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Old 06-25-2014, 11:53 AM   #1
memyselfandus
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Default Why is Kontakt such a pain in the ass to set up with multiple instruments?

Why is Kontakt such a pain in the ass to set up with multiple instruments? Why can't we just have one track for Kontakt and have just one track for each instrument?
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Old 06-25-2014, 11:59 AM   #2
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Originally Posted by memyselfandus View Post
Why is Kontakt such a pain...
You should write it to NI.
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Old 06-25-2014, 12:20 PM   #3
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I don't understand what the difficulty is here, so I will guess.

If you insert Kontakt into a track and then go to the options dialog in the fx window, you will be presented with the option to build multi track routing and multiple midi tracks routed to Kontakt. Once that is done, create another blank track and name it (Kontakt Folder works for me). Select all of your newly created Kontakt tracks (click top one, shift click bottom one). Drag all into "Kontakt Folder".

You can also move tracks around how you like. Sometimes I move each of the midi tracks adjacent to their corresponding audio track. Sometimes it is more convenient to have midi track blocked separately from audio tracks. Depends on what I want to do.

I have templates for both styles. I would post a template for you but I think the best way to learn is to do.

Come back in a few days after you have tried this for yourself, and maybe one of us will post a template for you.

p.s. Which version of Kontakt?
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Old 06-25-2014, 12:26 PM   #4
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Originally Posted by memyselfandus View Post
Why is Kontakt such a pain in the ass to set up with multiple instruments? Why can't we just have one track for Kontakt and have just one track for each instrument?
I understand where you come from.
However you can do just as you say, one track, one instance of Kontakt and one instrument. No problem
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Old 06-25-2014, 12:28 PM   #5
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Mere seconds after my last post I saw your other thread asking for a Kontakt template. Then I re-read your post here and realized that Kontakt is the source of your woes. And you are indeed right. Much the same way that a template requires a little effort to setup for the Reaper part of things, you must do the same in Kontakt. There are many videos on youtube that can explain this in better detail than I can in this post. They also provide visual help. Once you set it all up, then everything is such a breeze.
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Old 06-25-2014, 12:55 PM   #6
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I'm using lots of Kontakt instances on separate tracks and wondering what advantage there'd be to learning how to consolidate, if anyone could explain briefly, please?
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Old 06-25-2014, 02:41 PM   #7
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I'm using lots of Kontakt instances on separate tracks and wondering what advantage there'd be to learning how to consolidate, if anyone could explain briefly, please?
Mainly cpu and ram conservation. The more instances of Kontakt the more it taxes the system. If you have a stout enough system or don't need 95 tracks then for the most part it's irrelevant. There is a little more to it but I'm not a Kontakt expert by any means... See ED, DarkStar, etc..
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Old 06-25-2014, 02:54 PM   #8
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you can have one per each and my tests show it don't use much more cpu
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Old 06-25-2014, 02:57 PM   #9
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Doc Brown View Post
Mainly cpu and ram conservation. The more instances of Kontakt the more it taxes the system. If you have a stout enough system or don't need 95 tracks then for the most part it's irrelevant. There is a little more to it but I'm not a Kontakt expert by any means... See ED, DarkStar, etc..
Thanks. I haven't tested myself, but I'd think the RAM used by multiple instances of Kontakt would be small compared by the RAM used by the samples.

Quote:
Originally Posted by hopi View Post
you can have one per each and my tests show it don't use much more cpu
Thanks for that info.
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Old 06-25-2014, 05:42 PM   #10
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Quote:
Originally Posted by hopi View Post
you can have one per each and my tests show it don't use much more cpu
I'm getting about double the usage here. And this is only with 5 instruments.. Imagine dozens. People who are getting the Same usage.. Feel free to upload licecap pics.


Single instance of Kontakt with five instruments.



Five instances (tracks) of Kontakt with one instrument each.

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Old 06-25-2014, 05:44 PM   #11
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Will update with smaller pics later when I'm not on my phone.
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Old 06-25-2014, 05:57 PM   #12
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Lol. . Yeah, those huge pics are a bummer on my iPad.

If you plan to use one Kontakt instance per sound/track,
you probably also want to go into the Kontakt mixer and turn
off all of it's multi outputs but two, not have 32 unused mixer
channel in ever instance.

