Having been looking into Kontakt recently, I found myself with a few questions. I figured anyone else new to the platform would have the same ones, so I decided to put together this very brief overview.
What is Kontakt?
Kontakt is basically a sample player. Its raw ingredients are simple sound files--things like WAVs. You could analogize it to adding little bits of recorded audio to make your own drum kits in Studio One (Which is something else that's also possible, but that's another topic.).
Kontakt has its own file formats (things like .nki, .nkm, and .nkc), but bundled with these will be samples in .wav/.aiff formats.
Kontakt vs Kontakt Player
Beyond simply playing sound files, the full Kontakt software has effects, expanded tools for editing the sounds, and the capability to create your own instruments. These features, however, are largely exclusive to the full version of the software, although sometimes a 15-minute demo period is allowed.
The Kontakt Player, on the other hand, is a free version of the full Kontakt software. Being free, it's somewhat like a demo version of the full software, although it's still quite powerful.
It's also important to note that Kontakt instruments come in two varieties, and their usability varies between Kontakt and the Kontakt Player. Instruments in the correct file formats (.nki, .nkm) that are not licensed by Native Instruments are playable in the full Kontakt software, but not in the Player. The other format, Kontakt Libraries, come in an .nkc file format, are licensed by Native Instruments with an accompanying serial code, and are usable in either Kontakt or Kontakt Player.
The above is a rough overview; for further details, please do see Native Instruments' comparison chart (KONTAKT 6 PLAYER VS. KONTAKT 6). See also Garrick Wareham's awesome article Everything You Need To Know About Kontakt.
Usage
Here is a great video that introduces what Kontakt is and how it works: How To Use Kontakt (beginner tutorial)
Making Kontakt Appear in Your DAW
You may have to follow @uncreepy's advice for adding Vocaloid 5 to Studio One 3 in order to get Kontakt Player to show up in Studio One/your DAW of choice. To find where your VST instruments got installed, open Native Access and click the person silhouette in the upper-right corner. A dropdown will appear; click Preferences. On the File Locations tab, you'll see two entries: "VST 64 location" and "VST 32 location." That is the address you should put into your DAW to tell it where your Kontakt VST is installed; choose the version of the VST (32 or 64-bit) that is the same as your computer's operating system.
Adding Instruments
The process for adding instruments varies somewhat depending on what kind of instruments they are:
Kontakt is often regarded as a plugin/program that uses a lot of computer resources. Probably for that reason, after dropping Kontakt into the song project in your DAW, you can see that it allows you to host multiple instruments inside the new single instance of Kontakt. In order to make each Kontakt instrument show up as an independent track in your DAW so that you can write MIDI notes to them independently/apply independent effects, you need to use output and MIDI channels. This is much more efficient than dropping in multiple instances of Kontakt. Here is a tutorial about how to do this in Studio One; other DAWs should behave somewhat similarly.
If your Kontakt instruments load slowly, running "batch resave" on the instrument may improve its performance. Full details are in the links below (and reading them is very highly recommended, as they go through some of the things to watch out for when doing batch resave to prevent causing issues with your instruments; having a backup is always recommended, too), but it basically seems to refresh/resave the links in the instrument so that the samples don't have to be re-found every time you load the instrument.
Your mileage may vary--the difference seems to be most dramatic if the instrument was created on a Mac but you're using Windows, because some kind of gotcha between the two makes the instrument load more slowly on the Windows machine.
Here are the links I mentioned:
Description of steps (from Soundiron.com)
Description of gotchas to watch out for (from vi-control.net)
If batch resaving doesn't improve your load time, you may want to try temporarily deactivating your anti-virus software--if it's scanning the files in the library as they're being loaded, that could impact the load time, too (mentioned in the vi-control.net link).
Moving a Native Instruments Product to Another Location on Your Computer
Moving a Kontakt instrument to a new location on your hard drive can make the instrument stop working inside Kontakt. These instructions will help keep things working if you need to reorganize your instruments: Moving a Native Instruments Product to Another Location on Your Computer
Creating Kontakt Instruments
This video covers the entire process of creating your own basic Kontakt instruments from your own recorded WAV sample files. Note that only the full version of Kontakt can create/use instruments created this way.
The same person also makes other videos regarding Kontakt, like this one about making samples loop.
What is Kontakt?
Kontakt is basically a sample player. Its raw ingredients are simple sound files--things like WAVs. You could analogize it to adding little bits of recorded audio to make your own drum kits in Studio One (Which is something else that's also possible, but that's another topic.).
