KVR :: Samples, Sampling and Sample Libraries » Native Instruments Cr*ppy Technical Support [View Original Topic]
There are 31 posts in this topic.

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comma - Thu Mar 29, 2012 11:31 am

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Does anybody know whether it exists?

I've attempted to call the numbers listed on the website (for America) and they put you into the 7th circle of call waiting hell, where all choices eventually lead to a wrong number recording. WTF.

My problem is that Kontakt is losing or "missing" samples, I don't know where they go. But it basically kills my desire to do anything music related since I can't tell if any work done today will be there tomorrow. This tech support bs just adds to the issue. I have gotten response via email after a couple of days that amounts to "upgrade to the latest update." Um... no. Put out a program that saves... how about that.
*End Rant*

How do you speak to human being at this place?

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updog - Thu Mar 29, 2012 12:37 pm

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are you sure kontakt can't just find the samples, even though they're really exactly where they're supposed to be? if so, i have the same problem. let me know how to deal with it if you get them to actually help with something

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sandbags - Fri Mar 30, 2012 12:31 am

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NI support are notoriously unreliable via email but usually I hear the phone support is good so I'm surprised to hear that's a problem too.

Have you signed up for the NI Kontakt forum? You can usually get help from the more experienced users there and for this kind of problem I would expect so.

Lastly your problem description is a little too vague for, for example, me to help you. When Kontakt loads an instrument and can't find samples it pops up a dialogue that describes the missing samples and gives you some options for finding them. Once found you then need to resave the instrument so that it can remember the new locations.

It would be useful to describe what's going on in as much detail as possible. For example is the problem that the samples are no longer where they were, or that you relocate the samples but don't save the instrument with the new sample locations, or that the save is failing, etc...

Also which version of Kontakt are you using? Which OS?

I realise that your thread was more along the lines of "NI support sucks" and you'd get no argument from me, I've had my own experiences of tickets that go unanswered for months at a time, but - at the same time - there is an opportunity for people to help you if you provide a good explanation of what's going wrong.

In any case I hope you get the problem sorted and can get back to music

Kind regards,

Matt

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simesf - Fri Mar 30, 2012 12:38 am

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Well this is worrying. I sent them an email at the start of this week saying that my new upgrade to Komplete 8 had the serial number sticker ripped off the back & so I had no serial number. Still waiting for a response...

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Jace-BeOS - Fri Mar 30, 2012 12:57 am

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Why is it that when companies start pushing their products harder with more arrogance and ditching products, that tech support & customer service goes straight to hell? All I read lately is the same story about NI service being abysmal.

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Coil - Fri Mar 30, 2012 1:12 am

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perhaps it is an option to call the german support using skype.
i never get an answer from them in their forum and also, i never get an answer on my emails but the german telephone support is very helpful and friendly.

next option to fix your problem is to use Redmaticas ProManager

http://www.redmatica.com/Redmatica/ProManager.html

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comma - Fri Mar 30, 2012 4:54 am

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Thank you for the responses and suggestions. Matt, since you very generously asked for more details, what follows is the crux of it. Basically, I'm building my first instruments, (a cheap vocal library) which I was hoping to post about on here in the new future. I've been editing samples in Reaper and then dragging them into Kontakt 4, where I map them by hand/ear.

I've been saving the samples and instrument on a folder on my desktop, to make it easy to find. I pick the sub-directory every time I save the instrument, which is about every 30 minutes. I also save the reaper file about once an hour.

I've been working on this instrument for months. At what seems like completely random points, when I launch reaper (and thus Kontakt w/the instrument) I get the missing sample dialogue. Pointing to the folder in which I am 95% certain where the samples should be (but for which, I'm not 100%) doesn't load the samples. In fact, clicking anything in that dialogue doesn't find the samples. They are just lost. In the past, I have chalked it up as a complete loss and moved on. But as you can see, it is impossible to stay motivated if what you do today may disappear tomorrow. So, for instance, yesterday when I opened up the instrument 1/7th of the samples had disappeared (basically, all of the previous days work... so, 5 hours gone).

