OK, I have a score with 13 staves. I am routing the playback right now to Kontakt player 5. I have everything setup properly, I believe.
I hit play, and all of the instruments sound, and I can hear what is going on. A little out of balance, but I can hear it all. When I go to the mixer to try and adjust the balance, or solo an instrument, I have all of the instruments except 2. They do not show up in the mixer.
Is this a bug?
Robby
To add to this information. When I click the ‘MIDI’ button in the mixer it shows all of the instruments and the drum set (which is certainly missing from the VST list).
I am trying to hear the drum set part only. In play mode, the M/S buttons I have all selected for the drum set. But everything still plays. And I cannot filter out just the drum set part in the mixer.
Robby
Robby,
I had what I believe to be the same issue. I don’t remember changing any of Dorico’s defaults.
Robby, could you please send the corresponding project to u dot stoermer at steinberg dot de? Also, while that project is loaded in Dorico, choose from the main menu Help > Create Diagnostic Report. That will create a zip file on your desktop, please send me also that one. That data will help us much more in identifying what is wrong. Thanks.
Ulf,
E-mail sent. Thanks!
A couple of things, I’d recommend for the next version… when creating a Diagnostic report, the file saves to the desktop. I had a previous Diagnostic Report from an issue with printing that I created about a week ago or so. I would expect Dorico to rename the report with a date, or a number ( Diagnostic(2) ), or something. It took me several minutes to realize that Dorico wasn’t creating a new file, because the old one was still on the desktop.
Also, I feel rather foolish with this thread. I swore I had a read a thread similar to my problem (MusicMaven’s), typing the word ‘mixer’ into the search bar did not reveal the thread. I tried variations of ‘mixer’ with no luck. I think the search aspect of the forum needs great improvement.
Robby
Hi Robby,
thanks for the data. I had a look and things become clear now, but it needs a bit of explanation, so please bear with me.
Kontakt, similarly to HALion Sonic, is a multi player with 16 outputs and simply spoken, for each of the 16 Kontakt outputs Dorico creates one mixer channel in it’s own audio engine, so that via Dorico’s mixer UI you can mix and balance the levels of these channels.
Now, what sounds do come out from each of the 16 individual Kontakt outputs is managed by Kontakt itself and needs to be adjusted there.
When using HALion Sonic, each of the 16 slots is using by default exactly one output and also in that order, but in the HALion UI you can also change this and completely mess this up (what of course no one does deliberately.)
Kontakt however has by default a different strategy. It groups the first 10 outputs to stereo pairs and names these channels Stereo 1 and Aux 1 to Aux 4. The last 6 channels stay mono and are named Unassigned 1 to Unassigned 6.
So, 5 stereo plus 6 mono are 11, and that’s why in the Dorico mixer you see only 11 channels and not 16. Also, what sound now e.g. comes via Stereo 1 or Aux 2 is not under control of Dorico, but solely controlled by Kontakt and can only be changed in the Kontakt UI.
I hardly know Kontakt, I only have a very basic installation with just the player plug-in and NO sound library for it, so sounds don’t load here with me, and I can not tell what sounds would come through which output. Neither can I give you any advice of how to set up Kontakt in an appropriate way. I guess one would do in Kontakt’s ‘Outputs’ section; there click on ‘Presets/Batch Configuration’ and then choose ‘Batch functions’ > ‘Clear output section and create one individual channel for each loaded instrument’.
Maybe some other Kontakt user could step in here and give some advice.
So you see, it is a matter of setting up Kontakt properly. Most likely Dorico adds to the confusion by giving it’s own channels the names in the same order as it would do with HALion Sonic and we also have to change here some Dorico behaviour. I will discuss this with the London team.
And thanks for the hint with the existing diagnostic report not getting overwritten. We were not aware of that and will consider a solution.
Cheers, Ulf
Ulf,
Thanks for the response and the information.
While I sort of understand what you are talking about, it makes me wonder. If Kontakt is only sending 11 channels, then how am I able to hear the channels that are 12 and above?
The next question is, I tried adding Kontakt to the VST whitelist (following the directions in the FAQ). All it added was Kontakt 16out, and not Kontakt (I was trying to add both). I’m not quite sure what the difference is, but I tried adding both plug-ins, and it only took one of them. Could it be that this might resolve my issue if I am able to add the regular Kontakt?
Robby
Ulf,
As an update, I spent about an hour, and finally got Dorico to recognize Kontakt Player 5 (not 16 out).
This shows what appears to be everything! I think it is breaking down the drum set into 15+ different voices. However, I can’t make sense out of what is what. This at least heads down the correct path it seems, but I cannot figure out what is routed where to mute one instrument versus the entire ensemble.
