New NI Komplete Kontrol with third party plugin support out

[beats me]

Haven’t installed it yet, but it sounds like the third party plugin support has to be done on the developer’s end instead of the free for all of letting you roll your own. Probably for the best. I think they are being cautious and calculated with their years of experience from Kore and also complaints about competitor “control everything!” software claims. Baby steps to get it right.

As an Apple man I appreciate a walled garden with some kind of quality control between the developer and myself.

[EasyWorkflow]

Did you see the list NI just sent out in an email regarding the first round of software they are currently working on to support. I wonder why they did not include Omnisphere 2 & Trillian. Maybe they know Omnisphere 2 & Trillian are such good synths, they would lose sales if they were going to be supported. At least Akai Advance supports Komplete ultimate and Spectrasonsic's Omnisphere 2 & Trillian because Akai is not competing in software market. I have Kontrol 61 and Komplete Ultimate and have not installed the software yet because I need new studio furniture that has a bottom slide out tray for the 61 key controller.

The 25 key Advance looks like a nice option.

[login]

Did you see the list NI just sent out in an email regarding the first round of software they are currently working on to support. I wonder why they did not include Omnisphere 2 & Trillian. Maybe they know Omnisphere 2 & Trillian are such good synths, they would lose sales if they were going to be supported. At least Akai Advance supports Komplete ultimate and Spectrasonsic's Omnisphere 2 & Trillian because Akai is not competing in software market. I have Kontrol 61 and Komplete Ultimate and have not installed the software yet because I need new studio furniture that has a bottom slide out tray for the 61 key controller.

The 25 key Advance looks like a nice option.

Is on the developers side to adopt or not the NKS standard, not on NI, if developer is interested it gets in contact with NI and gets the SDK.

NI couldn't care less about what develoeprs jump on board in the long term, in fact if more do it the better for them. In time they will have a lot of them on board and people will naturally choose their controllers over akai and others (for software instruments). As far as profits: Hardware > software.

They are creating an ecosystem to dominate the future.

What I want from NI is a great number of controls in a layout that is intuitive for controlling synths. Give 32 encoders in 4 sections (oscilators, filters, enveloeps and modulation), screens and led rings.

[Myattmode]

Has anybody had any issues after installing the 1.5 update? After I updated to the new version Ableton doesn't see the Komplete Kontrol plugin anymore and sure enough the dll file is missing in my VST folder. I don't have any time until tomorrow to try and resolve this problem, but in the meantime I am quite annoyed as my current projects are useless until it is rectified

[jestermgee]

Well I stayed up till midnight to install and check it out and as a user who has test driven both an Akai Advance and the NI Komplete range I can appreciate both approaches.

The NI integration with 3rd party VSTs is "basic" as it stands (unless the plugin is NKS compatible). You can load in your VSTis and create default mappings as you would like. One of the nice things (which Push cannot do) is you can have "unlimited" pages and also shift the position of controls and even leave blank controls to help group pages properly. This is very nice. The Advance is limited here because you ONLY have 4 banks of 8 controls and personally I found that having the controls displayed on a screen to the left of the controls was not intuitive at all especially in low light where you cannot match the display with a physical control easily. The KKS was much better in terms of display feedback for the controls

If you want to browse plugins presets you need the plugin to support the NKS feature (which none I have do such as Omnisphere, Trilian, Sylenth, EastWest, Cakewalk etc etc etc) OR you need to do what I have spent 6 months doing for push and that is export each preset 1 at a time in the Kontrol software THEN tag each preset with the various tags. The issue I see here is that it would take a long time (but I can script that no worries) but Omnisphere you load 1 preset and that may have 6 tags associated with it. There is no way to automate the tag assignment easily... This is where Akai win because they have done much of this work for many of the top plugins and their browser (especially the soon-to-be released Beta I have been testing) is way easier to manage tags and exporting of presets because its built around that.

I am doing a full comparison of the 2 solutions because each has strengths and weaknesses and honestly I still believe Push does all of this better since it's almost the same amount of work to create browsable presets. I like the browser of KK from the keyboard (if you are not fussed with looking at a PC screen) but I like the database setup of the Advance more.

