Hi everyone,
I have plenty of Cubase track presets using the Kontakt 5 8outs version, and I would like to “convert” them to Kontakt 6 trackpresets.
So far, my only success has been opening a trackpreset with the Notepad, searching for “kontakt 5 8outs” and replacing it with “kontakt” (the Kontakt 6 new dll is named kontact.dll). When opening the MediaBay in Cubase, that preset is now seen as a Kontakt 6 Trackpreset in the list, but still loads Kontakt 5 8outs when imported into the project.
I know I could just rename the “old” dll, so that “Kontakt 5 8outs” loads Kontakt 6, but would like to avoid that.
Would anyone have a clue how to do this, please ?
Mmmm interesting question … how to convert track presets en masse to use a different plugin.
As far as I know there is no documented way to do this other than manually, track preset by painful track preset.
In your previous attempts, it looks like you only changed the display names. Changing the name of the DLL is unlikely to be successful either because VSTs have a unique identifier embedded in the file. Perhaps you could create an instrument track with only Kontakt 5 loaded, create another one with only Kontakt 6 loaded, export them both as track presets and compare the files? If you’re of the programming sort, you might then be able to script a conversion utility.
On Windows, the files are located in %APPDATA%\Steinberg\Track Presets<type>, where is one of Audio, Instrument, Midi, Multi or Sampler, depending on the type of track preset. The files have an extension of “.trackpreset” but are XML text files. I’m guessing the plugin is identified by a unique ID which it gets when it’s scanned; on this machine, for Kontakt 5 that appears to be:
<member name="Plugin UID">
<string name="GUID" value="5653544E694F356B6F6E74616B742035" wide="true"/>
</member>
[...]
<string name="Original Plugin Name" value="Kontakt 5" wide="true"/>
… though I could be wrong. If you can find what the equivalent GUID is for Kontakt 6, you could try putting that there instead and see what happens.
Thank you for your answer !
I’ve been spending some time on the subject and I think there is no way to do this quickly, unfortunately.
As you guessed, changing the name of the DLL didn’t work either. I may be wrong, but it seems like those unique IDs are not only related to the plugins, but to the presets themselves. Two identital track presets, with an empty instance of Kontakt 5 for exemple, will have different IDs.
Looks like it’s a dead end ! 
It’s not too bad in my case, I wanted to “update” my orchestral template using only Kontakt 6, but I will finally keep all my existing tracks with Kontakt 5, and use Kontakt 6 for the new ones.
It is perhaps something you could suggest over in the Feature Requests and Suggestions section.