Kore Users: What Are Your Plans for K8?

Twice this week I almost bought the Komplete 8 Ultimate upgrade from Audiomidi. They offer a $50 gift certificate for pre-orders. I've given this a lot of thought and I believe that K8U is the only real possibility for me because a simple K7 to K8 upgrade doesn't offer nearly enough that I don't already have, not even at $200.

But both times I reholstered my payment trigger finger because I still get the nagging feeling that Native Instruments has not done ANYTHING to alleviate our concerns about formatting and presets, and they have not done anything to assure us that K8 or K8U will not break our existing Kore installations and browser databases.

I actually am excited about K8U because I get more in it than the stuff that's a repeat and/or stuff that I already have. But my excitement is diminished because it seems that Keir is still on holiday about the Kore concerns that we have.

I'll repeat, it's been several weeks now and getting this information is just taking too long. I'm calling upon our "Community Man" to go bang some heads and get the info we need so that some of us can take advantage of pre-order offers. I know it's Saturday as I write this, but I often want to make my purchase decisons on the weekend. I'm ready to buy, so please get some movement on this issue! :angry:

Also, to my fellow Kore users, what say you? Are you satisfied that it's safe enough to proceed with K8 U?

By the way, I already know that K8 is very "Maschine Centric" and yes, I do have Maschine already. Please note that Maschine is NOT my concern for this thread; I'm quite certain that there will be no troubles with Maschine and K8U.

Hence, I want to limit this conversation to KORE USERS and to the possibility of K8 breaking KORE. Or news from Keir about breaking heads.

Come on, Native. Make it happen so we can make up our minds and proceed accordingly! Further delays will just be more stressful, cost us more money, and result in further degraded public relations.

 

Keir is indeed on holiday - until the latter half of next week- but he is concerned about your issues.

when Keir gets back from holiday, i am sure he will push for some more info, i know that i will

and how can Kore Users help you, they don't know.

maybe you need to clarify exactly what you mean by K8 breaking Kore.

please be specific about what you mean, what are your worst nightmares?

sowari

 

the "basic" upgrade is an insult to k7 owners who have some of the sound packs... and offers not much...

they should have been on point with their bug fixes.. and I'm not paying for their "mess" ups or because they were spending their time working on other things and neglecting their paying customers..

do I want to pay for a hard drive for ultimate.. nope..

so I had a choice of NI's new amp.. or IK's version of the same amp.. the other day..

simple, IK got my money

why would I want to use an amp thats dependent on GR after them pulling this stunt with kore. it might suddenly stop working in GR 2 years down the line.. sod that.

NI only understand when users spend their money elsewhere like more, that's apparent...

I've had rubbish service / unprofessional service for them.

kontakt maybe industry standard pretty much now as samplers go, but it doesn't give them the license to take the "mick" .

 

Hi Sowari _

I think you have fully understood the concerns of Bif _
It's about the new format adopted by Native renews in the format. KSD and understandably so.

 

@BIF, one more thing.

afaik, Komplete 8 is not available until September 1st. so a purchase now is a pre-order.

@corbo-billy, i know Kore users are concerned about the new format and ksds... but i would like BIF to clarify, what he is afraid of if he installed Komplete 8 and what that would do to Kore.

sowari

 

well 2 things need to be noted. Kontakt 5, and GR 5 will not break kore compatibility, thats for sure. Also, if you look at the majority of "new" content, it focuses primarily on those 2 items.

Any issues that exist with the other content would apply whether you went for K8 or stayed with existing content - thats my take on it anyway. We do need further details to be explained, but, at the present time from the information received, I don't think anything is going to fail and be lost forever with migration to maschine format, just a bit of a change in workflow. I know others will shoot me down at this point

 

Well, let's see how much "pushing" is done. It sure seems to take an awful long time to get any useful information from Native Instruments.

They don't "know" only because NI hasn't made much attempt to get back to them. But I submit to you that the users DO know how they feel and what they think because they are going through the same decision points as I am. I also believe that some of them have thought this through extensively already, and have maybe spent considerably more time thinking this through than Native has spent trying to communicate with us.