Or if it's one already setup that way, use that one.
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Old 06-25-2014, 06:01 PM   #13
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memyselfandus and Lawrence, thanks for the additional info. My bottleneck is generally RAM, so I'm already accustomed to freezing tracks I'm not working on, but I'll keep reading these threads in case I decide to consolidate later.
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Old 06-25-2014, 06:10 PM   #14
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Quote:
Originally Posted by memyselfandus View Post
I'm getting about double the usage here. And this is only with 5 instruments.. Imagine dozens. People who are getting the Same usage.. Feel free to upload licecap pics.
What CPU are you running on?

Even on my prehistoric Phenom 1045T a single instance of Kontakt with one instrument loaded only uses about 0.16%.
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Old 06-25-2014, 06:25 PM   #15
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Doc Brown View Post
Mainly cpu and ram conservation. The more instances of Kontakt the more it taxes the system.
In terms of CPU usage, I actually find that it's Kontakt multis that are the problem. Arming a MIDI track that's routed to a Kontakt instance that has lots of other instruments playing always used to result in pops and clicks for me.

Meanwhile, discrete instances per instrument just works perfectly. The overall CPU usage might be higher, but the actual business of recording MIDI parts seems to be handled far better by discrete instances.

Edit: Just my experience... Not a statement of fact.

Last edited by Ozymandias; 06-26-2014 at 02:14 AM.
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Old 06-25-2014, 07:57 PM   #16
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Originally Posted by G-Sun View Post
I understand where you come from.
However you can do just as you say, one track, one instance of Kontakt and one instrument. No problem
Thats what I do now. MUCH easier for automation purposes....
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Old 06-25-2014, 09:00 PM   #17
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Ozymandias View Post
In terms of CPU usage, I actually find that it's Kontakt multis that are the problem. Arming a MIDI track that's routed to a Kontakt instance that has lots of other instruments playing always used to result in pops and clicks for me.

Meanwhile, discrete instances per instrument just works perfectly. The overall CPU usage might be higher, but the actual business of recording MIDI parts seems to be handled far better by discrete instances.
I'm sorry Ozymandias but a statement like this has absolutely no foundation and can only lead to incorrect confusion an misinformation.

There are so may possible things that can influence something like this that it's simply not a statement of fact.


I don't blame any you folks if you like the seemingnlly easy way of using Kontakt one instance at a time. It's easy to see why you do that.

However, don't be surprised if the day comes along that you suddenly realize, hummm, Maybe I can do more with Kontakt then I thought possible with one instrument.

Or if you really get serious and learn how to script for it.

Go ahead an use one instance per midi track. there is absolutely nothing wrong with that, But please don't contribute to the wrong perceptions and misconceptions that multi-Instruments contribute to pops and clicks without the exact details to back it up.
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Old 06-26-2014, 02:10 AM   #18
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Sorry Tod, I didn't mean to present that as fact, hence the ambiguity (I find, for me, seems to, etc.) but I should've made that clearer.
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Old 06-26-2014, 02:35 AM   #19
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Quote:
Originally Posted by memyselfandus View Post

Single instance of Kontakt with five instruments.
[images]
lol
print screen + paint.net
Eg. Upload to stash https://stash.reaper.fm/
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Old 06-26-2014, 02:38 AM   #20
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Do you have multicore processing enabled in Kontakt? That should ease up the CPU load when more instruments is loaded per instance.
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Old 06-26-2014, 02:39 AM   #21
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Quote:
Originally Posted by hopi View Post
you can have one per each and my tests show it don't use much more cpu
What's your findings?
Cpu, ram
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Old 06-26-2014, 06:31 AM   #22
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Quote:
Originally Posted by G-Sun View Post
What's your findings?
Cpu, ram
it really doesn't matter what I find does it? Just try it on your own system and watch the results in the reaper usage monitor .... your own results is what will matter to you, eh?
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Old 06-26-2014, 06:53 AM   #23
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Quote:
Originally Posted by G-Sun View Post
What's your findings?
Cpu, ram
I did a quick little test by loading 8 instances of Kontakt into an empty Reaper project and got 431 Meg of ram and almost no CPU usage.

You cold probably double it for 16 instances which would be equivalent to a full Kontakt with 16 instruments. With the old XP machines that could be significant but for the newer computers it's not much worry. :}
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Old 06-26-2014, 12:11 PM   #24
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Speaking of Reaper's "Build multichannel routing for output" with Kontakt.