I may try the German support, though I'm nervous about a $100 long distance charge but maybe skype is the answer to that.

Coil, thanks for the response. I would be happy to go the Redmatica route -- in fact, Rematica please take my money! -- but they are Mac only, and I"m on Win 7 with no desire to move over otherwise.

I very well could be doing something dumb, but since I'm not changing anything day to day, I don't understand the issue. Cheers.

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sandbags - Fri Mar 30, 2012 5:00 am

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Okay definitely go the Skype route, you're bound to be on hold for a while!

In terms of your problem, I have never had an occasion where using the "i'll tell you the folder go look for the samples" has failed to find them. At that point I should (but often forget to) save the instrument so the new sample location is fixed.

But it sounds to me like you're actually losing sample files. I'm not aware of anything Kontakt can be doing for that to happen.

Are you organising your samples with cogent file names? Are you sure you're not resaving them with different names? Do you have anything which might be "tidying" files from your desktop?

Although it's little comfort that I tell you I've never seen this (at least, it never comforts me when I hear it from others) I think if Kontkat were losing sounds like this generally it would be a well known problem in K4 or K5.

If it were me I'd make sure that the sample files were well named so I clearly knew which samples where which and where and, if it happens again, go and visually inspect the folder the lost samples are supposed to be in.

I'm Mac based so I have TimeMachine and, if any files did go missing, I could fish them out from my backup. I'm not sure what the options are on Windows but I guess you should be able to do the same.

If files really are disappearing then it's a case of tracking down the culprit.

I hope this helps.

Kind regards,

Matt

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hollowsun - Fri Mar 30, 2012 5:10 am

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This is a not an uncommon 'quirk' with Kontakt.

The NKI holds pathnames to the samples used within it. What can happen is that the pathname(s) don't work on YOUR computer. As a very simple example, the pathnames for samples on the developer's machine is:

c/library_name/samples/sample_names

However, you've put your new library on the D drive ...

d/library_name/samples/sample_names

So the NKI is looking for them on the C drive but can't find them (obviously) but they are safely there on the D drive.

When this happens, it should throw up a prompt ... "Missing Samples" or some such.

That prompt will have some options one of which is BROWSE FOR FOLDER. Click on that and a typical 'navigation' window will pop up. Navigate your way to the offending library and click on SAMPLES - the samples should now load.

NOW SAVE THAT NKI (using PATCH ONLY) to save the new pathnames. You won't (or shouldn't) be troubled by the problem again.

That's just a simple example - there are other factors that can be involved and sometimes it appears to happen for no reason whatsoever. I get it when people send me stuff (or I buy anything) created on a different system ... and sometimes my customers get it when they buy my stuff. And I might sell five, ten or twenty Music Lab Machine Bundles (for example) to people and just one of them will have the problem for no apparent reason whatsoever and the other people will be happy bunnies!

It can be a bugger for a dev to troubleshoot because it will work fine on his and his testers' systems and on the majority of customers' systems but just one customer will inexplicably have the problem.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,


Stephen

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darsho - Fri Mar 30, 2012 6:07 am

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Skype

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EvilDragon - Fri Mar 30, 2012 7:20 am

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1. Never EVER put your instruments and samples on your desktop. Designate a hard drive for your samples.

2. Use batch resave then save the NKI, then save the project file.

3. If you're developing instruments, do it in standalone first, then just test how it works in your DAW.

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comma - Fri Mar 30, 2012 12:25 pm

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Well for some reason American Tech Support works today (both Mac and PC). In gist, I've been told it is "user error." My method of recording all repetitions of one note at a time, chopping in Reaper, then dragging into Kontakt and relying on Reaper to change the name of each separate sample into (A4 render 1, A4 render 2) was prone to error.

I was also told that what likely happened was I dragged the same file into Kontakt more than once, and that's why samples are missing. Unfortunately, when I got off the phone with them I tried this out. I dragged the same file into Kontakt multiple times and Kontakt adds to the file name "render 1, render 2, render 3". So that seems unlikely to be the issue.

