
That workflow is the whole point. Where a divisi system asks you to be an orchestrator, Session Strings lets a producer drop in a finished-sounding string part in minutes, then adjust. Both versions run in the free Kontakt Player (version 7.10 or higher), so neither needs full Kontakt. Pricing is heavily sale-driven; loyalty and sale prices on the smaller version land in the tens of dollars and the PRO version a good deal higher, so check the current price rather than trust a number. Start with Session Strings 2 if you want intimate, contemporary strings cheaply; step up to PRO 2 if you need section control and a bigger sound. Either way, if your goal is a string bed rather than a scoring system, this is the producer’s answer — and the broader field, Kontakt and otherwise, is covered in our best plugins for strings roundup, with the mixing side in how to mix strings.
Sonuscore LUX Orchestral Strings Elements — the free pure strings
If you want a free, focused strings library — just strings, no full-orchestra bundle around them — LUX Orchestral Strings Elements is the pick. It is the free, slimmed edition of Sonuscore’s paid LUX strings, drawn from the same recordings, so the core tone is the real thing rather than a token sample set. It runs in the free Kontakt Player (it needs version 7.10.9 or higher, which the current Kontakt 8 Player covers), and it gives a producer a genuinely usable lush string bed for nothing. Paired with GLADE below, which also includes strings, the free strings job is more than covered before any purchase.
A whole orchestra in one instrument
Sometimes the job is not a single section but “some orchestra, fast” — a sketching tool that gives you strings, winds, brass and color from one patch so you can rough out a cue or a cinematic intro without loading ten libraries. This is the category where the free tier has become genuinely astonishing, and where a producer can often skip paid entirely.
Audio Imperia GLADE — the free flagship
If you install one free Kontakt library this year, make it GLADE. Released in November 2025, it bundles nineteen orchestral and world instruments — high and low strings, ensemble woodwinds, voices, harps, tuned percussion, and a set of world flutes including duduk, fujara, shakuhachi, ney and pan pipes — into a single Player-licensed instrument with a four-layer Designer interface and more than eighty curated presets. The Designer lets you stack up to four sources and blend them with macros into instant evolving textures, which is what makes GLADE feel less like a sample pack and more like a writing tool: you can sketch a finished-sounding cinematic bed in a minute, then drop into the individual instrument patches when you want precision.
What is remarkable is the quality. The vocal soloists are true legato and genuinely beautiful rather than the thin afterthought free voices usually are; the woodwinds and world flutes are expressive enough to carry a melody; and the whole thing is mixed to sit in a track out of the box. It runs in the free Kontakt Player (version 7.10.9 or higher) and installs through Native Access. It ships in two downloads from one free license: a roughly four-gigabyte GLADE with two ready mixes, and a twelve-and-a-half-gigabyte GLADE Studio that adds four separate mic positions for serious mixing control. For keys-adjacent textures, strings, woodwinds, world color and quick orchestral sketches, GLADE alone covers an enormous amount of ground — which is why it anchors the free side of nearly every job in this guide.
ProjectSAM The Free Orchestra — cinematic color, free
ProjectSAM’s The Free Orchestra is the other free orchestra worth installing, and it pulls from serious pedigree: more than twenty Player-licensed patches drawn from ProjectSAM’s commercial Symphobia and Orchestral Essentials libraries, now spanning two volumes that install together. You get orchestral staccatos, heroic horns, luminous choirs, dystopian drones, sul-tasto strings, legato brass and film-noir color patches — the cinematic-color end of the orchestra rather than a play-every-note system. The one honest caveat is attack time: most of these patches have slow, cinematic attacks built for sustained, evolving writing, which is glorious for pads and transitions and a poor fit for tight staccato arpeggios or rhythmic parts. Know that going in and it is a superb free source of instant cinematic atmosphere.
Sonuscore Orchestra Elements — the free ensemble engine
Orchestra Elements is Sonuscore’s free taste of its Ensemble Engine approach: a one-instrument orchestra where you trigger evolving, arpeggiated ensemble phrases rather than playing every section by hand. For a producer who wants motion — a pulsing orchestral ostinato under an electronic track, say — it is a fast way to get an orchestra moving without orchestration knowledge, and it runs free in the Player. It is narrower than GLADE but complements it well: GLADE for sketched-out beds and solo color, Orchestra Elements for animated ensemble motion.
