Native Instruments Cr*ppy Technical Support

[comma]

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?

[updog]

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

[sandbags]

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?

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

[simesf]

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...

[Jace-BeOS]

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.

[Coil]

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

[comma]

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.

[sandbags]

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

[hollowsun]

My problem is that Kontakt is losing or "missing" samples

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

[darsho]

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

Skype

[EvilDragon]

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.

[comma]

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...

[comma]

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.

[EvilDragon]

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

[comma]

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.