NKS User Library

I do think there are still some issues on the Mac side, but if they are working for you that sounds hopeful. At least the previews have already been posted with the VST2 version so that should help. I did notice that had some previews missing for the Arp presets also.

Now Available: IK Multimedia SampleTank 4 NKS Library (Core)

I am finally able to release the first part of this massive library, the core factory library for SampleTank 4 and SampleTank 4 MAX. This covers the presets in both the standard and MAX versions of SampleTank 4 with up to 6700+ presets for SampleTank MAX owners.

Presets include full tagging converted from SampleTank to NKS format, custom sound previews (done with painstaken patience since many instruments operate in a limited key range and need different keys to trigger samples) and control of the macro, volume, pan and envelope controls.

To say this was a huge job is an understatement. Not only is there much content to process but SampleTank presents numerous problems in regards to making NKS that required months of work, testing and frustrations. The main problem is you have to enable "Automation" for the controls you would like to learn in KK but when you switch presets, this learned automation is reset. I have to say IK Support while responsive, are almost completely useless and will just ignore you when you hit an issue they cannot resolve and I found MANY problems in their plugins which many they confirmed but 9 months later, still no updates to fix so this resulted in me not being able to include some things I really wanted such as the ability to switch On/Off effects modules because there is a bug this results in these learned controls all resetting to effect slot 1 only on reload. Confirmed by IK as a bug in November last year and still not fixed.

Another problem I hit frequently which caused much of the added time is SampleTank will just crash when you switch presets for no apparent reason. Luckily, NKS files make this a non-issue and when loading from NKS files I never received a crash so it is how their browser loads their own data that causes this crash, luckily because making sound previews would have been a nightmare more than it was already.

Previews were also painful to make with this because many instrument presets have limited keys used so the usual method I use just hitting either C2 or C3 for the preview would often not work so it had to be done in small batches with weeks of manually fixing previews and generating new ones by hand. I am certain there will be some previews that are silent still or have terrible glitches so if you find them, just let me know what library/preset and I will fix.

Lastly is the absolute inefficient way the preset data is stored when exported. SampleTank is (IMO) a rather bloated sample player and this carries through when you save out presets too. Some NKS files can be upto 12MB each with most being between 1-6MB.... This is the worst plugin I have seen in terms of how preset data is dumped out (Omnisphere has 10x the automatable parameters but has no issue like this) and results in a 10GB space requirement for just the core library and up to 22GB needed for the entire "Total Studio" bundle of instruments which is over 16,000 files.

So this took a few weeks to test out and design a method to even save out the files reliably so they would work and a further 2 months using multiple computers to generate the files, tag them and make the previews.... But it is done and is working.

Currently the main factory content is available with Expansion content and the Syntronik content (which is also available separately already for the Syntronik plugin) available soon covering the Total Bundle 3.5 content. I know v4 of this is now available which simply adds a few additional expansions and I may look at doing that depending on the popularity of this library. If it is deemed to not be popular enough, I will not be looking to update this any further. This was not fun to do at all!

Well, I use the version 2.34, because i'm afraid if i update it, i will go in to problems like this