Kontakt Player impractical to use BS Instruments Multitimbrally

Ive tried loading several instances of my old BANDSTAND GM libraries into Kontakt Player 4. It gets ridiculous once you have 4 or more instrument banks ( each with 127 GM insruments ) in the multi - ie 4 channels of General MIDI.

NI stated that now BANDSTAND is discontinued we just need to load our BS banks into Kontakt, but this is just plain impractical. It takes forever to load.

Having to load even a multi with just 8 channels of BANDSTAND takes forever.

What we need is something a little more clever whereby we only have to load ONE 127 instrument bank, and then have these able to be played by any MIDI channel.

Obviously there needs to be some new code, so that if several MIDI channels request the same MIDI patch then Kontakt can manage this intelligently ( for example one might be playing the same note on the same insrument on two different channels. Currently this is dealt with simply by having duplicate instruments but this is slow ).


In many circumstances in GM there will be different instruments being played in each of the 32 MIDI channels in a MIDI file, so the issue of contention for GM instruments doesnt occur often.

Please NI - for those of us who use a combination of GM sounds and others, please make our life easier. Multitimbrality in Kontakt just aint where it ought to be at the moment.

 

Bandstand and Kontakt player

Hi

moved to a new intel imac and cant now use my trusted Bandstand.
Downloaded the freebe kontact player 4, but can't figure out how to load BSs library into it!
Probably going to be a waste of time anyway but would love to know how you do this

robbzz11 U.K.

 

Well I've only had partial success. One can certainly use any SINGLE instrument fine. But trying to use KONTAKT4 as a true MULTITIMBRAL 16 MULTI-CHANNEL outputs is nigh on impossible, t least on a 4 GB MB Pro.

1) The First thing is to create a 128 instrument bank FROM Scratch, using the original BANDSTAND instruments and save this bank. This needs to be done because using the GM bank provided with the BS library is buggy and crashes, so better to start off with the latest file BANK file format. Make sure you put the instruments at the gorrect MG midi patch positions. Then do the same for a separate 127 patch GM Drum bank.

2) Now you can create a NEW MULTI. To do this you need to drag an instance of the instrument bank for each output channel you need. Also drag a single instance of the DRUM bank and assign this to channel 10. ( In the REAL GM file world there is NO guarantee that the drum part will be on channel 10, it could be on other channels or on more than one channel. BANDSTAND handles this and other GM stuff perfectly of course. )

Make sure you give each bank a unique MIDI channel. If you want true MULTI-CHANNEL outputs from your MULTI ( for example for use in a sequencer ) then you need to create enough dedicated outputs ( st1, st2, st3 etc ) to hold thenr of channels. then assign each bank to a seperate output channel. ( Typically just asign the bank with MIDI channel 1 to outputs 3,4, bank2 to outputs 4,5 etc ).



Now heres where the trouble starts.

Firstly you need 16 banks. each holding 127 instruments. This is a huge memory hog. Now you can use them all in PURGED mode initially and just load instruments manually as needed after the program change command is sent for each channel. Trouble is Kontak seems to NOT automatically load the samples when a patch change gets received. Its erratic and usually i end up having to use the "UPDATE SAMPLE POOL" every time a program change has been sent from the sequencer ( or BIAB for example ). this is obviously not ideal.

Of course one can load up the multi in NON-PURGED mode, where ALL the instruments get loaded up into memory. But doing this for all 16 multitimbral banks. Uses up tons of memory. And using the MEMORY SERVER doesnt help.

This is an extremely inefficient way of getting some form of Mutltitimbrality out of Kontakt.

for example with 16 banks loaded up, the memory useage for K4 rises to nearly 2 GB and thats WITH the actual samples being held not in Kontakt4 but in the seperate MEMORY SERVER!.

It almost brings my 4GB MacBook Pro grinding to a halt!.

Something just isnt quite right.

 

There is a much simpler way to use Bandstand multitimbrally in Kontakt 4.

Simply install the "Bandstand 1.0.2 Quickload preset" mentioned in the sticky above to your Bandstand preset folder and load it in Kontakt.

Sometimes there seem to be stability issues regarding midi files with lots of program changes but besides that this solution works like a charm for me.