Kontakt 3.5 to 4 library upgrade query/ confusion

hi there

am thinking of upgrading from Komplete 5 to Komplete 6, but am slightly put off by the knowledgebase article on this website that suggests that it is better to install the new library alongside the old one (thereby wasting LOADS of hard drive space on repetations of the same instruments). from what i can gather from the rather poorly worded article this is mainly because some sounds may not play back exactly the same - largely as the new and updated convolution library DOESNT include some of the older impulse responses. why they would do this is anyone's guess.

article:
http://www.native-instruments.com/k...ary+completely+include+the+KONTAKT+3+library?

it seems laughable to install a 30-40 gb sample library twice just because of this. could one not just keep hold of the convolution impulses alone and load them where applicable.

i have not used kontakt 3.5 enough yet for it to bother me if the instruments didnt sound EXACTLY the same as in the 3 library and would rather delete the old library and replace it with the new one.

anyone tried this? if so - how well do older projects load up?

i'm presuming that if an older project uses k3 on a channel it will oad up kontakt 3.5 but find the library from kontakt4 (or have they also deleted some of the instruments too? - i hope not)

i'm thinking i should maybe do this upgrade sooner rather than later so i dont get forced into a position where i HAVE to keep the old library just for compatibility issues with nearly-finished tunes. would be a right old waste of space

i wish companies would ADD to things, whilst keeping all the previous material intact (see Logic7 to 8 Space Designer issues......)

any help/ opinions welcome!

 

nkis programmed in Kontakt 4 can't be loaded into K3.5 so you will have to at least keep the old nkis if you want to play your old patches.

 

thanks for that - so what you're saying is that my old Logic projects (or at least the Kontakt 3 bits) using kontakt 3.5 instruments would NOT load up if i had deleted the K3 library as they would not read the new NKIs. does the DAW (Logic 8 in my case) actually look for and read the library NKIs themselves every time it loads up a project? - i thought it did this the first time you loaded one, then as you worked on it, it would save the currently edited state of the NKI as part of your song file (like Halion used to) and then on starting up again just looked for the samples (not the programs/ NKIs) on the hard drive. surely if the actual samples are still there on the hard drive (in the new library) the sampler would just load them up into the old K3.5 instances instead (but without the fancy new interface etc). or would it still try to look for the original NKI that was loaded up initially (this seems strange - it would also appear to suggest that any edit done to your NKI from within your DAW gets saved over the original one in the library - which would be rather worrying.....i need to test some of this stuff asap!)
i guess the only way round it (without keeping 2 copies of the entire K3 and K4 libraries on my drive - a MASSIVE waste of space) would be to open each song in turn, find the corresponding instrument within the K4 library, load it into K4 and then resave the song (presuming no massive editing had gone on)

or...open up each song and save the K3.5 sample instrument (along with its samples? or would it find them in the new K4 library?) into my Logic song folder. then open up K4 in its place and load the saved K3.5 instrument into that

we're not talking a lot of songs here .......yet

getting more and more put off this upgrade by the second

 

It's not poor design...it's a pro/con decision. If they made everything totally compatible then they would face other complications.

In your case, being that you've barely done any work with the older one, I say just upgrade to the new version if you want the latest.

 

thanks for that


choosing whether to upgrade isnt really the issue - it's what to do with the libraries/ previous songs that use k3 instances.

does anyone know any answers to any of the other queries i've raised above?

essentially - are NKIs and their samples interlinked and inseparable....or, as long as the samples are still there, shouldnt the old instruments loading up with my old songs find the same samples within the k4 library (with the plugin k3.5 itelf still on my machine, but not the library)

if nobody understands what i am on about, no worries!

 

I am also confused on these issues. What I want to know is this:

If I replace the K3.5 library with the K4 library rather than keeping both, will the songs I created in Cubase using K3.5 still load? I mean will all the instances of K3.5 automatically be replaced by K4 playing the same instruments?

I understand that some of the sounds have changed a little in K4 but I assume that most of them are essentially the same and differences are likely to be relatively subtle - I don't mind tweaking the odd mix to accommodate a small problem that might be caused by a new convolution in K4.

Alexandra.

 

No

 

Oh dear, so going from K3.5 to K4 is not at all like going from 3.0 to 3.5 then.

So, do I take it that if I want to use K4 on songs I've already created with Kontakt3.5 so that I can make use of the new options and improvements, I will have to replace each instance of K3.5 manually in Cubase?

That sounds a bit cumbersome. You'd think there would be an option to upgrade K3.5 with K4 rather than having to install K4 as a new and completely different instrument alongside K3.5.

I mean, wasn't the upgrade from 3.0 to 3.5 quite radical with huge changes to the software? I did that without having to replace each instance of K3.0 in Cubase manually. What is it about "upgrading" from 3.5 to 4 that is so different?

