check out "CoreGuitar Strawberry" from Orange Tree Samples

Thanks for the tip, keith. I googled "Kontakt + Guitar" on the NI site and found lots of recommendations (although not the one your recommended, so thanks again).

Sheesh, you can blow a lot of money on sample libraries! Some were $350 to $500. For that kind of money, I'm thinking a person would probably do better just getting RealStrat and have a purpose-built application.

I've been experimenting with the Strat samples in the Kontakt 2 library, and getting some usable if not quite mind-blowing sounds. NI says K3 has much better guitar samples that are much better than the earlier Strat samples - so much so that they don't even include the K2 Strat in the K3 library anymore.

So I'll see what K3 can do with stock samples before I buy any third-party libraries. Anyway, I've heard that library-collecting can become habit-forming.

Yah, I don't do dongles. It's a shame, because there are some great products out there that require them. But they won't make any sales to me as long as there are dongle-free equivalents available.

Oddly, iLok-protected products are usually more expensive than key-protected products. Given that the justification for dongles is protection from monetary losses due to piracy, these companies should be wildly profitable and in a position to pass the savings on to consumers.

Great tips, Keith! And Free is right in my price range!

So K3 finally arrived today. Some initial observations follow...

It's big - 5 DVDs, and took 2 1/2 hours to install. With two 160GB drives I've never had to give much thought to disk usage on this system, but then I've never installed a 33 gigabyte application, either.

Sigh - no instant gratification today. 2.5 hours to load up the library.

While waiting for the install to complete, I carefully compared the K2 and K3 orchestral libraries and determined that I could safely blow away the K2 VSL library and reclaim 8GB of disk space. (Warning: don't do this if you have projects that use the K2 library, as it's a pain to redirect to the new sample files)

I noted that Kontakt no longer has a DX version, just VST, so Kontakt 3 won't show up on the soft synth list until you rescan.

Now I have to authorize it. Sigh - still no instant gratification. Of course, first it wants to update the program that registers the program, with the on-screen warning that "This may take a while". I wasn't expecting instant gratification, but sometime today would be nice.

OK, the Service Center has updated itself. Now it wants a serial number. What serial number? Nothing on the disks or the box. Ah, there it is, in 6-point font (not kidding) on a sheet of paper that was headed for the wastebasket. I used a magnifying glass to read the S/N. Yay! It accepts my activation code! That's never a given, so I'm pretty pleased.

Next it wants to index the library. This is probably a waste of time but I elect to do it anyway. Fifteen minutes later, it's still going. No instant gratification tonight. I have a snack and make coffee.

All right! K3 is up and loaded into a project. Of course, it has no knowledge of K2's existence, so no preferences have been imported. That's OK. Now to find that vastly improved electric guitar library...hey, where is it? The Strat and Les Paul samples from K2 are gone and all I can find is the lame Elektrik Guitar.

Gratification is close...

Restart. Wow, it takes a long time to load those guitar samples.

I adjust K3's volume, SONAR crashes again, BSoD. This is not looking good.

Restart. Sure is slow loading those guitar samples.

This time I adjust the volume before beginning playback. Whew, no crash. Played through the entire song without crashing.

Just lots of dropouts. Only 25% CPU but lots of dropouts. Maybe if I allocate more buffer space...bump it up from 60Mb to 120MB -- ouch! A message box says not enough memory, then that's all she wrote. K3 and SONAR are unresponsive. CTL-ALT-DEL and kill sonarpdr.exe.

K3 is not impressing me yet.

Checked for updates. 3.0.2 is current, I am at 3.0.0.2. So I download the update. It's 131MB zipped up. Please wait.

(The update was released in July, so my box has been sitting on the shelf at least that long. So why did it take NI ten days to get around to shipping it out? I had assumed they were off duping more product. Perhaps U.S. workers aren't up to the same standards of efficiency as Germans.)

After the update, a new message pops up: "Multiprocessor support has been disabled in plugin mode." Huh? But no BSoD!

