Is there any way to create a single track for each channel in a multitimbral instrument?
For example:
At this point I would like to have 1 track for each instrument that controls both midi and audio, not a separate midi and audio track for each instrument.
Is this possible?
How do you do it?
Open the rack and enable multiple outputs for the vst.
Yes, I understand that… what that does, if I’m not mistaken, is create a new audio track in the mixer for each channel , then you need a midi channel for each instrument as well, but that is what the problem is. I would like to control the audio and midi from the same channel as though it were a monotimbral channel, if that is possible. Does that make sense?
Yes, makes sense…
would be nice…
Until then, to keep things nice and neat, you could make a folder track and put the midi and audio channel in it…
So instead of 8 tracks, you have 4 folders…
You could probably do it with a lot of routing n sends and then hide a bunch of stuff… But thats kinda messy…
I am using a Panorama P6 controller that has some great integration with Cubase. Having the audio track in the mixer lets me control and automate both panning and volume. Having the midi track in the mixer allows me to select and arm the track. If both tracks are visible it gets very cluttered and difficult to manage. I can hide the midi tracks in the mixer but then I don’t have access to the track arm record button from the keyboard, because that is on the midi track. If I only have the midi track in the mixer then I am able to control volume but loose automation and the midi pan doesn’t work. If I can’t get everything into one track I guess I could record with the midi track visible then switch over to making the audio track visible to do the panning and automation.
If you are committed to using Kontakt as a multi-timbral VSTi then you are stuck with this complexity since audio & midi are different things each with their own controls. But if you used Instrument Tracks with only one instrument per track then you’d have the audio & midi integrated with each other - this integration is why Instrument Tracks were created. I use Instrument Tracks in this manner 90+% of the time because they are cleaner and easier to deal with.
On some of my work I am using Spitfire Audio’s Albion and it only runs inside of Kontakt. If I used 1 instance of Kontakt for each sound I could easily be running hundreds of instances of Kontakt. I don’t know of very many computers that can do that. One solution would be to have a server farm of computers, but besides not being able to afford that I don’t have the room in my studio.
It seems strange that you can do what I am suggesting with Ableton but you can’t do it in Cubase. Maybe in need to ReWire Ableton into Cubase and do it that way.
But one thing Cubase has that I have not seen in any other DAW is the way you can completely define an external instrument (I’m currently running 5 external synths) and control it as though it were a VST.
By the Way it’s not just Kontakt that has the issue… Omnisphere, Vienna Ensemble, and East West Play suffer the same problem. I can’t believe I am the only person out there that is having this problem.
If you search these forums you’ll find more than a few threads on the performance differences between using X instances of Kontakt (or similar) with 1 instrument vs. X/8 instances of Kontakt with 8 instruments. Remember it is the instruments inside Kontakt not the instance of Kontakt that uses the vast majority of resources - if your are running 128 instruments in 16 instances of Kontakt, you are still running those 128 instruments. The common wisdom is that there is generally, but not always depending on actual instruments used, a modest overall performance advantage to loading multiple instruments in Kontakt. The cost of that increase in performance is greater complexity that you have to manage (i.e. the problem you ID in your OP). If you are so close to maxing out your PC that this performance boost makes a difference, you’re walking dangerously close to the cliff’s edge anyway. There is also a specific situation where loading multiple instruments in Kontakt can cause audible problems even though your PC has adequate capacity. In Cubase each instance of Kontakt runs on one and only one CPU core. So your overall need for CPU might be well below the available capacity of your system. But you could still have one instance that maxes out the capacity of a single core. So you can end up with 7 cores running at 60% and 1 core trying to get to 115% and failing. If these had all been single instances Cubase would have distributed the load around.
Logically it seems wrong to not put more than one instrument per instance so have always tried to fill up my Kontakt or Vienna Ensemble with as many instruments as I can. I am running Window 7 Professional on an a i7 4770 Haswell 3.5GHz chip with 32GB of RAM and it looks like raino is running something very similar. So will take your advice and run one instrument per instance and see how it goes. I’ll start building my composition template and let you know what this machine will take. I have been working on creating a very efficient composition workstation where I use my mouse as little as possible, preferring to use hardware controllers instead, this has been a huge stumbling block for me for a long time so look forward to the possibilities.