Does anyone know why Reaper gets the names wrong when it creates the tracks?

In this example the names are correct until you get to the 7th instrument which (if you look at Reaper's routing), is mis-labeled Feedback Oddity but routed correctly to Serenghostly.
The problem continues as you go down the list from there with some labels missing and others just mis-labeled.
https://i.imgur.com/YoNYFy0.png

I haven't seen issues with Superior Drummer 2, SampleTank or UVI DigiSyn...
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Old 06-26-2014, 04:04 PM   #25
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Originally Posted by lachrimae View Post
Speaking of Reaper's "Build multichannel routing for output" with Kontakt.

Does anyone know why Reaper gets the names wrong when it creates the tracks?

In this example the names are correct until you get to the 7th instrument which (if you look at Reaper's routing), is mis-labeled Feedback Oddity but routed correctly to Serenghostly.
The problem continues as you go down the list from there with some labels missing and others just mis-labeled.
https://i.imgur.com/YoNYFy0.png

I haven't seen issues with Superior Drummer 2, SampleTank or UVI DigiSyn...
Hi lachrimae, I don't think this has anything to do with Reaper. Kontakt has some very strange ways of dealing with the outputs, not only how it names them but how it displays those names.

With Kontact I think you have to be very precise in how you name the ouputs.

In all honesty lachrimae, based on your pictures, I don't know how Reaper is coming up with the names as they're shown, but the way it looks, it's all Kontakt's fault.

A whole lot depends on how you assign the outputs in Kontakt and quite frankly, I think this is the part that everybody is missing.

To put it bluntly, Kontakt has a very screwy way of creating and assigning it's outputs.

There are some very easy ways to create the outputs in Kontakt so that they show up the way that you want them to. However, you'll probably have to create your own names in Reaper on the individual Reaper tracks for them.

Maybe hopi and I or some of the other Kontakt users (ED, DS, etc.) can get together and come come up with some of he missing parts to better understand and hopi can add them to his tutorial.

In the mean time you can take a look at this YouTube video I put together a while back that shows how to set up your Kontakt outputs. However, it doesn't really explain what to do with them afterwords. However, this is one of the first steps in trully getting Reaper and Konakt to work together.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHkxPPbTKME

Last edited by Tod; 06-26-2014 at 04:14 PM.
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Old 06-26-2014, 07:01 PM   #26
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Hi Tod,

Thanks for the links. Perhaps this issue only pertains to my system?

When I create the tracks manually as you do in your video I get similar results.
Note that odd numbered tracks are skipped from 7 onwards. The even numbered tracks are then placed sequentially which leaves the <error> tracks at the bottom.
https://i.imgur.com/w17dobe.png

Reaper is unable to see Kontakt's odd numbered track names (7+) in the routing matrix as well:
https://i.imgur.com/2b0pnFq.png

I'd be curious to know if anyone else has this issue when using "Build multichannel routing".
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Old 06-26-2014, 08:00 PM   #27
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Quote:
Originally Posted by lachrimae View Post
Hi Tod,

Thanks for the links. Perhaps this issue only pertains to my system?

When I create the tracks manually as you do in your video I get similar results.
Note that odd numbered tracks are skipped from 7 onwards. The even numbered tracks are then placed sequentially which leaves the <error> tracks at the bottom.
https://i.imgur.com/w17dobe.png

Reaper is unable to see Kontakt's odd numbered track names (7+) in the routing matrix as well:
https://i.imgur.com/2b0pnFq.png

I'd be curious to know if anyone else has this issue when using "Build multichannel routing".
But it looks like Konakt got it right, right? And Reaper got it wrong?

Heh heh, it's hard to tell. There are a few things to try, after you've changed the outputs in Kontakt, save them as the default. When you do this with K5 I rcommend that you do this with Kontakt (64) and create 32 out puts.

Make sure you select a total 32 outputs and 2 outputs for the number of channels pet output. Also be sure and delete all the old outputs. Then save it under a common sense name and save it as default. Before you try make track templates out of then close out Reaper and come back in.

If you do it this way, you should be able to make Track Templates of 4, 8, 12, 16, 24, and 32 outputs.

Give it a try and let us know if it works.

Tod
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Old 06-26-2014, 08:57 PM   #28
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Thanks a million everyone. Great discussion.
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