Can't seem to get samples in an instrument I've made to use relative paths

jonoboyo94 · 2023-10-21T13:31:23+00:00

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Hi!

I've made an instrument but I'm having a hard time getting the samples to use relative paths. Everything works fine until I move the instrument (and all samples etc.) to a new location (or a new PC), at which point Kontakt complains that none of the samples could be found, with the absolute paths to the old locations being displayed.

I've tried the following to get this to work, but nothing seems to make a difference:

Resave the nki with "absolute path" unchecked, this seems to have no effect
Batch re-save the instrument - this just seems broken in my version of Kontakt (6.7.1), as soon as I click "yes" on the "proceed anyway" dialog that appears, my instrument immediately unloads and nothing happens, unless I've misunderstood the purpose of this
Resave the nki with "patch + samples" - in this case, the samples do seem to use relative paths but my sample folder structure is lost, which is an issue because I have my samples grouped in subfolders by mic positions and each folder has samples with the same name. So even though all my samples seem to get copied to the new location, the folder structure is completely flattened so most of the samples just overwrite previous ones and I end up with half of them missing
I've also tried running a lua script in Creator Tools to overwrite all the zone file paths with explicit relative paths, but as soon as I "push" changes back to Kontakt, Creator Tools just reverts all the paths back to displaying absolute paths and there is no effect

At this point I'm very confused and thinking there's either some quirk which isn't well-documented, or a bug in Kontakt 6.7.1. I contacted Native Instruments support and they suggested asking here for help.

Something I've yet to try is manually flattening my samples into one huge folder and renaming them to have completely unique names, but I thought I'd ask here first before committing to renaming 500+ files and adjusting all my region names in Reaper so the samples still export correctly. All I can think is that Kontakt doesn't support samples with the same names even when they are separated into subfolders like so:

Instrument/
    instrument.nki
    Samples/
        Mics/
            Front/
                sample_0.wav
                sample_1.wav
                ...
            Back/
                sample_0.wav
                sample_1.wav
                ...

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jonoboyo94

I've now tried putting all samples into one big folder and giving them unique names and can confirm it has fixed the problem. So for future reference, Kontakt appears to not understand subfolders within the samples folder if you want your samples to use relative paths!

All comments

Paule

I don't know how it works in Kontakt but in Reaktor the sample folder must be in the same path than the instrument or ensemble.

jonoboyo94

Thanks. My samples folder is in the same folder as my instrument nki. My folder structure is laid out as I have mentioned above with an instrument.nki, samples folder, and then subfolders within there to organise the samples. My issue is that Kontakt doesn't understand to use relative paths for the samples, so can't find them when I move the whole thing to another PC.

stephen24

Neat folder structure - your own design I would guess? Alas looks as though Kontakt is having problems with it.

From what you say it seems clear that it's too complex for the "relative paths" Save to cope with. I would suggest your best bet is to move the entire instrument to its new location, temporarily hide the original somehow (e.g. rename the main folder), open the instrument and direct Kontakt when requested to the newly sited "Samples/" folder, then save it using "patch only, absolute path".

If this doesn't work and you are transferring to a new PC, locate it so that its path is identical to that in the original PC (change drive letters etc if necessary).

Otherwise you seem to be up the proverbial watercourse without means of propulsion.

You might want to change your folder structure in future. Identify the mic positions in the sample name rather than which folder it's in. Windows makes it easy to save a lot of files with long names with minor variations.

jonoboyo94

It just seemed logical to me to organise the samples into subfolders, and I can't find anything in the Kontakt reference manuals to suggest that such an approach is invalid. But it does indeed seem like Kontakt just doesn't understand it which is a shame. Unfortunately I need the relative paths to work so I can distribute the instrument to others, and don't really want it to throw up missing sample errors when first loaded. I'll try flattening everything into one big folder and putting the mic names into the sample names and report back here if it fixes the issue.

jonoboyo94

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