I plan to use Kontakt for a dozen or so MIDI tracks in each song: bass, piano, drums (separate kick, snare, hat, etc.) and other stuff.

I trying to decide between using a single instance of Kontakt for all the instruments (e.g., Kontakt Library, Abbey Roads Drums, etc.) or a separate Kontakt instance for each instrument...

To me, the advantage of one Kontakt instance per instrument is that I would be able to more easily control the output buses and effects for each instrument.  Also, when I double-click on a track's soft synth icon to pop up that instance, I would see the correct instrument for that track, since there's only one instrument per instance.  If all instruments are within a single instance of Kontakt, I have to scroll up and down through Kontakt to find the instrument I want to tweak, which is a pain.

The disadvantage of one Kontact instance per instrument is the increased CPU and memory usage, correct?  Has anyone found out whether this is significant?  How much overhead is associated with each new instance of Kontakt?

Are there other pros and cons of using multiple instances vs a single instance?

Kontakt's outputs are extremely configurable.  I would certainly (and this is what I do myself) recommend using 1 instance of kontakt and use kontakt's outputs and buses for any routing you need.

yes, using more than one instance of kontatk will be very taxing on your system.  I can't give you details because they're going to be specific to your machine, but every instance of kontakt will tax your CPU, your RAM and your hard drive access.

Beagle


Kontakt's outputs are extremely configurable.  I would certainly (and this is what I do myself) recommend using 1 instance of kontakt and use kontakt's outputs and buses for any routing you need.

yes, using more than one instance of kontatk will be very taxing on your system.  I can't give you details because they're going to be specific to your machine, but every instance of kontakt will tax your CPU, your RAM and your hard drive access.

+1 to Beagle

I also thought about using multiple instances of multi-output VSTs for several reasons - one being that when you
freeze a synth, all outputs are rendered and frozen.  That was when I "needed to freeze" stuff all the time because
my system was just not powerful enough to cope with what I was asking of it.

The real solution to that issue was to get a more powerful system - done that now and I only freeze a synth when
I'm ready to, because I'm happy with the performance and want to work with the audio from there.

You haven't included your system specs, but since you're running Win7/64, my guess is you have a reasonably capable
system CPU wise.

Cheers - Cliff

cliff - you can freeze individual instruments if you have each instrument sent to separate outputs.

I'm not too concerned about performance, since I just bought my PC a few months ago; it's a i7-950 w/ 12 GB RAM.  However, I've only tested about 5 instances or instruments so far, and would like to scale up to 12 or even 20 instruments in the future.

I'm a bit confused by Kontakt's output routing.  For instance, I'd like to try to apply a simple reverb to all my Abbey Roads drums tracks.  I eventually figured out how to do it via the Outputs panel, but selecting a reverb preset felt a bit clunky, and I found myself wishing I could get the drums to use one of Sonar's reverbs.  However, I don't know how to send just the drums to the Sonar reverb, since I only have a single instance of the Kontakt synth, and all its output goes to the same place.

Is the solution to create one of those "16 out" or "8 out" Kontakt instances, and then send each instrument to a different output from within Kontakt?  I'm guessing that would let me use Sonar effects on individual Kontakt instruments, which would take care of my first concern.

The other issue is how to quickly find the instrument associated with each track.  If I use a single instance of Kontakt, and double-click on my piano MIDI track, I just see the main Kontakt window, and have to scroll through the instruments in order to find the piano.  Is there a faster way to see the piano settings when I click on the piano MIDI track?  Or do I need to get used to scrolling within Kontakt in order to find instruments?

Thanks!

Beagle


cliff - you can freeze individual instruments if you have each instrument sent to separate outputs.

Thanks Beagle, I have never tried that with Kontakt.
I know I certainly couldn't freeze individual instruments/tracks with many of the multi-out synths like GPO for example
on my old system.  You've piqued my curiosity now - I'll have to go have a tinker.

Cheers - Cliff

Cliff - I do it that way all the time!  If GPO won't do that then I am glad I never bought it - even tho I thought about it several times and ended up with Kontakt.

tripecac - yes, you'd need the 8 or 16 out of kontakt and then create the outputs in the kontakt GUI to correspond to the output tracks in sonar, then you'll also need to route the individual instruments to the separate outputs in the kontatk GUI by selecting the output on each of the instruments.

for things like reverb and compression, etc, you can select those on the outputs themselves (by using the pull down menus on the output mixer) or, what I do is not use kontakt for that anyway and just use reverb and compression in sonar using plugins.  I normally use a reverb bus and just send parts of each of the output tracks to the reverb bus.

as far as scrolling thru the instruments to get to the correct one, yeah, there's no way around that really. 

I was unaware that you could freeze multiple instruments independently. I always assumed you froze the whole synth.

I always route each instrument of a multi-timbral synth to its own audio track, be it Kontakt or Superior Drummer or SampleTank or TTS-1. But I have always observed that freezing means every voice on that synth.

So how exactly do you go about freezing individual voices?

bitflipper


I was unaware that you could freeze multiple instruments independently. I always assumed you froze the whole synth.

I always route each instrument of a multi-timbral synth to its own audio track, be it Kontakt or Superior Drummer or SampleTank or TTS-1. But I have always observed that freezing means every voice on that synth.

So how exactly do you go about freezing individual voices?

Ah, I am very sorry, I meant to say "bounce."  freezing does indeed freeze all voices.  you can bounce individual ones, tho.

Ah, gotcha. Yes, I have bounced individual tracks to conserve CPU. But it doesn't give you the same benefits as freezing the synth, which prevents the libraries from loading which conserves memory and makes the project load faster. That's why I sometimes use multiple instances of Kontakt, so that I can freeze each voice individually. But overall, it's more efficient to use a single instance with multiple outs.