Making a Slimmed-down Kontakt with selected instruments

gordon k

I've got myself a older MacBook air for doing live sets. This has a 500GB internal drive, which in theory is plenty for what will basically be a single-purpose machine.

It will be running Ableton with Komplete - and also Logic Pro 9 for some older stuff I have that uses Logic instruments.

My problem is that my current studio setup runs to about 900GB - much of which is sample libraries - and for performance reasons I don't want to stuff my Air close to its 500GB limit.

Can someone describe, or point me to, a method for setting up a slimmed-down version of Kontakt, with only the selected intruments I'm using?

For example, if there are two instruments I use from the Middle East sample pack, is there a way to just save these to my MacBook Air, without having to put on the entire 10 GB sample pack?

LostInFoundation

Ok. So you don’t want to install only the instruments you use, but also pick some presets from a bigger library without having to install the whole thing. Correct?

In this case a possible solution could be to use a sampler (if you already have Maschine software its auto sampler is very good for this, making the big part of the work automatically for you) to sample the presets you want and use them in the sampler installed on the MacBook.

The sound Will never be exactly the same, but you can achieve good results, depending on how many times you make every single note being recorded (for velocity expressiveness), the note length and the octaves range you set up (the more you increase these settings the more the samples will be accurate, but also the more the instruments will get bigger in size)

LostInFoundation

I was trying to check for you an easier way (saving in Kontakt (being it a sampler too) a preset from Middle East as a new instrument), but for NI instruments presets the option “save patch + samples” is greyed out, probably to avoid exactly this case 😏

I’ll investigate more on this later

gordon k

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/66539#Comment_66539

Thanks, this is exactly the sort of thing I'm wanting to do.

I'm sure I can't be the first person to hit this problem, so I'm guessing there may be a creative solution out there somewhere. Thing is, I don't have much experience with Kontakt yet, so even basic things have probably escaped me... 😊

stephen24

I think this is how it works.

Official Kontakt libraries - those that can be run in Kontakt Player - have their samples protected so that Kontakt - even the full version - cannot copy or modify them and the option to save the samples along with the patch is greyed out. You can modify and save instrument patches but the samples themselves must be referenced from where you installed them (nkx files accompanied by nkc files).

Kontakt can't copy these sample files but you can. You could copy selected nkx and nkc files relevant to your required instrument to your local HD, temporarily rename the original folder or files (put an x in front or something) or disconnect the HD where they are located, then try to load the instrument and direct Kontakt to the new location when it can't find the samples. Then save the new patch. If it's not clear which nkx file you need you'd have to do some detective work.

Just be very careful when renaming original files!