I was told this is not a known bug. "Don't believe what you hear on the internet." "If the samples aren't in the folder than Kontakt won't find them" -- thanks for that one. I asked to speak with a second tech support guy, after the first tech support guy was less than helpful. But the second guy seemed to have a chip on his shoulder too and after going over the same stuff over and over, refused my request to email a screen capture to check naming conventions. After saying my naming convention was faulty, he said "that's it" and I was hung up on.

It is possible there is human error here, but tech support was less then helpful getting to the bottom of the problem. They had very little desire to help figure out a solution to it. This whole thing is frustrating and extremely discouraging...

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comma - Fri Mar 30, 2012 12:30 pm

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One piece of information that might help others in the situation is that finding the missing samples, and pointing to those files wherever they are means that you won't have to remap them too. (And then re-saving as others have mentioned). That was useful, though not applicable here.

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EvilDragon - Fri Mar 30, 2012 12:39 pm

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I think it's very unlikely that naming convention has anything to do with missing samples.

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comma - Fri Mar 30, 2012 1:06 pm

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The suggestion was that if I brought in the same sample twice or two samples with the same name, that only one sample would be saved and thus the other would go missing. It seems unlikely though, since Kontakt adds "render 1, render 2" to each duplicate named sample, thus, avoiding that problem.

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comma - Fri Mar 30, 2012 1:38 pm

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The only other piece of info that might be useful here is that all of the missing samples are formatted with a suffix, in the following odd way: "Long Medium A 5 render 001-[3].wav" or "Long Medium B 4 render 006-[2].wav".

I have no idea where "-[2]" comes from. None of my naming conventions include that. Instead, all samples are just "Long Medium C3 render 003". With "render 003" being added by Kontakt or Reaper when each master wav is sliced breaking it into its individual repetition.

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mrtlikesrobots - Fri Mar 30, 2012 3:31 pm

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Hi comma,

Are you dragging the files directly from Reaper to Kontakt? I'm willing to bet this is your problem and its actually Reaper killing the files itself (I've had this happen before).

I know its a nice workflow and it saves a lot of time - but you would be much better off bouncing the files out of Reaper in to your own directory (with your own naming convention and directory structure) before importing them in to Kontakt.

This will help with a few things:

1) You will know what the file is supposed to be named (Reaper is probably appending numbers the the name of the file for some sort of internal book keeping or to deal with multiple files with the same name).

2) You will know exactly where the file is supposed to be if Kontakt decides it doesn't exist anymore.

3) By using the OS file browser to bring stuff in to Kontakt you will eliminate Reaper from the equation. This way, if it really is Kontakt erasing the file, you have more evidence.

Basically, just because Reaper allows you to drag the files around - don't assume that they had the workflow you're using in mind. You might be trying to use that feature in a way they haven't thought of and can't currently deal with!

I hope this post was helpful
-mrtlikesrobots

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hollowsun - Fri Mar 30, 2012 4:55 pm

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Are you editing the samples within Kontakt's own wave editor? If so, BIG mistake!

So...

You have "MyBigSampleC3.wav" assigned to (say) C3). Fine. Then you tweak it in Kontakt's wave editor and save it and it will create "MyBigSampleC3-[1].wav" (to distinguish it from the original "MyBigSampleC3.wav" you created). Depending on how you then save that NKI can determine whether or not it will find the -[1] variation or not when you try to subsequently load it. Hence, maybe, your 'lost samples' (but I'll bet they're all there ... somewhere)!

I am not quite sure (from your description) of exactly how you're working but I am with Mr Dragon - get it sorted at source, standalone, and make sure it all works there and once it's working reliably there, it should work elsewhere as a plug-in.

As for my other reply, I assumed you were referring to libraries you'd bought, whatever. My mistake but the principles still apply.