If KNS is not adopted by most of the big players it will really limit the browser in my opinion. I have completely overhauled my entire Live content library to make browsing of everything possible from Push (Live instruments, effects, VST presets, Loops, Libraries, Packs) and though that took months of scripting it has cleaned up my library's and made it very fast to locate the kind of sounds I am after. I'd love to see the same thing with KK but I doubt the likes of Spectrasonic will play with other guys in this area. If I really centered my work around the KK browser and integration then this would certainly start to affect my decision on a new software synth if it would integrate via KNS over a similar non-KNS option. Hopefully this new standard can also be adopted by others to also pull the data out (Such as Push) to help everyone play together. Seems like a bit of a pipe dream tho.

[jestermgee]

Has anybody had any issues after installing the 1.5 update? After I updated to the new version Ableton doesn't see the Komplete Kontrol plugin anymore and sure enough the dll file is missing in my VST folder. I don't have any time until tomorrow to try and resolve this problem, but in the meantime I am quite annoyed as my current projects are useless until it is rectified

Check in the installation path for the KK software.

I had issues when after installation the new KK software detected my 64 and 32 bit DLL paths and added both these to the software for scanning. This resulted in the 64bit version of KK not even detecting any of them including my Komplete instruments that had been working. I had to remove the 32bit paths from the software and rescan. Could be in your case the VST.dll was deleted from the installed location and re-installed to the registrys default location from when you first installed Komplete (if you happen to have moved the dlls around).

Have a look for "VSTTool" for the NI Komplete plugs that can be used to relocate al your Komplete Dlls and update the registry. That was required for me back in 1.2.

[Myattmode]

Thank you Jestermgee for your reply.

I have now resolved my problem and it is all now working. I had in effect two problems and this is what I did to rectify it.

After the v1.5 update my Komplete Kontrol.dll was missing in my 'c:/VST Plugins 64 Bit' folder and a quick search failed to find it elsewhere. I decided to re-install the Komplete Kontrol v1.0.1 opting to downgrade during the installation process. The Komplete Kontrol.dll file appeared where it should in my 'c:/VST Plugins 64 Bit' folder. Using Service Centre I then installed the Komplete Kontrol v1.5 update for which the Komplete Kontrol.dll now remained in the original folder as the previous.

Running Ableton my projects still wouldn't run with the update. This was soon rectified by both re-scanning my library - but importantly - in the 'Plug-in' tab I had to add my 'c:/VST Plugins 64 Bit' path again and re-scan that. I am pleased to say that my projects are now running correctly

I ran the NI VST Tool as a matter of course and it found no issues.

I hope this info helps any others that may have similar issues with the v1.5 update.

Cheers

[beats me]

I stand corrected on not being able to roll your own mappings for third party plugins. So I guess the only reason developers need to code this into their plugin is for library presets and tagging and possibly the light guide? What about the presets you create in third party plugins? Do they get included in the master library?

Also if you’re trying to create a performance library of presets it seems a little half-assed and cluttered to just lump that into the top tagging menu, like mixed in with drums, pads, leads, horns, etc. you’re going to have “OCT 28 PERFORMANCE”.

[jestermgee]

I stand corrected on not being able to roll your own mappings for third party plugins. So I guess the only reason developers need to code this into their plugin is for library presets and tagging and possibly the light guide? What about the presets you create in third party plugins? Do they get included in the master library?

Also if you’re trying to create a performance library of presets it seems a little half-assed and cluttered to just lump that into the top tagging menu, like mixed in with drums, pads, leads, horns, etc. you’re going to have “OCT 28 PERFORMANCE”.

Yeah I am a little disappointed with how the KK software handles presets for 3rd party plugs BUT believe that will improve in time.

Firstly, plugins do not even appear in the software browser AT ALL until you at least save 1 preset from them. They are then in the "User" library, not the main library.

Tagging sounds is painful mainly because of the limited size of the editor and if you consider Omnisphere with several thousand presets that span multiple tag categories there is no way to tag as you rip so if you have a heap of presets ripped already it's a challenge to actually locate ones you haven't tagged (there is no "untagged category for instance). This makes it difficult to script creation of presets. I have had a look and I can easily script ripping of presets to build a browsable library but the manual tag assignment throws a spanner in the works for multi-tag presets such as Omnisphere.

As you pointed out, there is also no way to easily create a "setlist" of presets to easily switch between without creating a tag. Akai really does win this part because for all the other issues I had it was a way better library system even at V1.0 and the Beta further improves this. I like how the KK software works with its own content but 3rd party is just a tack on at the moment and does not help you browse or catalogue your VST presets well at all yet. The NKS integration will be great IF more of the big players get on-board...

