Kontakt 5.4.1 update -- be VERY VERY careful

[mhschmieder]

I really don't have time for this right now, so can't confirm, so please be warned and think hard before applying the just-released Kontakt 5.4.1 update.

First off, they dropped support for 10.7, if that affects anyone.

Secondly, at vi-control, many are saying that some libraries (especially ones that are no longer maintained by their vendors, such as the older Tarilonte libraries) now revert to demo mode. This may not be fixable; either visit that thread to see if it's resolved, or hold off on the update.

Thirdly, apparently many libraries have to be re-added.

Finally, and most damaging, it appears that Sample Modeling's The Trumpet is now receiving a constant pitch bend value and has to be pre-de-tuned to compensate.

My apologies if it isn't OK to post links to other forums, but a lot of people could be messed up by this update and lose $$$ if it affects tight projects, so I am erring in favor of accidentally breaking the rules for now:

http://www.vi-control.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=40800

It does appear the Sample Modeling folks, at least, are on this and trying to suss it out.

[BKK-OZ]

The last update cost me about a day of time in cleaning up the mess - NI need to sort this sh!t out.

[mhschmieder]

This has certainly made me less likely to update to Komplete Ultimate 10 when it is released in October.

I feel like I'm going to have to take a wait and see attitude with everything from NI from now on, after the way this year has gone with Kontakt libraries that stop working.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Thanks for the warning.

[mhschmieder]

All of my Kontakt Player Libraries loaded fine.

I don't have time to set up a MIDI keyboard and/or launch a product to run some legacy MIDI through The Trumpet (you can't play it in standalone test mode, without sending it CC11 first).

I'm only recording live musicians at the moment, so all my MIDI projects are on hold.

I'll try to suss out The Trumpet tomorrow though, to see if it's a general issue. It hasn't been updated in awhile, but this is different from the problem with The Trombone back in FEB.

[kwiz]

I won't be touching that update...
Thanks for the warning.

[jloeb]

I ran the update about an hour before I read this thread goddamnit.
Time to start assessing the damage.

Not sure what to say about the situation overall. It's definitely inconvenient but the more customization is possible, the more incompatibilities are possible. Unless it's a supremely popular library I imagine the devs are going to have to try to work with NI and/or take up the slack themselves. Otherwise we are SOL.

Awesome that we have a virtual instrumen/sampler that is complex enough to be a "development platform" but… Behold the downside.

[billf]

Thank you for the heads up!

[David Polich]

Thanks, Mark. Won't be updating to this version. It probably just addresses some issues with
the latest version of Windows and the Mac O.S. anyway. I can't think of any "must-have" Kontakt libraries I lack at the moment, either.

The SampleModeling issues seem to continue, sadly. I feel bad for them.

[mhschmieder]

Hey, it's even worse than I feared.

I woke up with a song this morning, quickly wrote it down in full manuscript, and am now trying to very quickly do a rough mock-up before returning to my live instrument mixing sessions.

I should be so lucky!

I'll just pick different guide track sounds for now, to avoid Kontakt.

No time to debug, but its output is not being recorded by DP!

It produces output when you trigger it live or via a MIDI track, but it doesn't like being routed to internal buses anymore. Only the direct audio output still works.

I have eight tracks in my new song so far, and the ONLY ones that fail are the ones that use Kontakt libraries, so I seriously doubt this is user error, but I will now triple-check for the umpteenth time to see if something is wrong with the routing JUST for those tracks (unlikely).

[mhschmieder]

This may not be a Kontakt problem, as I'm still having this issue after changing from Passion Flute (Orange Tree Samples) to Sample Modeling Flute (SWAM engine).

Other tracks fail as well, but one thing at a time.

The VI's that are recording so far are Play and Pianoteq.

It matters not whether I am bussing to mono or stereo.

This might be unrelated to the Kontakt update if SWAM is having the issue as well.

I'll try MachFive now, as I think it may still run as an MAS vs. AU plug-in.

Update: Neither Vienna Instruments Pro nor MachFive V3 are routing output successfully through the internal busses. Very strange! Same bus as the one that works for Play and Pianoteq.

[mhschmieder]

I'm too confused to know what's up at this point, as my computer has been behaving weirdly ever since the mavericks update the other day.

I don't think the failure of the bus routing is a Kontakt issue per se, as I still get the problem if I route either the MIDI of the tracks that aren't recording to Play or Pianoteq, or the output of either of those to the audio tracks that are paired with the MIDI tracks above after using "working" MIDI tracks (previously sent to Pianoteq or Play) to the audio tracks that aren't recording.

I have compared settings of all of those tracks over and over again and there is no difference whatsoever in any setting or status. Furthermore, the failed tracks are the first four in project order, whereas the successful tracks are the final four.

I set my buffer size high after having it low earlier. No difference.

Safari has been acting up ever since the Mavericks update and the follow-on 7.1 update for Safari. I am starting to suspect Mavericks 10.9.5 more and more. When I restart Safari, the tab shows this website and URL but it is blank as is the URL field at the top of the browser. This happens consistently, but never ever happened even once until the updates a few days ago.

I'll look again at project settings in DP though, as this gets more mysterious the deeper I dig and the more I try to isolate the problem the further I get from understanding or solving it.

[mhschmieder]

Whew; it's a DP issue, not a Mavericks issue and probably not a Kontakt issue (though I'll verify that again after I get some more tracks recorded, as by now I had deleted all the Kontakt instances).

I've been having troubles with bundles since the last DP update. It is sometimes reassigning their channels or splitting them to multiple channels with redundant references to the bus name. I've had this happen on several projects, but it was more obvious when it was named audio channels as I am sort of alert to that since opening an old project may contain audio assignments from an earlier hardware interface that I upgraded from.

For named busses, it's not as obvious when a redundancy creeps in -- especially if it's on a clean/new-ish project. But this particular project is my repository for unassigned compositions and it's getting quite large (28+), so this may explain the bundles confusion at DP's end, as there are other quirks that only show up once you have a multi-chunk project.

Anyway, this was a false alarm regarding Kontakt, most likely, but it just coincidentally happened when I opened a project with MIDI and VI's vs. just audio, for the first time since several upgrades that were done over the last several days. I've only been recording and mixing audio lately, and dipped back into MIDI today thinking it would save time on a quick mockup.

[bayswater]

Did this get sorted out? I was setting up some Kontakt templates today and noticed that making changes to the way output channels within Kontakt can send DP or Logic, or any DAW into a tailspin. Messed up Bundles and lost sound are apparent results.

If output configurations are managed as recommended by NI, should we consider this to be a safe update now?

[stubbsonic]

I hope I'm not muddying the waters, but I experienced the silenced internal audio bus issue months ago-- my work-around involved bringing the chunks into a new container project which fixed it. Perhaps that is related to the bundles issue? I was using Kontakt at the time, but I'm not sure if it was related to the busses getting broken.