Kontakt has its own file formats (things like .nki, .nkm, and .nkc), but bundled with these will be samples in .wav/.aiff formats.
Kontakt vs Kontakt Player
Beyond simply playing sound files, the full Kontakt software has effects, expanded tools for editing the sounds, and the capability to create your own instruments. These features, however, are largely exclusive to the full version of the software, although sometimes a 15-minute demo period is allowed.
The Kontakt Player, on the other hand, is a free version of the full Kontakt software. Being free, it's somewhat like a demo version of the full software, although it's still quite powerful.
It's also important to note that Kontakt instruments come in two varieties, and their usability varies between Kontakt and the Kontakt Player. Instruments in the correct file formats (.nki, .nkm) that are not licensed by Native Instruments are playable in the full Kontakt software, but not in the Player. The other format, Kontakt Libraries, come in an .nkc file format, are licensed by Native Instruments with an accompanying serial code, and are usable in either Kontakt or Kontakt Player.
The above is a rough overview; for further details, please do see Native Instruments' comparison chart (KONTAKT 6 PLAYER VS. KONTAKT 6). See also Garrick Wareham's awesome article Everything You Need To Know About Kontakt.
Usage
Here is a great video that introduces what Kontakt is and how it works: How To Use Kontakt (beginner tutorial)
Making Kontakt Appear in Your DAW
You may have to follow @uncreepy's advice for adding Vocaloid 5 to Studio One 3 in order to get Kontakt Player to show up in Studio One/your DAW of choice. To find where your VST instruments got installed, open Native Access and click the person silhouette in the upper-right corner. A dropdown will appear; click Preferences. On the File Locations tab, you'll see two entries: "VST 64 location" and "VST 32 location." That is the address you should put into your DAW to tell it where your Kontakt VST is installed; choose the version of the VST (32 or 64-bit) that is the same as your computer's operating system.
Adding Instruments
The process for adding instruments varies somewhat depending on what kind of instruments they are:
- Native Instruments-licensed library that You Purchased/Downloaded from a Third Party
If you have a Native Instruments-licensed library on your hard drive that you purchased/downloaded from a third party, you will need to add it in to Native Access to make it show up in Kontakt. To do so, open Native Access, click Add a Serial, and enter the serial number that you should have received when you downloaded/purchased the library. Then, follow any instructions that may appear. In my case, I had to click "Browse Not Installed," click "Install" next to my library, and then locate the files on my hard drive. See Reinstalling a KOMPLETE Bundle When the KONTAKT Libraries Are Already Installed on a Separate Hard Drive.- Third-Party libraries that are "Powered by Kontakt" also behave largely as above, although if they don't have a serial number, it won't be possible to add them to the library browser in Kontakt/Kontakt Player. They can, however, be organized with the Quick-Load Catalog view; please see Setting Up a Third Party KONTAKT Library.
- Native Instruments-Licensed Library Purchased from Native Instruments
If you've purchased a Native Instruments-licensed library from Native Instruments, the new library should appear in the Not Installed tab in Native Access. Simply find it there and click the Install button. See Setting Up a Native Instruments KONTAKT Library.
- Kontakt Files
Kontakt Files are accessed by navigating to them through Kontakt's Files tab and dragging/dropping an instrument (.nki) file into the workspace. Please see How to load Kontakt Files.- Note: Kontakt files (as opposed to officially-licensed Kontakt libraries) can only be used freely in the full, paid version of Kontakt. Kontakt Player can only load them in demo mode.
Kontakt is often regarded as a plugin/program that uses a lot of computer resources. Probably for that reason, after dropping Kontakt into the song project in your DAW, you can see that it allows you to host multiple instruments inside the new single instance of Kontakt. In order to make each Kontakt instrument show up as an independent track in your DAW so that you can write MIDI notes to them independently/apply independent effects, you need to use output and MIDI channels. This is much more efficient than dropping in multiple instances of Kontakt. Here is a tutorial about how to do this in Studio One; other DAWs should behave somewhat similarly.
- Note: Effects will need to be applied on the new bus channels. If they are dropped onto the tracks themselves, the effects will still be applied to all of the Kontakt instruments.
- Note: When setting up the new channels in Kontakt's Output view, beware of the different kinds of outputs. If you followed the above video, Kontakt will be perfectly happy to create new stereo channels while you're assigning to the Kt. Aux. channels. Once you start trying to assign to the Kt. Unassigned channels, the process will work the same, but Studio One (as well as Cubase, it seems) will create 2 mono buses in your Mixer rather than 1 stereo bus. For further details, you can see this issue being discussed in this thread on KVRAudio, which is also where the main premise for the below solution for this issue came from.
