Kontakt 5 and Pro Tools 11 / AAX

Hi, I'm planning a major upgrade to a full 64-bit system on my Mac Pro.

Is there any news as to when Kontakt 5 (and all the other NI plugins) will work in Pro Tools 11?
Thank you.

 

There have been threads about this already. There are no official news.

 

Does anyone know if the AAX update will be a free update or will NI charge us for a new plugin bundle in AAX versions? If their planning to charge for the AAX versions, then it's not worth buying the Komplete 9 bundle is it?

 

All .x.x updates are free of charge, and this is going to be such a version.

 

Well now we know why it's taking so long for AAX to get released by NI, they actually just released a new VI called Kinetic Metal. I'm hoping that they didn't devote most of their 270 employees on it. ( I know that not all of that number is actually the coding team, which just mean that the team is actually much smaller than the total number of employees, if that number is still valid today.)

 

Programmers don't do Kontakt libraries at NI - there's a separate division doing that that's completely unrelated to programmers.

 

It's kind of frustrating. It doesn't suit Native Instruments to be so far behind their competitors.

 

Bump.

 

Heck, now even Air is out with their VI's as AAX, although slightly buggy at the moment but at least they are out...... yes.. yes.. yes I know.. NI has a lot of products... but they were one of the first out when aax 32 bit came out, and now.. they are almost dead last.... The worst part for me is that I'm waiting for only one product to come out as AAX for NI (without having to rewire it). I was contemplating purchasing the K9 ultimate combined with maschine as some of my clients have been asking if I had it, but now..... hmmmmmmmmm

So let's see who in the Virtual instrument market are aax ready for pt 11.
EW
Air
Toontrack
FXpansion is getting most of their product out there
Ample sound (small series but very impressive Vi)
XLN audio
SONiVOX
Spectrasonic was in public beta (still is I think)
VEP 5
And probably more that I don't know of.

So who are the big name missing.. at the top of my head, IK multimedia, and NI. There's probably more, but those are the most known.

So as much as the coming soon from Air was really a bad tasting joke.. this waiting period for NI is also getting to be a bad tasting joke.

 

I'm stuck on the NI AAX update as well. In a couple of weeks I'll be upgrading, but I won't be able to move over to full AAX until NI update their plugins.

 

You're missing the possibilities of running NI stuff in PT 11. Least inexpensive but uses Rewire is Reaper. Next up the food chain is DDMF Metaplugin. A little further up is hosting the vst version of NI plugs in Blue Cat Audio's MB7-2 multi-band mixer - it can work in single band mode. I use it to run Kontakt 5 in PT 11. You can feed multiple MIDI streams into MB7-2 and hence on to Kontakt but you can't get multiple audio streams out. MB7-2 also works a treat with Massive, Reaktor, Absynth and FM8.

The ultimate but most expensive is VE Pro 5. Multiple MIDI streams in, multiple audio outs to PT. ON a Mac you'd run the au version of NI plugs and on a pc you'd run the vst version of NI plugs. Sorry but it won't scan/run vst's on Macs. About $270 US give or take and uses the Vienna key or a Steinberg key which are the same thing.

 

I tried rewiring the Vi (guitar rig 5) I use from NI in reaper, and vep5 and it gives me mucho latency. So it's a no go. I'm surely not going to pay forty or a hundred bucks for a plugin to be able to use an other plugin that should already be aax 64 ready by now. All my other Vi's are aax 64 bit, NI is the only one not aax 64 bit in the VI's I use. Isn't it moronic from this company to be dead last when they were firsts in the past? Don't get me wrong they do great stuff, but they are losing a lot of reputation right now due to this.

 

...or so you'd like to think.

 

I expected as much from you Dragon - you need to get out more and see what is being said about your beloved NI. I know you're a beta tester and beholden to them but still.......

MediaBCD and others are right ED and you're partially wrong. The reason I say partially is this is not the only issue NI is losing reputation but it's a biggie especially in the Pro Tools world. Heck even Waves finally got aax 64 bit support out and they said at one time they might not even do that (I know they're not ever doing aax dsp). NI is a four letter word in the PT arena.

 

PT world is not the only world out there. And it's certainly not the BIGGEST one - there are heaps of other DAWs out there and people use their NI stuff with them just fine for the most part, and when you sum all of that together, you get more users using other DAWs along with NI than number of people using PT with NI.

I very well know what's being said about NI elsewhere (of course NI isn't perfect, nobody is), I frequent other forums as well. I still don't care about any of that, really, because I always had great experience with their support even before I became a beta tester.


In any case, AAX2 will happen and it's being worked on. Could it have been handled better by NI? Perhaps. But it is how it is. Late or not, it's coming, and that's all it matters.

 

And so is Christmas and 7 figure recording contracts for all of us

 

It might not be the biggest when you factor in all the other daws combined for sure, but let's look at it this way, in the professional recording studio world, it's probably one of the biggest for NI. I don't only work from my own studio, as many others are doing regularly, and I can tell you that PT is pretty much in every studio I have been to, and again most of them having the full NI suite of VI's. If these professional studios are only a fraction of the Pro studios around the world that uses PT (albeit while also having other daw copies for the sake of compatibility with client needs), I can fairly imagine the user base NI is presently pissing off. And that is never good for the reputation of any company. Someone said earlier in this thread that the coders do not work on VI.. well I'll call that BS, because the engine of a new VI/plugins (like the one that just got out) is actually made by the coders before the samples are actually recorded, and the time they spent working on this in the last 2 years, is time that was taken away from providing costumers that paid in the near thousands, the compatibility they require out of NI. It's surely not the producer, assistant, mix engineer, and tracking engineers who are going to go around coding the additions processing options to the existing engines or new engine in c++ or what ever programing language NI uses, while they are recording the samples.

Now I'm usually a very lenient guy, and I understand that there's delays, but in this particular case knowing how much time they have had to work this out even with the last minute change in the sdk, seeing their past speed at getting compatible there's no excuses for them to be this late in the game.

And the fact that Maschine is actually PT 11 compatible at the moment, shows that they haven't really thought through their priority in which product they should have released first, being that komplete is probably the biggest seller and used product they have for music production.

 

I respect NI greatly and I don't want to come across as 'pushy' but I really need this update in the next 3-6 weeks MAX... otherwise my work will officially come to a stop. I want to start writing new music and have been holding back for an update for a couple of months now. It's time to go full 64-bit! So I really don't want to be waiting anymore after waiting for so long for my new SUPER HUGE studio upgrade.

Surely they can do it in the next 3-6 weeks?

 

I too am anxious for an AAX update. But in fairness to NI, the engine rewrite for AAX is massive, and many developers are rather late in delivering for it. This was partly why Avid chose to bundle PT10 with PT 11, to facilitate an incremental migration.

 

If you need it that quick try looking in to VE Pro 5. It will let you host any NI instruments inside PT 11 and take advantage of multiple audio outputs from Kontakt 5 into PT. Not cheap but if you need it then it might well be the solution without messing around with Rewire and Reaper.