Is Kontakt 8 more optimized?

[Lawrence]

I’m doing a job that’s fairly demanding of resources. I’m using a lot of instances of Kontakt 8, or at least more than I usually do, and my aging beast of an i9 iMac is barely blinking.

I’m fairly new to K8 and I realize that most of you who are on Mac aren’t on Intel. Still I wonder-are you finding K8 less demanding of resources than K5 or 6?

[Guy Rowland]

I honestly don't know, will be interested to hear others perspectives. My flawed sense is that 4 and 5 were good, 6 was getting a bit woozy, 7 was a mess, 8 is bringing it back.

[wst3]

I haven't tried to beat the snot out of Kontakt 8 yet, but thus far it works (even if I struggle a bit with the new UI). Perhaps I should pull up an old project that made the poor thing pant?

[Lawrence]

Bill, if you do please let me know the results!

[Luke]

Having used v6 as a workhorse for way too long, my sense is that v5 was king for me. Loved that version, it was stable on my system and light on resources, and we had ample time before the quicker updates of the following version, or so I seem to remember. K8 is doing mighty fine though, especially considering its predecessor. It's fairly stable if not quick. Resource management seems ok to me. I downgraded to 64 GB on a laptop from 96 GB and so far it has not been an issue at all. Buffers are low and the engine handles everything well enough, even in mixed environments (K6 + K8, legacy projects/templates). I'm optimistic that they're listening.

[Lawrence]

Hey Luke,

Good to hear. Luckily, I skipped Kontakt 7 so the bad experiences of others were never an issue. It was always 5 and 6 for me, and while they seemed ok, Kontakt 8 seems to be more efficient.

Up to this point I have had mixed sessions (due to some concern about how Kontakt 8 would function.) This is the first session I’ve gone with K8 exclusively and it’s been a happy experience.

[Luke]

Same, Larry. I've built the latest doc template around K8. It's working well, or at least I'm not noticing any hang-ups that are out of the ordinary (I do get some random crashes but they seem connected to Logic as a whole and are rare enough to leave alone).

[Guy Rowland]

This thread has reminded me that VSL got half way through auto-migrating old versions of Kontakt in VE Pro and appear to have given up. You can go from VST3 6 to 8, but can't go back any further into VST2 days. It's definitely technically possible. Would be lovely to do that and I think I could forget every early version of Kontakt completely.

[Lawrence]

Yeah, that reminds me.

It appears Im stuck with Kontakt 8.01 unless I go from Monterey to (at least) Ventura. Does anyone remember Ventura breaking anything? (I know this is prolly a distant memory for most.)

[GR Baumann]

(I do get some random crashes but they seem connected to Logic as a whole and are rare enough to leave alone).

Tahoe? So far no crashes here, Sequoia 15.7.3

[Lawrence]

Upgrade fun-

To upgrade my Kontakt 8, I would have to upgrade my OS to Sequoia. Sadly, my version of Cubase wont run on Sequoia, so I would have to update that first. I’m in the middle of three client projects and can’t take the chance, so I’m stuck where I am at present.

Forced obsolescence is always the case as companies need to make money. I’m always tempted to stay where I am for as long as possible, but this stuff is going to have to happen eventually. I stayed on a MacPro with a later addition of VEP and a Mini for 11 years, 2008-2019. I was a year early in my purchase of the last Intel but it’s worked flawlessly with 128 GB of cheap RAM and eventually 11 (!) SSDs. Ah well.

[Guy Rowland]

Yeah wait til all the client projects are over! It'll be worth it in the end, cos all the irritations you currently have will only get worse with each passing year.

[Lawrence]

Yeah wait til all the client projects are over! It'll be worth it in the end, cos all the irritations you currently have will only get worse with each passing year.

Yep yep. Same old same old.

[Mike Greene]

I'm always happy to complain about Native Instruments, but even as a die hard Mac lover, I have to concede Apple is the bigger villain. I'm on Sequoia right now, but it has plenty of issues, most notable (for me) with Kontakt 6.8 being occasionally unstable. Along with Mail and other apps randomly quitting, this is probably the worst OS I've ever been on. (Mind you I haven't been on that many. I'm a "drop anchor" kind of guy. You know, as if I'm the only one. )

I'd love to move to another a newer OS, but will Kontakt 6.8 be less stable? (As a favor to other upgrade-reluctants like myself, we intentionally encode in K6.8, so I need to keep it working here.) Will my version of Pro Tools work? (It's a perpetual license, but I let the upgrades subscription expire.) Will I have to upgrade Screenflow again??? (Those guys are worse than Waves.) What about the countless other apps that I don't really think about until I need them? I really want to get out of Sequoia, but I can't help but feel it will be an "out of the pot, into the fire" situation.

Ventura's days are numbered for Kontakt support, by the way.

[Luke]

(I do get some random crashes but they seem connected to Logic as a whole and are rare enough to leave alone).

Tahoe? So far no crashes here, Sequoia 15.7.3

Same here, 15.7.3.

[Luke]

I'm always happy to complain about Native Instruments, but even as a die hard Mac lover, I have to concede Apple is the bigger villain. I'm on Sequoia right now, but it has plenty of issues, most notable (for me) with Kontakt 6.8 being occasionally unstable. Along with Mail and other apps randomly quitting, this is probably the worst OS I've ever been on. (Mind you I haven't been on that many. I'm a "drop anchor" kind of guy. You know, as if I'm the only one. )

I'd love to move to another a newer OS, but will Kontakt 6.8 be less stable? (As a favor to other upgrade-reluctants like myself, we intentionally encode in K6.8, so I need to keep it working here.) Will my version of Pro Tools work? (It's a perpetual license, but I let the upgrades subscription expire.) Will I have to upgrade Screenflow again??? (Those guys are worse than Waves.) What about the countless other apps that I don't really think about until I need them? I really want to get out of Sequoia, but I can't help but feel it will be an "out of the pot, into the fire" situation.

Ventura's days are numbered for Kontakt support, by the way.

Hm, sounds to me like you could benefit from having an older MacBook Air or similar as your coding/demo machine and upgrade whatever you’re using now.