It is possible to overcome this by changing Kontakt's default Output configuration--basically, by setting up a big bank of stereo channels to use and saving that as Kontakt's default so you can use them in your current/future projects. For the most part, you do this by following the instructions in the video, but keeping the following notes in mind:- When you start having to assign to the Kt. Unassigned channels, remember that they will come in pairs that represent the 2 mono halves of a stereo channel (i.e., Kt. Unassigned 1 and Kt. Unassigned 2 will be mapped to a single stereo channel). So as you're making new stereo channels, you'll want to start your assignments on odd numbers of Kt. Unassigned (i.e., Kt. Unassigned 1, Kt. Unassigned 3, Kt. Unassigned 5, etc.).
- Don't bother renaming the channels at this point, since you're making a general setup to be used in future projects. You should be able to rename the channels during each project.
- When you're creating the last stereo channel that you want to create (I created my channels one by one, because I ran into an issue for some reason when trying to create them all at once. Your mileage may vary.), check the box that says "Make this your default configuration." You want that option enabled so that your new setup gets saved. When you click Ok to create your last stereo channel, you should get a popup that says your configuration was saved successfully.
- After setting up your channels, you want to remove Kontakt from your song and re-add it. (Yes, if you've been working, this is a colossal PITA. Fortunately, you should only have to do this when you want to change the output setup, i.e. add/remove stereo channels. So make sure you add plenty of stereo channels so you don't have to do this again :) . Also fortunately, at least in Studio One, you can remove an instrument without removing the MIDI notes, so you're not losing everything. Any ADSR/reverb/other tweaks you've made within Kontakt while you were working, though, you'll have to redo. *sigh*) I'd recommend removing Kontakt, closing/reopening your DAW, and then re-adding Kontakt.
- With Kontakt re-added, you should be able to create bus channels in your DAW's Mix view so that each Kontakt instrument has its own stereo channel. When you click "Kontakt" and see the dropdown of available channels, you should see that the list of channels reflects the stereo channels you made. Within Kontakt, these same channels will also be available to route your instruments to.
- Beware also that some multi-instruments (it sounds like user-created ones in Kontakt) save Kontakt's Output configuration within themselves, so you may need to update those, too.
If your Kontakt instruments load slowly, running "batch resave" on the instrument may improve its performance. Full details are in the links below (and reading them is very highly recommended, as they go through some of the things to watch out for when doing batch resave to prevent causing issues with your instruments; having a backup is always recommended, too), but it basically seems to refresh/resave the links in the instrument so that the samples don't have to be re-found every time you load the instrument.
Your mileage may vary--the difference seems to be most dramatic if the instrument was created on a Mac but you're using Windows, because some kind of gotcha between the two makes the instrument load more slowly on the Windows machine.
Here are the links I mentioned:
Description of steps (from Soundiron.com)
Basically boils down to these (reproduced/paraphrased from Soundiron.com link):
- Click the Save (Floppy Disk) icon at the top of Kontakt, then choose "Batch Resave"
- Click "Yes" on the warning message
- In the popup, choose the library folder
- Note: You WILL want to do this for each library individually. If you were to do this for, say, a folder with all of your Kontakt libraries in it, you might have issues if the files in two libraries shared names. Info on this is at the vi-control.net link below, as well as info about other potential issues. You might also have a similar issue if a single library has files named identically in two different folders.
- Click "Ok"
- If you get a "samples missing" warning, click "Browse for Folder" and select the folder with the samples in it in order to fix the missing samples.
If batch resaving doesn't improve your load time, you may want to try temporarily deactivating your anti-virus software--if it's scanning the files in the library as they're being loaded, that could impact the load time, too (mentioned in the vi-control.net link).
Moving a Native Instruments Product to Another Location on Your Computer
Moving a Kontakt instrument to a new location on your hard drive can make the instrument stop working inside Kontakt. These instructions will help keep things working if you need to reorganize your instruments: Moving a Native Instruments Product to Another Location on Your Computer
Creating Kontakt Instruments
This video covers the entire process of creating your own basic Kontakt instruments from your own recorded WAV sample files. Note that only the full version of Kontakt can create/use instruments created this way.
The same person also makes other videos regarding Kontakt, like this one about making samples loop.