Kontakt Factory Selection 2 — the official free starter
Do not overlook the obvious one. Kontakt Factory Selection 2 is Native Instruments’ own free library, the official freebie that ships as the starting point for the Player, and it covers a broad, dependable spread of usable sounds across categories — the sensible “install this first” pick. It is licensed, never times out, and gives a producer a baseline toolkit before adding anything specialized. Think of it as the foundation under GLADE: between the two, a brand-new Kontakt Player user has real, finished-sounding instruments across most jobs for nothing.
Drums and percussion: a kit that sounds like a record
Kontakt is unexpectedly strong for drums, and the job here splits two ways: realistic acoustic kits for songs that need live drums, and the sampled-percussion and trailer-hit world that overlaps with sound design. For a producer, the acoustic-kit job is the one a dedicated library solves best.
Native Instruments Studio Drummer — the paid acoustic kit
Studio Drummer is the producer’s realistic-drums answer in Kontakt: three top-tier acoustic kits, detailed mixing options, and — the part that makes it productive rather than just nice-sounding — a library of more than three thousand three hundred authentic grooves you can audition and drop in by genre and feel. That groove library is what lets someone who is not a drummer build a convincing, dynamic acoustic drum track quickly, then mix it with the onboard tools. It runs in the free Kontakt Player (version 5 or higher), so once again you do not need full Kontakt. If your tracks need live-sounding drums rather than programmed electronic kits, this is the pick; for the broader drum-tool field, including drum machines and beat-oriented instruments, see our best drum machine plugins roundup.
Battery and the NI drum ecosystem
For sampled, electronic and hybrid drums rather than acoustic kits, Native Instruments’ Battery sits alongside Kontakt as the dedicated drum sampler — a cell-based instrument for building kits from your own and stock samples, strong for hip-hop, trap and electronic production. It is a separate plugin rather than a Kontakt library, but it lives in the same ecosystem and Komplete bundles it, so it is worth knowing as the companion to Studio Drummer; our Battery 5 review covers whether it earns a place in your kit. Between Studio Drummer for acoustic and Battery for sampled, the drums job is well served without leaving the NI world.
Textures and hybrid scoring: motion under everything
Textures are the secret weapon of modern production — the evolving pads, risers, pulses and impacts that sit under a lo-fi loop, a cinematic intro or an electronic breakdown and make it feel produced rather than programmed. This is a genuine job, and Kontakt has the standout tool for it.
Heavyocity Gravity 2 — the paid texture and scoring toolkit
Gravity 2 is the producer’s texture-and-hybrid-scoring answer, and it is enormous: more than a thousand sound sources and over nine gigabytes of content, organized into rhythmic pedals, evolving textures, signature stings, transitions and impacts. The sources themselves are the appeal — analog synths, modular gear, processed cello and koto and zither, and the “junkyard metals” Heavyocity is known for — run through their signature processing into sounds that blur the line between music and sound design. Three engines tailor the workflow: a Designer for layering up to three sources into bespoke patches, and Menu and Menu XL for instant, keyboard-mapped access to dozens of ready sounds. The 144 tempo-synced rhythmic-pedal loops are a highlight for anyone building motion under a track.
For a producer, Gravity 2 is the tool you reach for when a track needs a bed of evolving low rumble, a riser into a drop, a cinematic impact on a downbeat, or a pulsing rhythmic texture nobody else has — the production layer that the synth-and-sample world does not cover as deeply. It is “Powered-by-Kontakt” and runs in the free Kontakt Player (version 7.6 or higher), so it does not need the full version. Pricing is sale-driven and lands in the few-hundred-dollar range at list, dropping in sales, so check the current price. If textures and hybrid scoring are part of your sound, this is the upgrade; for the free version of the same job, GLADE’s Designer and Foundations: Piano’s texture layer both produce usable beds, and the wider field is covered in our best plugins for sound design and best plugins for lo-fi roundups.
Guitar and bass: real instruments, free
The job people assume Kontakt cannot do well for free is fretted instruments, and that assumption is out of date. Impact Soundworks’ Shreddage line includes free editions that are genuinely playable virtual instruments rather than demos.
Impact Soundworks Shreddage 3 Stratus FREE and Precision FREE
Shreddage 3 Stratus FREE is a free electric-guitar instrument and Precision FREE is its bass counterpart, and the important fact is that both have been fully Kontakt Player-compatible since 2023 — they are licensed, so they run free in the Player without the timeout. They are the closest thing to a proper modern virtual electric guitar and bass you can get for nothing, with real articulations and a playable, sample-based core rather than a thin teaser. For a producer who needs a credible electric guitar or bass part inside a beat — a palm-muted line, a clean arpeggio, a bass groove — without learning a guitar or hiring a player, this free pair covers the job. It is a reminder of the broader theme of this guide: the free tier of Kontakt, when you know which libraries are licensed, is strong enough to finish real records.
