Is there a way of temporarily turning off Kontakt (or other VST instruments)?
For example, someone sends me a Cubase file and when I open it Cubase spends a lot of time trying to locate samples I don’t have.
I want to be able to see the MIDI and still play the audio files so having a non-activated project doesn’t quite work.
Obviously I don’t want to remove Kontakt permanently but just the ability to switch it off for that occasion before I open the project.
Looking in Plug-in Manager has left me none the wiser how I would do this.
I haven’t tried, but what would happen if you would make your own plug-in collection where NI Kontakt wouldn’t be in? If you would load the project after, is NI Kontakt loaded?
Other try: What happens if you Hide the plug-in in VST Plug-in Manager > VST Instruments > Show VST Plug-in Information and then you load the project?
I’ve turned it to Inactive via VST Plug-in Manager but it still tries to look for the samples that Kontakt would load and still loads instances of Kontakt.
Making a new collection of VST Instruments without Kontakt included makes no difference - it still loads empty Kontakt instances anyway!
I thought it would ignore Kontakt in this case but guess not.
Are you on Windows or Mac? On Windows you could just locate the DLLs that make up Kontakt and temporarily move them out of your VST search path, or actually rename the DLLs themselves (e.g. rename “Kontakt.dll” to “Kontakt.dll.disabled”). Note that earlier versions of Kontakt will consist of more than one DLL – different versions with a different number of outputs. That may be why disabling them in the Cubase plugin manager didn’t work – you need to disable all versions of Kontakt.
You can do the same on Mac, what is even easier, because you don’t have to search, where is it installed. On Mac the folders are predefined.
But myself, I don’t find this very clean and safe solution. I wouldn’t be surprised if Cubase would crash if you would remove the plug-in once Cubase is running already.
I removed the Kontakt VSTs from of the Plug-In folder while Cubase was running (but no projects open), loaded up a project and it didn’t seem to upset it.
It obviously works but isn’t an elegant solution. Handy to have if I know a whole batch of files is going to keep demanding a high number of sample locate windows.
