Kontakt question

[Matt_Quinn]

Just started delving into Kontakt (the free 'player', not the paid version). I bought 2 instruments, Vintage Organs and Session horns. The organs are fantastic, but I was disappointed to find out there is no way to access the actual samples in the horn collection, and the way they are set up to play in Kontakt is very clumsy IMO, making it almost unusable for my purposes. I'd like to get to the raw samples and rearrange them as instrument racks in Live to make them more useful, but have not figured out a way to do so. Does anyone know if I buy the paid version of Kontakt, will it let me access those raw samples?

Thanks in advance.

[102455]

This is the Ableton forum, for discussion of Live.

Kontakt is a Native Instruments product. You need to ask on the NI forum....

[piZMo]

No. Kontakt libraries use its own compression format .nkx

[beats me]

Just started delving into Kontakt (the free 'player', not the paid version). I bought 2 instruments, Vintage Organs and Session horns. The organs are fantastic, but I was disappointed to find out there is no way to access the actual samples in the horn collection, and the way they are set up to play in Kontakt is very clumsy IMO, making it almost unusable for my purposes. I'd like to get to the raw samples and rearrange them as instrument racks in Live to make them more useful, but have not figured out a way to do so. Does anyone know if I buy the paid version of Kontakt, will it let me access those raw samples?

Thanks in advance.

Did you check out any tutorials on Session Horns? I’m not familiar with that library (yet) but I know for some of their libraries there are sub windows where you can design and manipulate the phrases to make them more of your own. If you are just load up the presets you might think you are just stuck with whatever phrases are playing by default.

[Matt_Quinn]

This is the Ableton forum, for discussion of Live.

Kontakt is a Native Instruments product. You need to ask on the NI forum....

Actually, if you read the description of the forum, it says this:

"Music and Audio Production
Discussion of music production, audio, equipment and any related topics, either with or without Ableton Live"


...but thanks for your valuable input.

Did you check out any tutorials on Session Horns? I’m not familiar with that library (yet) but I know for some of their libraries there are sub windows where you can design and manipulate the phrases to make them more of your own. If you are just load up the presets you might think you are just stuck with whatever phrases are playing by default.

Yeah, read the documentation top to bottom, nothing helpful unfortunately. The only reason I thought I might be able to get to the actual samples if I get the full version of Kontakt is because of the way they list the differences on this page:

http://www.native-instruments.com/en/pr ... s-kontakt/

There are 3 things on the Kontakt side that are not on the Player side that might be relevant:

-Extensive Instrument Editing
-Wave Editor with tools for intuitive looping, slicing and editing
-Integrated Sample Editor


So I'm not sure if any of those would allow me to re-arrange the samples in a more useful order. It's just annoying because the sounds are great, but they layout of the instrument is very bad, IMO. For example, in the main patch, you have a choice of 2 ways to play. In Polyphonic mode, playing a note sounds that note from all 4 instruments. This is crazy, I can't imagine a situation where I would want a horn section ALL playing the same note instead of playing a chord. Sure, you might double ONE note, but not 4. So that mode is pretty useless. The 2nd mode is 'Smart Split', which, sadly, is not very smart. It sort of works - if you play a 4 note chord, it will indeed split the 4 notes among the section appropriately, but it causes all kinds of weird voice jumping if you don't play from one 4 note chord to the next, with no single notes between. Like let's say you want the sax to play a melody while the other instruments periodically reinforce it with stabs...can't do it. As soon as you remove your fingers from the keys for the stabs, any melody notes you play will sound ALL the instruments. It's really odd. The simplest way of setting it up IMO (and what I'm trying to do myself) would be to just assign an octave to each instrument, so you have the 4 instruments split over 4 key zones. Ableton's Woodwind pack has a patch that works like this, and it's infinitely more usable and realistic. And I can do it myself with an instrument rack, but I can't get at the stupid samples inside the Kontakt instrument. Frustrating.

[beats me]

That doesn’t sound good, and certainly not like a library that could realistically replace a horn section. I should be getting Komplete Ultimate in the next couple weeks. So I guess I’ll be finding out for myself.

[102455]

thanks for your valuable input.

No problem. Makes much more sense to ask about Kontakt on the N.I. forum. Glad to have helped.

[beats me]

thanks for your valuable input.

No problem. Makes much more sense to ask about Kontakt on the N.I. forum. Glad to have helped.

Did you miss the part where he wants to put the samples into Live instrument racks? Does that pass your appropriate standards?

[Matt_Quinn]

I mean, look at the front page of this forum - there's dozens of non-Ableton products being discussed all the time. You could spend all day telling people to go to other sites.

The NI forum also has a whopping 5 pages of information on Kontakt. I did, in fact, search there before coming here. I did find this over there, but doesn't really answer my question:

http://www.native-instruments.com/forum ... -a-library


I've tried emailing NI directly for an answer as well, no response yet.

[fishmonkey]

how easy it is to export samples depends on the level of copy protection on the big sample conglomeration files that Kontakt uses. the NI libraries use nkx files which have some protection on them. there is always a way of course...

however, the full version of Kontakt has really extensive editing and scripting capabilities (which is why so many top-notch sample libraries use it as a platform)...