Kontakt not recalled as shared instrument in duplicated Part

VST Live
1

Unfortunately there are still issues with setting up and recalling shared instruments in VST Live as of 1.1.80. Specifically, I have noticed that duplicating a Part with a plugin on it turns the plugin into a shared instrument. I am not sure if this was the case in previous versions of VST Live but I think it is a neat feature. Unfortunately it does not work properly for NI Kontakt (THE prime example of a plugin to be used as a shared instrument…). Here are steps to reproduce:

  1. Create a new project
  2. Add a layer to Song 1 Part 1. Add Kontakt as the plugin and load a Kontakt instrument.
  3. Duplicate Part 1. Both the original and duplicated parts now indicate that they use a shared instrument. Great!
  4. Open Kontakt in the duplicated Part. It has the original Kontakt instrument loaded as you would expect. Load another Kontakt instrument (in a real use case you would set the Layer in the duplicated Part to use channel 2, but this doesn’t matter here…). If you open Kontakt from the original Part, you also see both Kontakt instruments loaded, so you are indeed using the same Kontakt instance (!) as a shared instrument.
  5. Now save the VST Live project, quit and reopen VST Live and open your saved project. Now the two Parts do not use Kontakt as a shared instrument anymore. You will have an instance containing both Kontakt instruments on the original Part and an independent instance with just the first of the two Kontakt instruments on the duplicated Part.

Of course you would expect the project to be recalled in the state you saved it in… If instead of duplicating in step 3 you create a new Part and manually select Kontakt as a shared instrument, everything seems to work as expected.

This is with VST Live Elements 1.1.80.714 on macOS 13.4 with Kontakt 6.7.1 as a VST3 (all ARM64).

2

Update: I tested this with NI Reaktor (6.5.0, ARM64) as well by loading an Ensemble inside Reaktor and duplicating the Part in VST Live. Same as with Kontakt, after saving and reopening the VST Live project, the two Parts use independent instances of Reaktor.

3

Will check!

4

Not great at all, that is a bug which leads to the problems you encounter. Will be fixed with the next version.
We will consider to add “Duplicate Part Shared” and “Paste Part Shared”, for now you can use the Layer functions “Paste Layer Shared”, and “Duplicate Layer Shared” resp. Paste or Duplicate without shared must not create Shared Instruments.

5

Ok, thanks for clarifying that the instrument becoming shared is not intended in the first place!