Alexandra.

 

K4 is an independent app, you can run 3.5 and 4 at the same time, be it standalone or as a Plug-In in a DAW. So either leave your old projects like they are or substitue K3.5 with v. 4 manually.

 

Thanks for letting me know. I wonder why they didn't just include upgrading as an option - I mean, surely you could have a little dialogue box appear during installation saying "Do you want to replace K3.5 with K.4 or install K.4 separately?" There must be loads of people who'd prefer to simply replace K3.5 and you would think it would be an easy option to implement.

 

That would have been very difficult to implement. K3 and K4 are completely separate applications. It's not as simple as offering an option to replace or operate side-by-side. They are different architectures (even though from the outside they look similar).

 

I have to agree that installing the whole library is cumbersome, especially if you are re-using the same samples. I already have the K2 & K3 Libraries installed. I had to buy a new hard drive to make room for K4. Something has to give. If the samples themselves are truly different, ok. But if there is a lot of redundancy in samples, there should be an option for upgrading vs full install.

 

I have reached a compromise that recovers most of the disk space occupied by the K3 Library that relies on the assumption that all of the samples used in the K3 Library appear unchanged in the K4 Library, and so only the "non-sample" files need to be preserved. I went to the "Z - samples" folder in each of the top-level sub-sections (e.g. Orchestral) of the K3 Library in turn and deleted every sub-folder except for the two folders "IR samples" and "Wallpaper". In K3, I then ran the "Files - Batch re-save" process on each of the top-level sub-sections in turn, selecting the given top-level sub-section in the "Browse for Folder" dialogue. K3 then checked for missing samples and (naturally) declared them all missing. I then used the "Resolve Manually - Browse for folder" option to point at the corresponding Z-samples folder in the K4 Library. K3 then progressively re-saved all of the .nkis with the new sample locations. I repeated this process for each sub-section - Band, Vintage, etc. - one-by-one.

There may be a more efficient way to do this, but this method worked for me. Nevertheless, it is tedious, and I really think that NI should have provided an option to do this automatically as part of the K4 installer. The recovered disk space is not a trivial amount, by any means.

 

Thanks Chris. I was thinking about trying this. And you're right. This should be part of the K4 installer.

 

hmm, it's all a bit fiddly isn't it. The people who program these things seem to be on the one hand quite brilliant but on the other to lack everyday common sense ;-) I strongly suspect that the Kontakt team also programmed my Panasonic DVD recorder - a real triumph of jargon over usability!

So, I won't bother with K4 for the time being. It's going to be bundled with Ethno World 5 which I want anyway so I'll wait and install it as a separate application with a whole different library.

I might then gradually change the instances of 3.5 to 4 as I work on a piece of music but I'll see how practical that seems when I have K4.

 

Do I understand correctly, if I say that the samples of K3.5 are all available in K4? And that if you agree to manually reassign the instruments of K4 to projects that used K3.5 instruments, you can rebuild everything?

 

It seems that way.

Maybe NI should release an update to K4 which takes care of the library alterations, since it seems like a process that can be messed up quite easily...

 

yeah. They really should. This whole business has completely put me off upgrading. As if you'd want to waste 34GB of hard disk space on copies of samples you already have on your hard drive. It's only the Instrument settings/ interface that has changed - not the samples themselves (as far as I can gather anyway...).

Oh....and WHY bother removing some of the convolution IRs that came with Kontakt 3?

this is the main reason given in the knowledge base for needing to install the WHOLE library again - eh? - to quote:

"Note: If you still have songs based on KONTAKT 3 and its library, we highly recommend to leave the KONTAKT 3 library installed, since some content (as some impulse responses) is not included in the KONTAKT 4 library anymore, thus making it impossible to replace existing songs totally with KONTAKT 4 and the KONTAKT 4 library."

If these IRs were removed because newer, better ones are included with Kontakt 4, why not still include the old ones under a folder called "legacy IRs" or something? SURELY it wasn't intended to save you disk space as now you need to install the WHOLE library again.

My god these tweaks to the instruments must be amazing to justify installing them twice.....

are they?

 

Absolutely ... and it's not just the disk space wastage that's at issue. The installer takes a considerable amount of time to install the duplicated samples, and you can't just leave it to get on with it, because of the need to swap the DVDs. Let's hope they come up with a more thoughtful approach by k4.5 or k5 or whatever it will be.

 

Thanks for the tip, Christopher. I installed K6 on my laptop yesterday where hard drive space was def. at a premium. I deleted the K3 samples and moved the remaining folders to my Win7 User folder as resaving was not possible in the original folder for some weird Win7 reason. After that the batch resaved worked and it really didn't take all that long to do all 6 genre folders.