Robby
Due to my limited Kontakt installation, I can’t answer this exactly. Most likely Kontakt is sending an own mix of all channels via Stereo 1 out.
So what comes out via the individual Kontakt outputs depends on the internal Kontakt assignment and mixing matrix.
We chose to whitelist by default only Kontakt 16out, because we assumed, that is what people will most likely want, and to have a similar workflow like with HALion Sonic SE.
Because the Kontakt that you now enabled has only a stereo out, i.e. all the mixing and balancing needs to be done from the Kontakt window and not the Dorico mixer.
As I say, I hope that some experienced Kontakt user can explain how to best setup Kontakt for use in Dorico.
On my MacMini I have Kontakt installed with a tiny, basic sound library, so I could fiddle around a bit.
And indeed, by default all instruments of a multi program do get internally mixed in Kontakt and the sum of it gets sent out via Stereo 1.
One can change all the assignments in Kontakt and as already assumed, ‘Clear output section and create one individual channel for each loaded instrument’ does the trick.
Unfortunately, Dorico does not get notified by the automatic channel renaming, so in the Dorico mixer the names stay as before. That makes it awful for identifying what instrument is on what channel. We have to work on this in the future.
To give some context behind Dorico’s mixer: one of the major limitations of the mixer/routing design that we had in Sibelius was that there was no concept of a channel strip, and so (as I recall) there was no way of having per channel EQ or insert FX. Sibelius’s mixer was purely MIDI. In Dorico we wanted to have proper DAW-like routing with channel strips for every plugin. However, this gives rise to a potential problem. Ideally, if you wanted to tweak the EQ on the oboe part, you’d want to go to the mixer and, well, tweak the EQ on the oboe part. You don’t want to go to the mixer and try all channels in turn until you discover the oboe is routed to channel 13. If you have a MIDI mixer then we can automatically label it as the oboe channel, but then all you can do with it is change the volume and pan. So Dorico’s pragmatic solution to this is an implicit assumption that if you have a multitimbral plugin (ie which plays separate sounds on >1 channel) then it is set up so that it has more than one output audio channel, and that whatever is fed into (eg) MIDI channel 7 will produce sound on output (audio) channel 7. If that’s the case then we can automatically label the channel strips in the audio mixer and then you can have per-channel EQ, insert FX, etc.
This all works pretty well for HALion Sonic SE because we can set it up in that 1:1 mode. It works well for single channel plugins too as you know that you can reliably label the fader. However for 3rd party multitimbral plugins (Kontakt, Aria, etc) we have no way of knowing what their internal routing is, and what the relationship between MIDI inputs and audio outputs is. Dorico labels the channel faders according to our assumption, but if the plugin isn’t set up in that way then the labels will be misleading. If we were to not attempt to label the faders beyond ‘Kontakt 1’, ‘Kontakt 3’, etc then that would be less misleading but would penalise users who had set the channels up independently.
This is something that we’d like to find a better solution for in the future, though I don’t know what that would be.
Paul,
Thanks for insight. It makes a lot sense of what you trying to tackle, and one can certainly see the struggle to make it user friendly.
Maybe a solution to part of the problem could be putting an indication on the players card next to the instrument (and maybe make this a toggle, so those that don’t do any modifications could hide it). Put a ‘Audio’ icon next to the instrument name, and a number that corresponds to the channel strip number in use. And in the mixer put these numbers very clearly, so maybe someone could see that oboe is channel 13, and they could search for 13 and make adjustments. Just a thought… maybe I don’t know enough of the problem to know if this would be a help or not. I am not at my computer at the moment, so I cannot see the Dorico interface.
Robby
To mitigate the mess with the channel names in the Dorico mixer, I propose you do the following in Kontakt:
In Kontakt’s Outputs section you can create an own configuration with channels and output assignments, save that “section” and then set it as the default (either for all formats or just the 16out version). By that, whenever Dorico creates an instance of Kontakt, the channels and outputs are named according to those defaults, and that’s what will also appear in the Dorico mixer.
So e.g. then ‘Kt. st. 1’ up to ‘Kt. st. 8’ could appear. Still far from optimum but better than the other mess. Also, you still need to assign yourself in Kontakt, what instrument comes through the individual outputs. So it’s pretty much of a hassle compared to the workflow with HALion Sonic.
I’ve attached an output section preset that I would use when working with Kontakt. After unzipping it would go into /Users//Library/Application Support/Native Instruments/Kontakt 5/default/Output Section Presets.
As said, it’s just a proposal. In the end you need to decide yourself what fits best for you. And you probably need to get more acquainted with the internals and workings of Kontakt, if you want to work conveniently with it in the Dorico context.
Dorico output section preset.cfg.zip (991 Bytes)
Thanks so much Ulf!!! This will be most helpful for sure!!!
Robby