Could it be NI is having trouble getting multiple cores to play together, just as CW had trouble with S8 and multiprocessing? Turning off multiprocessing seems to have been the turning point.

Should a person be allowed to have this much fun for only $74?

ORIGINAL: bitflipper

Checked for updates. 3.0.2 is current, I am at 3.0.0.2. So I download the update. It's 131MB zipped up. Please wait.

(The update was released in July, so my box has been sitting on the shelf at least that long. So why did it take NI ten days to get around to shipping it out? I had assumed they were off duping more product. Perhaps U.S. workers aren't up to the same standards of efficiency as Germans.)

The installer media version usually stays the same through the product's life (Cakewalk does the same thing); new DVD masters cost money. So yes, they probably were duping new product.

After the update, a new message pops up: "Multiprocessor support has been disabled in plugin mode." Huh? But no BSoD!

Could it be NI is having trouble getting multiple cores to play together, just as CW had trouble with S8 and multiprocessing? Turning off multiprocessing seems to have been the turning point.

The problem in this case is more of both the host and plugin fighting over core distribution. Since 1) most hosts these days are multiprocessor friendly, and 2) quite a few people don't like the additional latency required by Kontakt to run in multiprocessor mode, it was decided to switch it off by default.

Also, most people weren't aware that the settings for multiprocessor support were individual for plugin and standalone, and not global.

Should a person be allowed to have this much fun for only $74?

It sounds to me as if you forgot my recommendations for NI plugins:

1) install and activate
2) run any updates (you did remember to install the library update, didn't you? If not, do so)
3) run in standalone and check paths, etc. For all of your NI sample stuff such as earlier Kontakt version libraries to appear in your quick load menus, use the custom folder option under search/DB in your Kontakt options (I just have my NI sample library folder listed there). Then, make sure the boxes are checked in the quick load tree view in the browser. Done.
4) now, start Sonar or your other hosts and scan your plugins.

ew

Turning off the "multiprocesser support" option turned out to be the key. It was on by default after the initial install but turned off by the update, so it would appear that NI realized that "off" was a better default choice. Had I taken ew's advice and looked for updates first thing, I would have saved myself some frustration.

K3 is now running smoothly alongside K2 in the same project, so I am now able to jump between the two versions and compare features.

Kontakt is a memory-intensive application, and gives you lots of options for managing memory usage. I was surprised, though, that it responded to an insufficient memory condition by shutting down its audio engine. I would have thought that an app so deeply involved in memory management would have better self-correction and self-preservation mechanisms. Not a show-stopper, though, just one more thing you have to understand and account for in order to get the most out of this product.

The purge options are helpful in this regard. When you load up a sample set, you may be referencing half a gigabyte (or more) of sample data - even though your song actually touches only a subset of those samples. Purging unused samples greatly reduces the memory footprint. It also reduces the load time the next time you open the project.

ORIGINAL: bitflipper

Can you elaborate on "make sure the boxes are checked in the quick load tree view in the browser"?

A picture's worth a thousand words, Dave.



Note the filled in boxes to the left of the tree. That's how you want them to look; just click on them to select and deselect.

ew

Click where it says quick load, Dave...

ew

Final thoughts on the K3 upgrade.

If you're looking for a great sampler, Kontakt can't be beat. If you're looking for great samples, however, especially if you're upgrading from K2, you'll be disappointed. There are some good bundled samples, but the best samples were the VSL orchestral stuff, and that hasn't really changed from K2 to K3.

I was really hoping for a usable Rhodes this time, but no. I was hoping for some vox/choir samples, too, but they're not in there, either. Or perhaps some sound effects or unusual percussion. Nope. 33 Gigabytes sounds like a huge selection, but the number of samples I'll actually use could have fit on two disks instead of six.

If you hated the K2 interface, don't expect K3 to change your opinion, as it's not a whole lot different. A few nice touches is all.

So now I know why my original post elicited no strong recommendations. K3 is a small upgrade. Still recommended, though, but only at the half-price offer currently in effect. I would not recommend the upgrade at the full upgrade price. The discounted price is good through the 31st.