I was working on a composition and had several instruments loaded into an instance of Kontakt 5. I attempted to load another instrument into Kontakt, but it got stuck on the "instrument loading" window. Then Sonar went white and I had to Ctrl+Alt+Del to close the program. Upon reloading my project file, every instrument that was loaded into that instance of Kontakt is not gone; it's just an empty Kontakt 5 shell. This is detrimental to my project as I had customized the settings of several of the instruments within Kontakt. It's not just a simple matter of loading those instruments back up as I lost all of my settings on those instruments. No, I don't have a backup copy of the file from a few minutes before this happened. I pretty much know this is a lost cause, but I'm super frustrated and hoping that there's some chance someone can let me know what happened and how to get my instruments back. :(

Side note: I had two other instances of Kontakt in this project with Guitar Rig 5 loaded into them. Those instances remained populated with Guitar Rig. Only the one instance of Kontakt, the one that I was trying to load an additional instrument into, lost everything. 

Sorry, all I can do is commiserate with you by saying, dude, I feel your pain. Doesn't help but I experience this kind of behavior pretty frequently since I run Sonar on Windows 10 preview releases. The last few of those have been kind of painful, lots of freezes particularly. It ran great before the last few insider releases so it's probably not Sonar, but still. I don't know of any way to restore a project file that's been corrupted after a crash except from a backup.
 
Save early, save often and buy War Bonds!  

When was the last time you ran NI service centre?

How do you load instances of Guitar Rig into Kontakt? That's a new one on me!

I know this ain't helpful nor what you want to hear AND you already know it but I work on the premise that ANY work I do between doing a Save As can and will be lost.
 
And I mean Save As... like renaming the project and everything (using a descriptive point versioning system)!!! I've lost projects even using regular Save.
 
I ain't saying I lose projects/work all the time... in fact it happens VERY rarely but when it does happen it is shattering. Even if it's only a couple hours (once you're in the "zone" on something it's hard to get back).
 
If anything good came out of the bullpuckery that was X2 is that all the crashes and corruption made me ULTRA vigilant about my saving habits. Now when bad things happen I lose very little work.
 
I think it helps clean up the project file a little too which avoids corruption. Like the act of saving forces Sonar to think about WTF it's doing for a second and cleans things up a bit. That is pure speculation though.

possible you had more instruments loaded than the flavor of the Kontakt dll allowed?  They have the 8, 16, and 64 output flavors.  Just guessing there, and am sorry you lost stuff.
 
Bob Bone

Doktor Avalanche
When was the last time you ran NI service centre?

I run it regularly. I normally check every couple of days. 

sharke
How do you load instances of Guitar Rig into Kontakt? That's a new one on me!

Oops! I meant instances of Shreddage II, which were then routed to Guitar Rig. I'll edit my original post for clarification. >_< Tragically, I didn't even end up having any need for the Shreddage ones. I thought I was going to be using some guitars in the track, but I ended up not. :P

Beepster
I know this ain't helpful nor what you want to hear AND you already know it but I work on the premise that ANY work I do between doing a Save As can and will be lost.
 
And I mean Save As... like renaming the project and everything (using a descriptive point versioning system)!!! I've lost projects even using regular Save.
 
I ain't saying I lose projects/work all the time... in fact it happens VERY rarely but when it does happen it is shattering. Even if it's only a couple hours (once you're in the "zone" on something it's hard to get back).
 
If anything good came out of the bullpuckery that was X2 is that all the crashes and corruption made me ULTRA vigilant about my saving habits. Now when bad things happen I lose very little work.
 
I think it helps clean up the project file a little too which avoids corruption. Like the act of saving forces Sonar to think about WTF it's doing for a second and cleans things up a bit. That is pure speculation though.

I am absolutely going to start doing that from now on. I can always delete the previous versions once the entire piece is completed without any problems. 

robert_e_bone
possible you had more instruments loaded than the flavor of the Kontakt dll allowed?  They have the 8, 16, and 64 output flavors.  Just guessing there, and am sorry you lost stuff.
 
Bob Bone

I only had about six instruments loaded, and I was using the 64 output version. I really can't explain what happened. 

The bright side of all of this is that I had actually bounced all of the tracks to audio before this happened. So, while I won't be able to go back and listen to the MIDI again, I am at least able to use the audio tracks. I was able to continue working on the piece and actually finished it. It was for the "Just Cause 3" trailer competition, so I'm glad I was at least able to put out the finished product. I just hope I don't have to go back in and edit anything at the MIDI stage in the future. 

Thanks for all your suggestions and kind words. 

skitch_84
I am absolutely going to start doing that from now on. I can always delete the previous versions once the entire piece is completed without any problems. 
 

If you use Per Project Folders and are descriptive/clever about your naming conventions you can easily delete all the "point" versions and still have a bunch of good solid backups.
 
Like I usually use the word "Start" to indicate that I have finished all previous work up until that point and I have a nice clean project going into the next phase of the production.
 
For example after I'm done all my tracking I'll do a bunch of project cleanup/reorganization (which will go through a bunch of point versions) then do a Save as called "Start Editing". From there I'll name projects things like "Song Title Editing 2 Drums". The "2" indicates I've done some crap between "Start" and the current version (so if something fails I can go back to Editing version 1).
 
Recently I've also started including dates on stuff to give me an even better idea of what I was up to. So I'll toss Oct 17 on the end of a file name.
 
My file names tend to get really long because of all this but it makes it a FRACK of a lot easier to figure out what's what.
 
Anyway... when it comes to drive/folder cleanup or backing things up I can scout through those project names and pluck out the gems and discard the "safety" point versions.
 
Of course being the slackard muffugga I am all my project folders are still crammed with mountains of "Save As" versions I don't need but the raw project files aren't very big anyway and my drives have room.
 
Really gotta clean that crap up soon though. It's like an unswept floor. Ain't really hurting anything thing in the grand scheme but the damned thing should totally be swept anyway. lulz
 
Cheers.