Cheers,


Stephen

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EvilDragon - Sat Mar 31, 2012 12:06 am

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Yes, I also agree, do NOT use Kontakt's Wave Editor (the [<number>] suffix tells me that you've used it) for editing samples. Use anything else, Audacity, Wavosaur, Wavelab, whatever, for editing samples. NOT Kontakt's own destructive wave editor!

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comma - Sat Mar 31, 2012 5:04 am

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Thank you for all of the great replies! I greatly appreciate it. You are all very generous with your time and knowledge!

My work flow has been to record the one notes multiple repetitions in Reaper. For example, I then have one .wav file in Reaper that may have 8 C3's on it. I do a rough slice to that .wav in reaper to separate each repetition into its own file. I then drag (alt + ctrl) into Kontakt, where I map every sample by ear. I then go back through and adjust the start time in the Kontakt wave editor to get the start and ending exactly where I want. In the process, I save patch and samples multiple times, and each time I save it I pick the sub-directory folder on my desktop to help ease finding the patches and samples.


Hollow Sun, if you would be so kind to elaborate on this... "Depending on how you then save that NKI can determine whether or not it will find the -[1] variation or not when you try to subsequently load it. Hence, maybe, your 'lost samples' (but I'll bet they're all there ... somewhere)!"

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hollowsun - Sat Mar 31, 2012 6:12 am

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I can't really because I don't use Kontakt's wave editor for the reasons stated and on the odd few occasions I have used it in the past, it plays up ... so I now never use it.

What I do is record the samples, slice 'em up and trim, edit, loop, normalise and whatever else in DSP Quattro and only when all the samples are done do I start bunging them at Kontakt (*) and I NEVER edit them or even tweak them in Kontakt's editor because it breaks things!!

(*) I might bung in the raw, unedited samples quickly to check that it's (kind of) ok and assuming it is, then I start the editing process.

I don't know Reaper or what it's like as an editor but it would be worth having a look at AUDACITY - free wave editor, Mac and PC and very handy to have a round.

Cheers,


Stephen

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comma - Sat Mar 31, 2012 6:31 am

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Thank you Stephen. I just ran across this: http://www.native-instruments.com/forum/showthread.php?p=1013659 . Which means those of you who point to the Wave editor are probably right as I have a feeling that is the issue. (Though, I haven't yet finished enough coffee to go experiment with it).

It is a rather shocking idea that in a "sampler", using the wave editor destroys samples. That seems like a pretty ginormous bug to me. The whole thing is worse given the attitude of the tech support people... . I'll post if I can duplicate this.

Thanks very much. You all are awesome. Oh, and Stephen, any plans to make your CP 70 compatible for Kontakt 4.2?

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hollowsun - Sat Mar 31, 2012 7:05 am

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Well, maybe NI know that most people don't use Kontakt's own sample editor (apart from being destructive, it's very clunky, slow, limited and I find it pretty much unusable ... especially compared with something like DSP Quattro ... or even the free Audacity!) so maybe fixing/improving it is not a priority for NI ... which I can kind of understand (coming from a manufacturing and development background).

There's a lot missing from Kontakt that even the humble S900 and S1000 had back in the 80s - the damned thing can't even 'sample' FFS - and it took a while for me to get used to it after the relative simplicity of the Akai samplers. But that aside, what you can do with samples once you've got them in there is pretty astonishing especially with the scripting. The fact that I can 'design' my own Music Lab Machines and configure the voice architecture pretty much as I want it is testament to that, I think - I couldn't do that on any other sampler (with the exception of the new Mach V perhaps). And Kontakt has such a wide user base.


Ermmm ... it IS compatible with K4.2.x! Or do you mean tart up the GUI with fancier graphics?


Cheers,


Stephen

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Jace-BeOS - Sat Mar 31, 2012 7:31 am

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When you drag samples from Reaper, what happens to the source data? Reaper isn't intended to be an audio editor, is it? If the Reaper project later eliminates these audio bits (the ones you've dragged into Kontakt), because you're done editing them, what happens when you save the Reaper project? What happens to audio recorded in Reaper when the project isn't saved?