[EasyWorkflow]

Well I stayed up till midnight to install and check it out and as a user who has test driven both an Akai Advance and the NI Komplete range I can appreciate both approaches.

The NI integration with 3rd party VSTs is "basic" as it stands (unless the plugin is NKS compatible). You can load in your VSTis and create default mappings as you would like. One of the nice things (which Push cannot do) is you can have "unlimited" pages and also shift the position of controls and even leave blank controls to help group pages properly. This is very nice. The Advance is limited here because you ONLY have 4 banks of 8 controls and personally I found that having the controls displayed on a screen to the left of the controls was not intuitive at all especially in low light where you cannot match the display with a physical control easily. The KKS was much better in terms of display feedback for the controls

If you want to browse plugins presets you need the plugin to support the NKS feature (which none I have do such as Omnisphere, Trilian, Sylenth, EastWest, Cakewalk etc etc etc) OR you need to do what I have spent 6 months doing for push and that is export each preset 1 at a time in the Kontrol software THEN tag each preset with the various tags. The issue I see here is that it would take a long time (but I can script that no worries) but Omnisphere you load 1 preset and that may have 6 tags associated with it. There is no way to automate the tag assignment easily... This is where Akai win because they have done much of this work for many of the top plugins and their browser (especially the soon-to-be released Beta I have been testing) is way easier to manage tags and exporting of presets because its built around that.

I am doing a full comparison of the 2 solutions because each has strengths and weaknesses and honestly I still believe Push does all of this better since it's almost the same amount of work to create browsable presets. I like the browser of KK from the keyboard (if you are not fussed with looking at a PC screen) but I like the database setup of the Advance more.

If KNS is not adopted by most of the big players it will really limit the browser in my opinion. I have completely overhauled my entire Live content library to make browsing of everything possible from Push (Live instruments, effects, VST presets, Loops, Libraries, Packs) and though that took months of scripting it has cleaned up my library's and made it very fast to locate the kind of sounds I am after. I'd love to see the same thing with KK but I doubt the likes of Spectrasonic will play with other guys in this area. If I really centered my work around the KK browser and integration then this would certainly start to affect my decision on a new software synth if it would integrate via KNS over a similar non-KNS option. Hopefully this new standard can also be adopted by others to also pull the data out (Such as Push) to help everyone play together. Seems like a bit of a pipe dream tho.

Hey Jestermgee....your are most definitely a tru guru when it comes to programming MIDI and understanding how everything ties together. I am the exact opposite of you . Even if I wanted to do what you have the talents for I have ADD for half my life and a brain injury which makes focusing for long periods of time basically impossible. So I have a real quick and hopefully it;s an easy answer, I have the Kontrol 61 and Komplte Ultimate which I have not setup yet because I will be a getting a new computer withing next few weeks. My 2009 Imac is finally going on the fritz. So does it make sense forgetting money for one second which I do not have a lot of which and purchase the 25 key advance because I am a heavy user of spetrasonics software Onisphere 2, Trillian and styus RMX and know that I have Konplete Ultimate, just for the time it will save browsing the VST databases, does that seem like a good $350 investment picking up the 25 key advance? I really respect and appreciate your advice. Thanks bro,

BobbyD

[Muze]

Did you see the list NI just sent out in an email regarding the first round of software they are currently working on to support. I wonder why they did not include Omnisphere 2 & Trillian.

There is a thread for sharing user created templates for synths that are not yet NKS on the NI forum - Omnisphere 2 is there:

https://www.native-instruments.com/foru ... st-1431429

[beats me]

Forgive me if you can do this already, but if you just want to access parameters from the hardware then why force us to use the Komplete Kontrol wrapper? Especially if they are making supported developers slap some code in their plugin.

[Buleriachk]

I think the idea is that NKS becomes a standard, like VST's; if all software and hardware had a consistent standard, it would make life so much easier. I'm very impressed with the Arturia implementation.

Maybe we can talk Ableton into providing NKS support for their software devices .....
Duck! Watch out for the flying pigs....

[beats me]

I was thinking the same thing, but isn’t that what Mackie Control is/was supposed to be and yet hasn’t been really adopted beyond basic DAW functions?

But yeah, there should be a standard that is implemented by all developers and hardware manufactures. It would save a lot of grief for everybody.

[login]

I have faith in the NKS standard, but yes it's a tough battle. the VST SDK isn't even implemented in full by developers, so many plug ins preset systemsa ren't exposed to the DAW for example.

Hope NKS can bring many developers on board and helps to develop better controllers in the future.