Hi! Question: is there anyway to use Kontakt instead of Halion for writing? I ask because I have a slide guitar (e.g., bottlenecking) VST for Kontakt that I would like to use, and there isn’t one that I can find in the Halion selections.
It would be very frustrating to have to write it with something else in Halion, then play it, then go back into a different instrument in Halion to make corrections or add to it, then play it again in Kontakt and so on until finished. If I could choose which VST to write in, primarily Kontakt right now, that would save a lot of trouble for me.
And no, pedal steel and Hawaiian lap guitar are not the same thing as bottle-necking an acoustic 6 string. Not to my ear, anyway.
You can use Kontakt to entirely or partly replace HALion. However, it is not as straight forward and convenient to use as HALion.
First, you need to whitelist Kontakt for it to be seen by Dorico. To do this have a look here: https://helpcenter.steinberg.de/hc/en-us/articles/206899770-How-to-use-VST2-plug-ins-in-Dorico
Then, in the Play Mode, on the right side where the list of VST Instruments is, push the plus button and add an instrument.
First it is unassigned, so choose from the dropdown list Kontakt to actually load it.
In Kontakt, choose the wanted sound, then return to Dorico’s Play Mode. On the left side is the list of players; unfold the player (that you want to change) until you can see the VSTi that it is routed to. There you can then change to Kontakt and also make sure to use the right MIDI channel.
Save your work and you’re done. Next time loading the project will come back exactly same.
In fact you don’t need to whitelist Kontakt, as it is the only VST2.x plug-in included by default in the whitelist, but otherwise everything Ulf says is true.
Our documentation author, Lillie, is working on documentation for Play mode at the moment, and Ant has also nearly finished a set of tutorial videos on Play mode that will be available at some point over the next couple of weeks.
I did some further research regarding Kontakt being missing from the VST Instrument drop down control.
After some searching, I found an article that suggested I move the Kontakt dll files to folder C:\Program Files\VstPlugins.
That did the trick, I can now choose any of the three instances.
Seems Dorico is fussy about where the dll’s should live.
Any way, I’m happy to have it all working and you can stop looking.
The problem is not that Dorico is fussy, but a lack of specification in VST2.
With VST2 there were no defined installation paths for plug-ins, so the vendors could install them wherever they liked, but then you have to tell the host applications (Dorico, Cubase,…) about these additional search paths. Dorico does currently not have a UI for this, just a searchPath.xml in the VSTAudioEngine folder. You could have either edited this, or - as you did - move the dll to the other common location.
Starting with VST3, the spec defines concrete installation paths, so VST3 plugs do get picked up by any host immediately.
I don’t know if this is true for every installation, but on Windows my Kontakt.dll is under C:\Program Files\Native Instruments\VSTPlugins 64 bit
On Mac I’m not sure, but would assume it is under /Library/Audio/Plug-ins/VST
Hi, I am having almost the same issue… Kontakt doesn’t appear in the list of selectable VST instruments. I have checked the log (Dorico 3.5 AudioEngine_64\logs\vstAudioEngine.txt) and it includes lines:
VST2WhiteList : Kontakt
Plugin accepted: Kontakt.dll
I tried a few things:
Kontakt.dll was already in one of the directories listed in the path, but just to be sure I put it in the c:\Program Files\Common Files\Vstplugins
I specifically whitelisted “Kontakt 5” and it also doesn’t appear
I tried writing in “Kontact” in the whitelist in the interface
After each attempt I cleared the cache and restarted Dorico
Please do ‘Help > Create Diagnostics Report’ and send the corresponding zip file to ‘u dot stoermer at steinberg dot de’. Then I can give further advice. Thanks