When I send samples out of Sonar for fine editing in Sound Forge, the files are temporary creations that Sonar re-imports after the editing has been completed (it recognizes the changed state of the temporary file and imports it into the project in place of the original version already present). With such a workflow, I imagine it would be very unreliable to use Sonar as an audio editor for another tool (besides the fact that it has almost no actual audio editing functions, the file handling is not intended for permanence).

As others have suggested, run Kontakt standalone and use a standalone editor for your audio. If you really prefer to use Reaper for recording and editing, don't drag and drop your audio. Save clips of audio from Reaper and load them into Kontakt.

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Jace-BeOS - Sat Mar 31, 2012 7:39 am

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PS: a lot of "user error" is actually the result of software providing features that users discover novel ways to use but which aren't the intended uses. It's not so much that the user is wrong as the user has made use of what's available and the tools have failed to guide the user toward preferred workflows (or warn against anything unintended). This is a normal act of computing. Any tech support that gives out bad attitudes, instead of sincerely instructing the user on the intended workflow, basically deserves to be brutally slammed as poor service. This too (lousy support attitudes) is very common in computing. It won't change until it costs them (& many companies never actually realize they exist for their customers).

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bbaggins - Sat Mar 31, 2012 8:31 am

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Thank you, Stephen, for the warning about Kontakt's wave editor. I've never used it, simply because I am more comfortable with Adobe Audition. But now, because of this thread, I know something I didn't know before and forewarned is forearmed. I visit KVR almost daily but it's not every day I actually learn something useful here. So thanks again.

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comma - Sat Mar 31, 2012 8:51 am

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I've managed to reproduce the results twice now. In the wave editor, going over to "sample editor" and making a change (I used "fade out") adds the "-[2]" to the end of the sample name. Saving and reloading the instrument gives you the "missing samples" prompt. (Though I think the sample may still be there it just no longer has "-[2]" connected with the name.... not 100% on this part of it). Also, like the Native Instruments support post I linked to, you can watch the file folder and as soon as you close Reaper the files with "-[2]" disappear.

I guess I don't quite understand the point of buying and using a wave editor (especially when Kontakt has one and you have Reaper) but I'll have to investigate more and for the time being I'll try audacity and waveosaur to see what I've been missing.

Stephen, on your product page under CP 70 it says Kontakt 3.5. I presumed that meant compatible up to 3.5, perhaps it is compatible back to 3.5? Either way, I was confused. I'm glad it's compatible with 4.2 cause it sounds awesome!

Again, thanks for everybody's help!

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comma - Sat Mar 31, 2012 9:09 am

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Apologies for the forum litter but, when given the "missing samples" prompt one can go in and click the file name, however that file name will no longer have "-[2]" at the end of it. This will load the missing sample... without the edits that were made in "sample editor." So in my previous example, it will load the sample but without the "fade out." Which means, that at least it isn't a total washout... Just fyi.

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EvilDragon - Sat Mar 31, 2012 2:24 pm

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I would suggest NOT doing drag&drop from Reaper to Kontakt. Render your files in Reaper, then load those rendered samples from Kontakt's browser to its mapping editor.

Do not use destructive Wave Editor functions in Kontakt, they seem to mess with sample references somehow. If you need a fade in/out, use a zone envelope.

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jancivil - Sat Mar 31, 2012 4:48 pm

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do you have Kontakt set to follow a relative (vs absolute) path [for the samples]?

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hollowsun - Sat Mar 31, 2012 5:02 pm

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^^ Wot he said!

Seriously - have a look at Audacity ... it's free but it is very good. Has all the stuff you'll need - trim start and end (with zoom in/out to really in there for fine editing), fade in/out, normalisation, EQ, compressor, time stretch, noise removal and more. The only thing (unfortunately) it doesn't do is loop but unless I am mistaken, it sounds like you're not looping anyway. It really IS worth having a look at - won't cost you anything and might be just the ticket. Even if it's not, it's handy to have.




All Kontakt stuff is VX.X.x or higher.

Cheers,


Stephen

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There are 31 posts in this topic.