Instrument Banks seem bugged

irv · 2025-03-06T17:56:38+00:00

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I am struggling with using Program Change events from my DAW (Reaper) to Kontakt 8 as a VST3 plugin to switch presets of instruments.

I found a solution using instrument banks, but with several caveats:

To use an Instrument Bank I have to switch to Classic View to insert one via File→…
Is there a way to add an instrument bank to the Default View?
In classic view, I use the wrench to open the slot view of the bank and add a couple of instruments (multiple instances of the same one, to switch presets). The program change events nicely switch between the slots. So far so good.
I cannot, however, access the GUI view of any of the Instrument instances in the slot. Is that possible at all?
Double clicking any Instrument in a slot opens the edit view only, which is annoying in itself, since several instruments I payed for can't be edited, hence can't be accessed at all at that point, as long as 3 is not solved.
Once I have opened one Instrument in edit view I can even change the preset in the header, program change switches to other slots, and I think I have reached an acceptable goal but no:
Now I cannot switch back from editing mode! Which means I am stuck with the one Instrument I just opened, unable to even use the same trick 5 to adjust the presets in the other slots. Clicking the wrench again only opens the instrument properties.
The only way to go back is to find the little x in the upper corner, which is (almost) fully hidden by the scrollbar. This of course deletes the Instrument from the slot… destroying anything I configured. Why the restriction of resizing?

What am I missing? They behaviour seems like one or several bugs to me, in any case it is not intuitive.

I only want to access the instruments in the bank slots one by one, change presets, use the GUI to make configurations. Are instrument banks not supported anymore?

Thanks in advance for any advice or some scolding because I took a wrong turn. Anything helpful is very much appreciated

Kind regards

Alex

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irv

I found that the bugs 6 and 7 only occur if Kontakt 8 is used as a VST3 plugin and maybe it's Reaper that is causing the problem.

I also found the workflow to create the instrument banks I need:

Load the instrument into Kontakt
Make the adjustments (preset, settings, etc.)
Save as a new instrument
Repeat 1. bis 3. for each adjustment set
Add all the new instruments to an instrument bank
Repeat 1. to 5. to create a number of banks with adjustment set for each instrument I want to use
Load the banks into 1 or more VST plugins in the DAW (I have to check this out, hope it works because I like the multi setup using different midi channels to avoid the overhead of multiple Kontakt instances)

Still I have questions: Why all the hassle? Is the use case so exotic? Why are there presets und snapshots and whatnot if neither can be selected with events from a DAW? Why can only instruments be loaded into an instrument bank, and not snapshots? Are there technical restrictions that prevent that?

Regards

Alex

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