Saving K3 patches - pros & cons of monoliths

When saving instruments in Kontakt 3, I'm presented with three options: patch only; patch + samples; and monolith.

A monolith incorporates both the patch and all the individual multisampled parts within a single file, whereas the other two options keep patch and samples separate.

On the face of it, monoliths look more convenient and easier to manage, especially if I want to move/copy patches to other places within my file directory structure.

But I wondered which option other K3 users preferred. What are the advantages and disadvantages of the different patch saving methods?

 

Good questions.

The advantage of the monolith is that the patch information and the samples it requires always stay together so you never deal with broken paths. The disadvantage is that if you have multiple NKI's that need to reference that one set of samples, a non-monolith NKI can't reference samples inside a monolith NKI, therefore, the only way to do this would be to replicate the samples in each monolith NKI, which would waste disk space.

The advantage to doing patch + samples is that multiple patches can refer to a single set of samples. The disadvantage is that if you move one without moving the other, you may break the sample paths. You can use Batch Resave to fix this, if all the sample file names are unique.

 

Thanks for that, David.

Experimenting with the alternative options, I like the way that patch+samples automatically puts the sample data in a sub-folder with the same name as the patch name. A lot of the Kontakt patches I get from various sources - usually the ones given away by music tech magazines - give the sample folders names that are only nominally related to the patch name, which makes it awkward if you're trying to re-organise where they're kept.

So what I think I'm going to do is save all my instrument patches as monoliths, which keeps the sample data with the patch, and all my Kontakt loop kits as patch+samples. That will enable me to access the audio loops contained in loop kits in their own right, should I ever need to use a loop outside of Kontakt.

 

Hi,

My experience with monoliths is that they take extremely long to load!
I use them because my host gives an error message about "too many files pro application in OSX", and using monolits solves this problem.
But loading a patch as a monolith takes at least 15 times as long as loading it with seperated samples!
-I actually expected the opposite, because Kontakt doesn't need to search for the samples in a monolith!-

I hope that NI finds a way to work around...
(BTW commercial monolith files doesn't seem to have this problem...)

 

It's interesting that you've found that, michieldeiman. It's still early days but I haven't noticed any significant difference in loading times myself. I wonder what could be causing the differential for you?