Released: Kontakt 6

If NI's protection keys off of the Computers UUID, I wouldn't think replacing it's hard drive would affect that. There must be something here I'm unaware of.

 

Complex. At the very beginning, having monolith saves and embedded libraries were a good part of what made Kontakt successful over Halion, for example.

 

NI authorization has nothing to do with the system drive. The authorization is in a file residing somewheres on the system drive. I run a Mac and OSX stores various stuff in a folder called Application Support. I make weekly clone backups using Carbon Copy Cloner and I test said clone after it's made to see that everything works. One of the tests is that I can call up Kontakt 5 and open and play an instrument. When that works I know the clone is good.

Someone's probably going to say what about the system drive when I'm testing the clone - doesn't NI see the authorization on that? To put that to rest late last year when my iMac died and I got a 2012 cheesegrater (MacPro tower) I used the drive I made the clone on connected via Firewire 800 to the MacPro and started up from that. Every NI product ran just fine.

Upshot is the computer hardware has nothing to do with the authorization.

 

Yeah authorization is stored in registry in Windows, but it does have something called SYSTEMID, along with SNO, KEY, JDX, and HU. That's all authorization related. So there IS a system ID, but it doesn't take hard drives within the system as salt for system ID, it seems.

 

So . . . if I were a thief, what would prevent me from imaging my computer drive, containing all of of my licensed NI software, and selling it to someone while I continue to use the original? That person could then turn around and do the same thing. That's no protection at all. There must be something else going on here.

 

That drive would not only have to contain all your NI s/w but your entire system drive with all applications, etc. There's nothing else going on. The one thing going with the NI system is unless you provided the buyer with your NI login info they would not be able to get any updates.

 

Man, that's crazy. So, all I have to do to be able to use my current system for the rest of my life is to make a bootable disk image of it (I back my system up with CCC, as well) and install it onto another compatible computer?

All of my sound libraries are on external Thunderbolt connected SSDs. I have them backed up, but the library backups are done one library at a time as I acquire them. I don't make a disk image of one of these SSDs every time I add a new library to it. Is that a problem?

 

Well, I tried this and got a different result. Kontakt opened, but every installed library needed to be Activated. So, unless I'm missing something, this scheme won't provide independence from NI's on-line "blessing" down the road.

Just so you know, I'm using a 2012 2.6 GHz i7 quad core MacBook Pro with 16.GB of ram running 10.11.3. My Kontakt version is 5.8.1. I booted my CCC backup drive via USB 3. Slow as molasses.

 

Yes to the first paragraph. Once the sound libraries are installed there's nothing you have to do to them as such unless there's an update for them which is rare.

 

You might not have seen my previous post, but I have a second 2012 MacBook Pro and tried what you suggested. Kontakt opened, but every installed library needed to be Activated. It appears that you didn't have this problem. Why do you think that happened?

 

I honestly don't know or care. Worked on both OSX 10.10.5 and OSX 10.12.16

 

Would be nice if someone from NI could confirm whether Lightguide functionality with Komplete Kontrol hardware still requires Komplete Kontrol software in between Kontakt and the hardware as the Kontakt 6 announcement says "KONTAKT also works seamlessly with the Light Guide on KOMPLETE KONTROL S-SERIES keyboards for one-to-one visual feedback."

I know its unlikely, but that would be a real game changer if it was possible to use Kontakt and get the LIghtguide as I use VEP and Komplete Kontrol software is a real no, no with it and also very quirky when lots of instances are used.

 

KK is still required, that is unlikely to ever change, for a number of reasons.

 

I agree!

 

No new requirements posted for a minimum OSX version and October 1 is just over 2 days away.

 

Can anyone confirm if Kontakt 6 has any performance improvements over version 5? 5 is not exactly well optimized.

 

K5 is very well optimized (in fact, Kontakt is still the most CPU efficient sampler on the market), it just depends what you're doing with it. If there's a lot of timestretching going on, lots of groups going on, lots of FX going on, of course it's gonna eat some CPU. That is perfectly normal.

 

It's not CPU performance that is an issue, but the amount of Cubase performance meter that gets eaten up by Kontakt. Kontakt eats through the Cubase performance meter like it is nothing, while my CPU is barely hitting 25% and ram about 20%.

 

How may instruments are you running in K5? To spread out the cpu load you need to spread out instruments amongst multiple instances of Kontakt - it's been that way in every daw out there.

 

What Jack said.