Action Strings, Action Strikes and Emotive Strings Presets

I own Action Strings, Action Strikes and Emotive Strings, all share a common method for both selecting themes and phrases. They have a selection of preset groupings of phrases with names.

While you can swap any slots out or create a blank set of slots and fill them from the available phrases, you cannot save this as your own preset with a name.

Currently you can use a snapshot but this does not save a new name.

Yes you can save it inside your DAW project, but this makes reusing patches tricky. Its also useful to save groupings as that way they can be reused, its also useful as inspiration makers.

As all these products use the same system, surely there is a way to script a way to save patches? I have seen other products such as Output Signal make use of .nka files inside the interface and this product does seem to use .nka for its presets but I cannot see a way to either save to this folder or get it to read a renamed duplicate.

 

You can save it as a new NKI, name it however you want.

 

Yes I know I could do that, however its not an ideal way to deal with this type of instrument. As a scripting guru, how do other developers manage to make use of .nka files within the instrument interface?

Frommy understanding this is the format used for snapshots.

 

Nope, snapshots are more akin to NKIs than NKAs.

 

Okay so I have it wrong, however browsing the Emotive Strings folder I can see a Snapshots folder and these contain the presets the interface uses. I also see the same folder in Output Signal and you can select them directly inside the instrument interface.

Is there a way to add this functionality into other instruments simply?

 

Snapshots can be used with any instrument really. Read the manual addendum from Kontakt 5.4.0 update onwards (when snapshots were implemented).

And yes, you are definitely able to save your own phrase selections to a snapshot and name it however you want, but you gotta use Kontakt 5.4.0 or higher.

 

I have just reacquainted myself with snapshots and can see how they would work.

Having looked at the interface for the above mentioned Action Strings etc I think it would not be possible to update the GUI as it looks like its created from graphics to me, whereas the Output one uses a list menu that appears to use live text.

Its not the end of the world but due to this the interface will show one theme, but the snapshot will say another, which will get confusing.

 

Exactly. The Emotive Strings interface has predefined names for each individual phrase - and uses graphics to show the name of it there. You cannot modify this at all. You can only name your snapshot however you want (which I think is perfectly enough).

 

Okay having played around with the snapshot feature a bit more, I can see once you choose a new phrase for one of the slots the name changes to "custom" so thats better than I thought as at least I won't see the old name for a custom snapshot.

Emotive Strings seems to come with the presets in a snapshot folder that reside inside the instrument folder. Action Strings and Action Strikes do not. All are Kontakt Player libraries, yet when I click on instrument options in the tab after clicking the spanner it says "no factory snapshots available for unencoded instruments". Is this because they were scripted before snapshots came in?

Also is there a way to have the user preset directory inside the instrument folder rather than in the user content folder? I have mine on an external drive which I use between two machines, which would make managing the snapshots tricky if left in the default path.

PS Thanks for your replies so far

 

Yep.

Not possible AFAIK.

 

I now have this same issue and must say I'm extremely disappointed with these limitations.

The problem with snapshots is that (it seems) they must always be loaded manually. That is, they are not saved within the DAW. So, after opening a project, one must then manually visit EVERY instrument of this type (Action Strikes, Action Strings, Emotive Strings, etc.) and then access and select the required snapshot. Even after saving a "snapshot," NI couldn't make it so that the snapshot is recallable when our DAWs open a project containing one of these instruments? (Welcome to the 90s, folks!)

If I'm incorrect about that, please, please correct me. I'd be elated to be wrong.

That said, I'd appreciate some clarification on saving a new NKI. How does one do that? The term "NKI" appears nowhere in Kontakt's menus for saving. The options mentioned are "Instrument," "instrument bank," and "multi." Which of those is an NKI?

(I realize this probably seems more-than-obvious to you. But to those of use who are NOT Kontakt experts, it's not. As such, I'd greatly appreciate your using the terminology that's actually used in the instrument, which will make your intent much clearer.)

Once a new NKI has been saved, is it safe to assume that once we've loaded the new NKI and saved that version of the project in our DAWs, that it will load that way from then on? That's my goal, here: It's preposterous to have to manually load patches, each time a project is opened.

Thanks!

 

Nope, that is not true. When I select a snapshot for a certain instrument and save my DAW project, it reloads that setup perfectly, just as it was when I saved it.

Also, "instrument" is NKI, "multi" is NKM, "instrument bank" is NKB.

 

Thanks. Although that's encouraging, it's not what I'm not seeing, so far, but I'll investigate further.

Thanks! Very helpful.