With the effort that some end-users have made in the areas of database organization and patch creation, it seems to me that several Kore users here may have a better understanding on how Kore works than apparently anybody at NI is willing to admit that they themselves know!

So Kore users can help me by offering their GUT FEELINGS and their OPINIONS. It's more communication than NI has offered to this point.

Good God, what have we been talking about here since K8 was announced? There are at least a half-dozen threads on this line of thinking. With all due respect, I'm totally worried that you seemingly have no idea what we're talking about here.

Yes, that is correct, thank you! He SHOULD have understood, because my concerns are the same as what's already been written about, and quite extensively too. We have still not gotten any answers, only promises for answers.

Duh.

Yes, of course it is technically a "pre-order." But to make a pre-order, one must go through the "shopping cart and payment process". So it's a damned order from the customer's perspective. Sheesh, I can't believe I'm letting you get me bogged down in semantic minutae.

Corbo-Billy clarified already, as do a number of other threads in this forum. I'm gonna put my foot down now and say that I refuse to let this thread get bogged down in microscopic detail. This thread is not going to be a detailed list of my concerns. Let's just say that I'll stipulate to the concerns voiced in other threads.

Here's a refocus point:

I am asking my fellow KORE forum members what issues they are personally considering here and how it weighs on their personal process for decison making regarding Komplete 8 or Komplete 8 Ultimate.

I'm asking them if they're worried about Kore breaking (if you can't be bothered to look at a few other threads in this forum, then define "breaking" in whatever way makes you feel good), or if they have some sort of loose plan for proceeding with or without K8.

Really, it's NOT that hard of a question: "What do you think at this point in time?"

Thank you; that's very helpful and it is PRECISELY along the lines of what I'm seeking for this thread.

I highlighted the part in blue. That may be the most helpful (and most relieving) sentiment that I've read since the Kore death certificate was signed in early June. Thank you for that.

In case I haven't made the question painfully clear yet: How do YOU feel about K8 (or more importantly to me) K8U and YOUR chances of still being to get good use out of your Kore?

I'm looking for a "level of confidence" from those Kore users who have actually given some thought to this.

Opinions welcome. I understand that without facts from NI (shame on you), it's all merely conjecture right now. So I won't be mad if somebody ends up being wrong.

Thank you.

 

My opinion is this, I'm staying put right where I am. I have Kore 2 + Komplete 7. It works and has more sounds than I may ever fully discover. I only play live so I have more than enough sounds. I've just switched to Win 7 64 bit and expect Kore 64 eventually to happen.

My hesitation with Komplete 8 come from Kore being discontinued rather suddenly making me reassess my situation. Since I also have Omnisphere and absolutely love it, I'll be more likely to just support that platform for now.

 

Thank you for offering your thoughts. Yes, we do have more sounds in K7 than we might ever discover in a lifetime of exploration.

I too have Omnisphere and yes, it's excellent (as are Trilian and Stylus RMX, also from Spectrasonics).

I'm courious. How do you use Omnisphere when you play live? Do you use it with Kore in any way? As far as I know, Omnisphere only works inside a host such as Cubase or Sonar, but I'd be interested in anything that you know that I don't...

 

I run two instances of Omni in Kore 2. My list of plugs is;
Kontakt
FM8
Absynth
VB3
Omni (1)
Omni (2)
Battery

Above most plugs I use Midi Filter, Midi Transformer and Program Change modules.

The first instance of Omni is set up in "live mode". I use the Program Change module to select my sound. The second instance is set up in "Mixer Mode". That allows 8 sounds to be available at once. I can select them by using the Midi Filter and Midi Transformer.

Since you only have access to 8 sounds per instance, I may consider adding a third instance!

I also recently got an iPad and have the Omni TR App. I would like to incorporate that into the live setup so I can make more real time changes to Omni as I play.

Seems like science fiction! (or magic)

 

Aaaah, Kore is the host! D'oh! That completely slipped my mind...

I prefer the Android OS I think, mostly because it can do Flash. About a week ago my brother and I each tried to look at the same website with our smartphones. We tend to have little races for stuff like that to see who's phone/network is faster at any given time. Anyway, he has an iPhone and I have a Droid-X. He couldn't see the site because it used flash. Point for me!

