Will Kontakt Instrument Updates Break Kontakt 7 compatibility?

@DunedinDragon

"I've been using Ableton Live 11 Standard for several years now on Windows 10. As I remember (and it's been a while), when I made the jump over to Kontakt 7 and KK I updated most of my libraries that I had been using in most of my projects, and I would update others as I needed to. I kept the older Kontakt around for a while in case I needed it, but I never did. A lot of the libraries I was and still am using were not formally NKS licensed and still aren't and I load those either direct from the file system or through the quick load facilities."

Much like I did as well. Jumped to K7 and made updates where applicable.

But luckily - thanks to Studio One and it's "Transform To Audio" workflow - ALL my Kontakt instances - regardless of age, version, library etc - are all rendered to audio in every project.

So when this change occurred in Sept 2023 - IF I mistakenly updated a Kontakt library with a version that would give me the dreaded "your Kontakt version is too old" - I already had my original patch committed to audio.

For some projects that were still in flight - it was worth a "migration" trip to K7 - but for anything long since done and committed - it was done. I do not look back or have any need to edit something from 3 years ago - so I just used my rendered tracks and carried on.

For me - the priority is to be able to open a project 10 years from now - not worry about any need to edit it.

Still hoping that Studio One may one day perform some sort of migration - but that is unlikely.

VP

Well - that's the difference between being done and not being done.

I bounce everything after each time I work on it - even if it is in flight and I have to go back to the project 10 more times before it's really done.

Having pure rendered (and backed up) audio removes all worries and stress if something goes south.

I never trust any session/song/project to open back up cleanly without a backup.

Luckily with S1 - this has never happened in all my years since 2011 (yet) but I do not want to feel that doom if it does.

VP

K8 won't have any impact on libraries until it has a bunch of months/years behind it and "K8 specific" libraries start appearing.

But all the current existing NI K7 libraries - should load just fine in K8

And I am hoping that NI has learned its lesson after this botched MKIII/NKS II update rollout last fall.

VP

The Kontakt 6 to Kontakt 7 library mess sucks and was very badly handled by Native Instruments. I am lucky that most of the libraries which had a problem I had never used with Kontakt 6, so I only have to manage a small list of incompatible libraries.

But if you want to you can keep using both the old ones and the new ones. You will need each library installed twice if you plan to use it in both Kontakt 6 and Kontakt 7. Download the Kontakt 6 version and install it to a separate folder (e.g. create a ‘Kontakt 6 Content’ directory alongside the standard Content directory). Then in any instance of Kontakt 6 you should be able to relocate the instrument to this folder and apply the change so that all other instances with that instrument in any DAW session will be automatically fixed.

If you have hundreds of GB of libraries you need to install in two versions, this will take a lot of disk space. But it is an option.

Alternately, if you do not need the new features (I do not) you could install the K6 library over the K7 one and never upgrade them again (or over time manually migrate old projects, which is preferable because one day Kontakt 6 will no longer be supported on a new OS). This does not go against any best practices for using computers. Best practice for updates depends on your use case. The only best practice for always updating is when security is a concern. In this case, not only is security not a concern, but these libraries are not applications run directly on the OS. I would be perfectly comfortable never updating them again, because OS compatibility will almost certainly be based on Kontakt, not the library. You would miss out on bug fixes, though. If those bugs are not affecting you now, then why care?

I am hopeful Native Instruments will do better if there are future versions with Kontakt 8 only features. It is possible to support the Kontakt 7 versions in Kontakt 6. This worked for months. Then NI disabled access for Kontakt 6. I can get the K7 version to work again in K6, but my method is not advised for anyone not comfortable with modifying their system (I do it all the time for various reasons, but I have years of knowledge and experience of doing this on macOS and know how to fix anything I might break). If they make such incompatible feature updates again, I want to believe that they will do it such that previous versions of Kontakt continue to work. This could be by simply disabling access to those features in K7 and earlier. Or making it easy to have both library versions installed.

I tried parallel installation on one library and I didn't encounter any activation problems. Kontakt 6 version worked in K6, Kontakt 7 version in K7. Native Access only sees the K7 version.

There is one potential future problem that I forgot about: upgrading the K7 version in Native Access will break the K6 version again. This would be fixed by then reinstalling the K6 version wherever you put that.

I have some idea what's going on behind the scenes here based on running some experiments. It's a configuration thing.

Native Access is only aware of one version installed, and it will update configuration based on that. Installing the K6 version sets the configuration so that K6 can see the K6 version. Reinstalling the K7 version (and therefore probably also upgrading it if a new version is released) resets the configuration to what it was before and the K6 version stops working. As stated, then reinstalling the K6 version makes both work again. This does not break the K7 version because Native Access doesn't care what was done outside of it.

Instead of jotting down settings, save a Kontakt snapshot, named so it is clear where it came from, maybe in a folder named after the DAW project, with the instrument name and any other information useful to identify where it belongs.

But if you're doing that and you own Kontakt 7, why not at the same time replace Kontakt 6 with 7 in each session and load the snapshot and save the session? Now you don't have to worry about that DAW session again and can install library updates if you want to. And if there ever is a K8 library update that has the same problem, you have your snapshot. This is the approach I am taking.

If you don't own Kontakt 7, you can still save snapshots now and have them ready for if/when you upgrade to Kontakt 8.

I think some of that will always be the case regardless of what product you're using. For many years I used Sonar Platinum before Gibson shut the product down. I still have a ton of projects on that and even still have a working copy of Sonar Platinum on my PC, but I've only rarely found a need to mess with any of them. I could easily re-create them on my current system with newer plugins, but I haven't found a need to. Most of that stuff is no longer even interesting to me.