Is Komplete worth it versus buying libraries separately?
This is the question that hangs over every NI pick above, because several of them — Noire, Session Strings, Studio Drummer, Battery — are bundled into Native Instruments’ Komplete suites, which also include the full Kontakt 8 itself. So should you buy the libraries you want one by one, or buy the bundle?
The honest math depends on how many of the bundled instruments you actually want and whether you need the full version of Kontakt. Komplete is sold in tiers — Select, Standard, Ultimate and Collector’s Edition — and as of 2026 Native Instruments has moved to year-based naming, so the current generation is Komplete 26, with the Kontakt-8-included Standard tier and above bundling a large library of these instruments plus effects. Native Instruments runs reliable half-off sales twice a year, around a Summer of Sound in June and Black Friday in late November, and the bundles routinely drop to a fraction of list during those windows. The practical rule: if you want the full version of Kontakt and three or more of the bundled instruments, a sale-priced Komplete Standard usually beats buying them separately and throws in the full sampler. If you want one or two specific libraries and are happy in the free Player, buy those libraries individually on sale and skip the bundle. Our Komplete review works through the tiers in detail; the short version is that the bundle is a value play for people building a broad toolkit, not for someone who needs a single piano.
And the deeper point, true throughout this guide: you may not need to spend anything yet. Between Kontakt Factory Selection 2, GLADE, ProjectSAM’s The Free Orchestra, Foundations: Piano, the Felt Seiler, LUX Elements and the Shreddage free pair — all licensed, all running free in the Player — a producer has finished-sounding keys, strings, an orchestra, cinematic textures, guitar and bass without buying a library or the full version of Kontakt. Buy the paid picks when a specific job they own — Noire’s felt sound, Session Strings’ producer-grade strings, Studio Drummer’s grooves, Gravity 2’s textures — becomes something you reach for constantly. Until then, the free Player and the free libraries are not a compromise; they are the whole instrument cabinet.
The bottom line: what to install first
If you are starting from nothing, install the free Kontakt Player, then Kontakt Factory Selection 2 and Audio Imperia GLADE — that combination alone covers keys-adjacent textures, strings, woodwinds, world color and quick orchestral sketches, and neither will ever time out. Add Foundations: Piano and the Felt Seiler for keys, LUX Elements for pure strings, ProjectSAM’s The Free Orchestra for cinematic color, and the Shreddage 3 free pair for guitar and bass, and you have a complete free Kontakt rig.
When you are ready to spend, buy by job, not by hype: Noire for a felt piano with built-in motion, Session Strings (2 or PRO 2) for fast producer-grade strings, Studio Drummer for realistic acoustic kits, and Gravity 2 for textures and hybrid scoring — all of which, crucially, run in the free Player, so you never need the $299 full Kontakt unless you want to build your own instruments. The best Kontakt library, in the end, is the one that runs in the Kontakt you own and does the job in front of you — and for most producers, half of that cabinet is already free.
Put it to work — three drills
- Install the free Kontakt Player through Native Access, then install Audio Imperia GLADE (free, Player-licensed) and load it. Note that it plays indefinitely with no red “demo” text and no timer.
- Now find any free “Kontakt library” whose download page says it requires the full retail version of Kontakt, and load its raw NKI through Kontakt’s Files tab. Watch for the red “demo” text next to the instrument name.
- Let it run and confirm the fifteen-minute timeout behavior, then reload to reset it. You have now seen the trap firsthand — and you will recognize the store-page tell every time from now on.
- Using only free, Player-licensed libraries, lay a string bed with GLADE or LUX Elements, a felt piano line with Foundations: Piano or the Felt Seiler, and a world-flute melody from GLADE.
- Add motion with an Orchestra Elements ensemble pattern or a GLADE Designer texture, and a bass line from Shreddage 3 Precision FREE.
- Bounce it and judge honestly whether anything in the arrangement actually needed a paid library. For most producers, on most cues, the answer is no — which is the point.
- List the specific Kontakt instruments you actually reach for — not the ones you admire, the ones you use — and mark which are bundled in Komplete and which you would buy standalone.
- Price the standalone picks at current sale prices, then price a sale-period Komplete Standard that includes the full Kontakt 8 plus those instruments.
- Decide on the rule from this guide: bundle wins if you want full Kontakt plus three or more bundled instruments; standalone wins for one or two libraries with the free Player. Commit to the cheaper path and ignore the next sale email that does not change the math.