So I wish the Omni TR were available for Android. I'd use my Droid. It's not a tablet or pad but it's got a huge screen.

But then again, iOS has a lot of music possibilities and there are a lot of music apps available for iPad.

 

and i am asking you again.

what are your worse nightmares regarding running Kore if you buy Komplete 8?

the reason i am asking this is that there is going to be a beta test for the Kore update.

so, during the beta testing phase: what should beta testers who happen to have Komplete 8 installed be looking out for when they are using Kore?

so instead of gut reactions lets some decent bullets points going. this might also help NI with their Knowledge Base pages.

sowari

 

The key one for me is, we know not to manually overwrite the internal engines already. However what I would like to know is what would happen if you loaded the K8 version of say Massive in Kore (using it as a "third party" type plugin), and made a Koresound with it. If I then try and reopen it in Kore by clicking on the Koresound in the browser the normal behaviour would be for Kore to open that sound using the internal engine version of Massive but that should no longer be compatible. On the other hand, the correct new behaviour should be for that Koresound to access the external K8 version. So they should be checking to make sure that is happening consistently for a start, with single sounds and multi sounds created with the K8 versions.

 

Yes this is exactly the sort of things that beta testers should be testing!

so basically we are saying is "will the Kpmplete 8 engines behave like third party plugins when loaded into Kore in that those plugins can have settings and mappings saved as ksds."

so what other things should beta testers be looking out for?

sowari

 

I can see it being complicated by the fact that they are new completely new versions. If it was Massive 2 then it would be different. But since Kore is built to load koresounds using Massive with the internal engine - and still should be doing so for all sounds created with Massive prior to the K8 version - I'm unclear how this is going to work.

 

why would the Komplete 8 version of Massive be different to Massive 2?

sowari

 

btw if there is a problem with this there is a simple enough workaround (as I suggested before). The best thing would be to create K7 templates for Massive, Absynth and FM8 and add them to the right click menu (using the method I posted in the stickies). Then just remember to always use that version when loading them in Kore.

 

It doesn't have to be I suppose - there are 2 options, NI could just update it but still have the plugin labelled as Massive.dll and with the same plugin ID, or they could do what they do with Kontakt and make it a wholly new version ie Massive2.dll. That would be less problematic perhaps.

Actually technically it is possible to edit the VST Id (not sure about other formats) of plugins using a combination of Tobybear VSTSpy and HEX editor - I've done it myself before but not supported of course:

http://www.tobybear.de/p_other.html

 

If Massive is loaded as an external plugin, and then saved as a ksd, the ksd should be saved with the external plugin as a reference and not the internal engine. I'm pretty sure I tried this already and found it ok, but I will try it again to be sure. It can be tested by re-naming/moving the internal engines temporarily and seeing what happens

So create a ksd using the internal engine - save it
create a ksd using the external plugin - save it

Move the engines to another place. Expected result should be that the interal engine ksd fails to load but the external one loads

One could then rename the external plugin dll, and see if that causes the external ksd to fail to load ( after a kore restart)

 

Sheesh, you can't let it go and let me ask my fellow forum members a question about their opinions? Fine.

My worst nightmare is that my Koresounds get broken the moment I install K8U.

My second worst nightmare is that I end up corrupting my Koresounds by using the K8U instruments as VSTs within Kore, changing them and then saving them.

My third worst nightmare is that I end up corrupting my K8U sounds or patches by using them within Kore.

My fourth worst nightmare is that Maschine is still an unknown in all this. I have Maschine and as I've said many times, I like it. But it's still an unknown here.

My fifth worst nightmare is that Native (or maybe just Sowari) will continue to confuse the issue with Maschine sales points and will never really tell us details about 1 thru 3 above.

Finally, this business about conversion and porting and whatnot is really confusing. I have no idea what can be used where and whether or not this or that patch will be available in Kore and in Maschine and in Komplete 8's standalone or VST instruments.

Since when was it said that there would be a beta test? And will it be public or by invitation only? I seem to have missed that piece of information.

If there really is to be a beta, then we should start a beta planning thread, or better yet, Native should open a beta section in the forum so that we could begin proper planning and coordination.