Kontakt 6 templates and Kontakt 7 in Cubase

JoNee

Hello! I have built a lot of templates in Cubase pro that use a single instance of Kontakt 6. If I upgrade to Kontakt 7 do I need to build the templates again?

In other words, does the Kontakt 7 upgrade overwrite Kontakt 6 or will the new and old Kontakt versions be separate after the upgrade? The latter being bad news in this case.

Thanks!

Jeremy_NI

@JoNee I would first try by only removing the files from the Cubase VST folders (both K5 vst 2 and K6 vst3), keep those at hand, better safe than sorry!

Blindeddie

K7 does not overwrite K6. They are two separate applications/Plugins.

JoNee

Thank you. In this case this is bad news… I wonder how do others with really massive Kontakt templates deal with this?

If someone knows a way to make the conversion from K6 to K7 automatically please let me know.

davidmolina

I recently updated my whole template with K6, and now you're telling me I have to do that all over again if I want to use K7?

So, I need K5 for my older projects, K6 for my newer/current projects, and K7 for new and future projects (not to mention rebuild my template)? Why do they do this? I understand partly. It is helpful to have separate plugins to avoid breaking projects but what will be the limit? Will I end up having to install 10 individual Kontakt versions by the time they reach v14?

JoNee

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/34211#Comment_34211

Unfortunately yes, so it seems. There surely is a market for conversion software, of which I would be happy to pay for.

Silentservice

After NI named the Kontakt6 Plug-In only "Kontakt" I thought they had learned from the past and that converting large setup with 400+ instances is a major pain in the ass. And now? They present the next plug named Kontakt7 with NO autoconversion from previous Kontakt versions...*facepalm*

Iftekharul Anam

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/36980#Comment_36980

Same feeling! Before upgrading, I was looking into this template matter and found this forum. This is surely a deal breaker for my upgrade for now.

JoNee

I contacted NI support about this and got an answer (thanks NI). Support said that Kontakt developers are looking into this issue and there might be a solution in the future. I will not upgrade to K7 before there this happens, no way I would manually reprogram hundreds of instances of K6 to K7.

onebaldbloke

This is terrible behaviour from NI.

stephen24

Would it help to save each template as you go along? When I make a new orchestra or group of instruments (?or template) I always save the multi (Patch only) as well as the whole project. This is quick and takes up minimal drive space, and if you do it in a vintage edition of Kontakt it will load into any subsequent version.

oscastyle

I am sitting with this right now because I'm on Ventura and previous versions of Kontakt causes a lot of lag and bad performance in Logic, unless I update to Kontakt 7. I converted everything on one project. But now I'm doing it on a second project and I'm really getting a daunting feeling that I'm going to spend the next hour doing this, and will have to do that every time, as I go through the previous 100 or so projects I have on this project I'm working on. And my brain is going "EEGHGHGEGH PLEASE MAKE IT STOP". The sheer tedium of it is unbearable. I save an aupreset from Kontakt 5 and load it in Kontakt 7 and it transfers everything perfectly that way, but there has to be an automated way to do it, like a script or something! If someone could find a programmer that could make a simple script that saves an aupreset of the current Kontakt, then replaces that with K7, then loads the aupreset and deletes it afterwards, then does that for all selected tracks...it sounds simple enough to me, but I'm not a programmer. Maybe ChatGPT can do it lol.

JoNee

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/61077#Comment_61077

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/61077#Comment_61077

In my templates each instrument track (Cubase) is preloaded with a single instance of Kontakt6. Any single instance holds a single sound / patch. One template holds up to 400 tracks, and there about 30 of templates. Unfortunately what you suggest will not work in this case with ALOT of extra work.

JoNee

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/61623#Comment_61623

Yes, this is quite the same problem I am hoping to have a solution.

NI, if you are reading this, please write a conversion program to address this problem! I promise you will be selling more Kontakt7 licenses after that.

oscastyle

I am by no means a programmer, but I have anyway created a script for this using Keyboard Maestro for Mac which for now can work as a work-around (albeit slightly unstable due to Logic crashing and Kontakt sometimes greying out for no reason). It might work for you if you fulfill the following conditions.

The conditions for it to work are as follows (very important):

• Keyboard Maestro (KM from now on) installed (free trial available, $35 full version).
• Imported the Macro group into KM by going File > Import > Import Macros Safely... and selecting the Logic Macros.kmmacros file.
• Right-click the "Logic" folder containing the macros in KM and click Enable Macro Group.
• Have a track selected (Kontakt).
• Have the key command "Open/Close Instrument Window of focused Track" set to Ctrl+Shift+K.
• Have Kontakt 7 in your recents folder in the Finder "places" dropdown menu (the presets folder, that is), and the instrument patch dropdown menu.
• Have given full disk access permissions to everything involved (Keyboard Maestro, all versions of Kontakt, Logic Pro).

Logic Macros.kmmacros.zip

What the script does:

• Sets a few global key-commands to F4, F5 and F6 (if you have conflicts you can change this to your preference easily in KM).
• Moves Logic Pro to front first in case you run it from Keyboard Maestro (otherwise press F5).
• Opens the Instrument Window using Ctrl+Shift+K.
• Navigates to the dropdown menu and presses Save As...
• Saves an aupreset as temp.aupreset and navigates to the Kontakt 7 (by typing in the finder places dropdown menu) aupreset folder, placing it there
• Navigates to the Instrument patch dropdown menu and types "Kontakt 7" to find it and presses "Enter" to load it.
• Open the Instrument Window using Ctrl+Shift+K.
• Navigates to the dropdown menu and presses Load...
• Types "temp" to navigate to the temp.aupreset file.
• Loads the file by pressing enter and closes the instrument window.
• Navigates to the Kontakt 7 aupreset folder in Finder and deletes temp.aupreset
• This completes one cycle.
• Then it presses arrow down, and repeats the cycle on the next track until you press F6 to cancel all macros. Otherwise you can change the macro to your liking in KM to have it repeat only a select number of times based on the number of tracks you want to change in succession (if you want to leave the computer while it's working this could be a good choice).

Potential problems:

• Logic being a baby and crashing randomly
• Kontakt randomly greying out breaking the script chain (in which case you should press F6 to stop it from creating chaos).

You can try to fix these problems by adjusting the pauses between some actions to give Logic more time, restarting your computer, making sure all permissions are in order etc etc, I don't really know how to fix them, because they seem so random to me. Let me know what you think and if you have any questions and I might be able to answer.

JoNee

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/61641#Comment_61641

Thanks oscastyle, unfortunately I work with Cubase / Windows so no help here. Nice to see though, that it is possible to address this problem. Again, please NI, do something about this. Any comments NI? Are you reading?

oscastyle

I reached out to a developer who has worked on plugins for Logic, and he said he managed to create a decoy kontakt 5 and kontakt 6 component by duplicating the Kontakt 7 component, renaming it to Kontakt 5 and 6 and replacing the Kontakt 7 info.plist inside of the component package with the K5/6 ones (respectively) and renaming other files to match the version, and managed to trick Logic into opening Kontakt 7 over the instances that were previously K5 or 6, so it's definitely possible, NI just clearly hasn't directed any resources at trying to solve the problem, so we're left to try figure out our own community hacks.