Best way to load KONTACT into Cubase

I don’t use huge orchestral templates or VEP, but I get 0% CPU usage when I open multiple instances of Kontakt with big libraries that use multiple Kontakt effects loaded. I’m on Windows 7 and have ASIO Guard set to normal.

For those who primarily use Cubase or Nuendo as DAWs I would strongly recommend you to get Windows. Windows has been a viable and reliable platform for music and audio production for almost a decade now, and everything seems to just run smoother on it, not just Cubase. Several film and video game composers use it.

Thanks for the reply. I think indeed everyone should test for them self’s because every system is different in regards to used harware and drivers. But as a starting point it’s always a good idea to follow what other have have been investigating.

I also do not touch the multiprocessing settings in the VST of Kontakt. Maybe if you have an 8 core processor it might be interesting to play around with this?

Like I said before, I get better results with multiple instruments in one instance of Kontakt but I usually open like 3 or 4 instances of Kontakt and divide the types of instruments over these. So one could contain only a few while others have more that 16. If I put all these in it’s own instance of Kontakt my system is less efficient. Again test this for yourself and decide whats best you! Don’t assume there is only one way that always works best with all systems.

The fact that you can run 75-80 instances of Kontakt on a 15" MBP with OSX VS 100 on a PC tower running Win 7 -10
Is not a big deal. Considering that you can load 175-200 Steinberg VSTi. There are other aspects one most consider
Including producing music on a professional OS that will sound professional after export. Especially when producing complex electronic, pop music with vocals, variaudio. What’s so special about Kontakt?

Cubase can suspend VTS’s not in use but only for VST3. And since NI only provides VST2 for Kontakt 5 I’m not at all surprised it runs much smoother on Logic, that is apparently capable of suspending all types of VST’s? Cubase still has a lot ground to cover in this area?

Are you asking why on the most versatile tool in the business?

Kontakt gives access to thousands of instruments not available in VST or AU. I agree that “professional” sound quality is a must, however the different instruments that you can load up in Kontakt are among the “best” in the business. Take 8Dio and Soundiron, or Production Grand on the piano side. Spitfire on the orchestra side. Efimov , Ample Sound, SampleLogic, and Orange Tree on the bass and guitar side. (Just to mention a few). For scoring there are endless possibilities when it comes to underscore/FX. 5 minutes ago I bought the new “strained wire” from Modwheel. Kontakt gives developers a market possibility not available if they should add the knowledge and support of the VSTi or AU systems. And the market is us. You and I benefit from Kontakt. The VSTi world is big but very limited compared to the world of Kontakt where Kontakt serves as an interface. The instruments included in Kontakt itself is pretty limited, but the world of Kontakt is great and the world of Native Instruments is quite good, so if you buy Komplete on say a black Friday sale, it would be pretty cheap and give you the most of what’s “needed” for music production.

Since no-one else really seems to have mentioned it yet (although one or two have touched on workflow) -

It can be useful having it in the rack if you want to assign, say, 10 different midi tracks to it and keep them in a folder track, say if you’re working on a percussion part, or I guess if you had say horns, strings, keys etc in different cells and you wanted a quick way to open just the midi sections that you want to look at. Sometimes it’s nice to just open a hi-hat line for example and see what you’re doing there, rather than look at the whole pattern.

I don’t do orchestral or similar music myself, but I imagine there would be a similar benefit there in terms of being able to easily look at a specific section - no idea about CPU loads though :wink:



I agree completely with Rundrum. For me life as we know it without Kontak 5 would not be ‘kompleet’. :smiley: The variety of instruments offered for the Kontakt 5 platform is incredible verstatile and still groing. Also the quality of those of major developers already mentioned by Rumdrum is among the best you could possibly get on the market. I think in general 75 % of the sounds i’m using in a production are loaded wth Kontakt 5. So that makes it pretty special to me and probably most people in the scene, AP.

You can assign additional miditracks to instrument tracks as well. there is not much difference in Rack and Track Instruments anymore. :wink:

NI makes some sweet stuff. I guess Kontakt is essential to composer as Massive is to lots of electronic musicians.
Retrologue 2 and Halion SE /5 with note expression can do the same or better job with much less CPU load.

It depends on what you’re using them for. The library that comes with the full version of Halion Sonic 2 and Halion 5 is for the most part better sounding than the one that comes with Kontakt 5, even if it lacks fancier stuff such as release noises and legato samples. For creating my own libraries I also prefer Halion 5, since (at least to me) it’s quicker, far more intuitive and fun. But for third party content Kontakt is simply unbeatable. There’s tons of sample libraries for it and many of them use advanced scripting which allow for a level of realism that’s currently not possible in Halion.

Really? I wasn’t aware of this, thanks for letting me know!

To name but a few of the list of high quality developers. Take a listen here and you’ll know why Halion 5 can hardly be compared to the Kontakt 5 platform?

https://www.projectsam.com/Home

There are some differences and there was a massive discussion on this earlier. If you want to dig into more detail you can read it here:

Ah, interesting! Thanks very much for that, I went straight from C4 to C8 so I’ll have probably missed a phenomenal amount of things like this :wink:

I have to say that the main advantage to me of using the instrument tracks is that when I want to automate some of the VST parameters, I only have to click “expand” under the track, rather than digging it out of the VST instruments folder - saves me ages and stops me getting confused :wink: :smiley:

You can actually do the same with a midi track that outputs to an instrument in the instrument rack because you are usually manipulating midi CC’s. You still don’t have to touch the rack. :wink: I think in general an instrument track is better way to go if you have single instances of an instrument. If you have for instance 10 tracks using different sounds in Halion it might be better to configure these in one instances of Halion and put the midi tracks sending on channels 1`10 in a group track. But also here you could choose to use separate instances of Halion for each single sound. It all depends on what suits your workflow best. There is no definitive way of approaching this.

I must say these rack/track options coexisting have been cause for a lot of confusion and discussion from the start and actually today still do. Probably because nobody has ever been able to really point out a situation why one would be preferred over the other?

Does using instrument tracks solve the problem where having multiple instances of the same VST leads to Cubase “forgetting” which midi track goes to which instrument?

Actually i do find a reason.
To make my life easier i use a lot of track archives especially for BFD3 and other drum samplers where i set up the entire routing of individual tracks out of BFD3 including group tracks for Kicks, Snares, Toms and ambience as well as a main Drum bus, an fx track for NY compression and at least one reverb fx track. I than just have to load up all the samples and effects i want and don’t have to do the routing first.
the same way i work with Kontakt and others multi out instruments. I also made entire mixes for Groove agent 4 for every acoustic Kit and saved it as a track archive.
When i set this up as a Rack Instrument the actual instrument and the Outputs are never saved when i try to export it as a track archive. when i than reimport it the only thing that is left are the midi tracks. If i use an instrument track instead everything is saved including the group channels.
A multi track preset also doesn’t work as it dosn’t save the group channels also.

maybe i am doing something wrong with rack instruments not beeing saved correctly as track archives

greeting novik

I did a similar huge jump and was shocked to see instrument tracks improved to this level.

Got to love the black Friday sales for VST discounts.

Yes, it has to be the No1 must have.

I personally never had this issue with any VST I used? I suspect it might be an issue with the particular VST you are using? Especially 32 bit plugins can pose strange issues sometimes?