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After so many requests and such a long wait, it's finally here! This is a detailed tutorial on how to make Lite Versions of KONTAKT libraries. I initially planned to make a forum post, but I realised that the length would be too long for a forum post. So I decided to make a PDF instead.

In this tutorial, I've taken the conversion of one of my previous libraries, Cinematic Studio Strings rLV as an example. The tutorial goes through all the steps of the conversion process in detail. Screenshots have been added wherever appropriate to make the understanding clearer. The steps have been given based on the procedure I use and justifications have been given as well. Wherever possible, a few alternate methods have been discussed.

The links to the various tools and utilities used during the conversion process would be found below. Also, there are links of few forum threads which have some important discussion related to the utility. The reader is encouraged to go through these threads.

Hopefully after completing this tutorial you'll be able to go ahead and make your own Lite Versions of various libraries! Even though this tutorial is intended for those completely new to this subject, I hope that experienced LV makers might some find some use for it as well, in the form of alternate methods to do things.

I'd like to thank everyone who has been waiting so patiently for this tutorial, and apologise for taking so long to complete it. I hope everything was clear and easy to follow. Feel free to contact me via PMs in case you have any doubts or ask them in the thread here and I'll be happy to help!

Wishing you all happy holidays ahead!

LINKS:
1. TUTORIAL: How To Make Lite Versions of KONTAKT Libraries (PDF) (Archive password: rollerball)
2. Total Commander + inNKX
3. conNCW (Related forum thread)

 

Wow, thank you very much, it's very helpful, all the best for you, sir

 

ultralight! love your opensourcishness! this tutorial will generate much happiness!!

 

I'm... wow... no words.
Thanks infinitly man.
Been waiting for this for so long, I was patient and silent. But it's here.
You can't imagine how you're changing my life, from now on.
It's been months, or years, that I have to much space-consuming Libs, and want to minify them. We can't minify almost everything, compress almost everything, audio files, video files, almost every format can be compressed. (Except VST's maybe, unless you got some serious RE skills) and my Kontakt banks are -with VST's- the last thing I couldn't compress.
I will, you will, save a ton of space on my drives.

Thanks again brother, love your work and the passion to share/help. Love you !

 

I hope so!

Thank you so much for being so patient. Hopefully the wait was worth it.

 

Thanks for doing this Rollerball, it's very good of you.

FYI for anyone trying this - this box popped up during a sample extraction and it translates as:
"Failed to extract file "filename"
Read error: unexpected end of file
Failed to extract files: 1 of 4559"

I don't know how to fix it but at least you know!

 

Last edited: Dec 28, 2021

Did you follow the instructions for the installation provided by xupito?

 

Yes. It was only this one file - the rest extracted without any problem. I'm not too bothered by this as it's a room mic sample which I was going to delete anyway.

I have run into another problem however (see attached). conNCW converted every sample from ncw to wav apart from this one but I don't know why this message appears. I tried it with the version you provided as well as the latest 06 one and get the same result. Any ideas please?

 

Great work. Amazing
This a tutorial I planned to do but I'm too lazy

 

It's a shot in the dark, but this could be due to long folder names plus the file name (max is still 256 letters for several programs)
The second seems like a bug though.

 

Interesting, I don't think that's the case here as I'm doing it on the desktop rather than deeper down in a folder somewhere, but I'll keep that in mind anyway - thanks Xupito.

In the end, I was able to get that sample to convert by dropping it into Kontakt and doing a Save As patch + samples (uncompressed). I was able to do the bit depth reduction with it afterwards as well, so it seems like it worked OK and isn't corrupted or anything.

 

conNCW does nothing when I double click or use the "run as admin" option. How do you get it open? I'm on Windows 10.

 

Read the instructions rollerball gave. You have to run it with command-line options. You're not meant to run it by opening the exe file directly. I believe there's a graphical patch for conNCW if you do want to run it that way though

 

Ah I see, thanks.

 

This is confusing the hell out of me. I want to convert a Kontakt library to Wav files. Firstly I assume I need to unpack the nkx files? Total Commander appears to do that, but the unpacked ncw files aren't visible in Windows explorer for some reason, I have an empty folder but the folder properties state there are several gigs of files there which is strange?

Then how do I open conNCW in Commander as I can't see any instructions for this and it's not shown in the tutorial video?

Thanks

 

Ignore that, figured it out after reading through the kvraudio forum and found the graphical patch.

 

IIRC in some libraries the main "Samples" folder is a hidden folder for some reason, so that might have been the reason. why you weren't able to see the samples.

Have you gone through the main PDF thoroughly? I've listed each and every step in detail. You don't use conNCW in Total Commander. As pointed out by Meric above, you run it via Command Prompt or PowerShell. In the working directory, hold the Shift key and right-click, and you'll see the option "Open PowerShell window here...". Click on it and follow the commands given in the PDF.
Also note that the tutorial video only shows the usage of Total Commander and inNKX. It doesn't show the usage for conNCW.

Great that you got the graphical utility working. I found it just as I was about to upload the files, so I avoided including it just in case something doesn't work in the way described in the tutorial.

 

Last edited: Dec 29, 2021

Double post. Please ignore.

 

I'm working on shrinking down Spitfire Symphonic Strings and took out the samples labelled _a_ (for the Ambient mics), and labelled _l_ (lowercase L - I'm not sure what they're related to), but somehow the interface is now messed up (see attached) despite copy-pasting everything besides the original samples to a new folder and redirecting Kontakt to it. There are hanging notes too.

Has that happened to you before, Rollerball, and if so, is it an easy fix?

 

Last edited: Dec 30, 2021

If I'm not wrong, the "l" represents the "Leader" mic. The library has 5 mics: Close(c), Tree(t), Ambient(a), Outrigger(o) and Leader(l). The Outrigger mics are placed farther than the Tree but are placed wider. The Leader is a mic that's placed near the leader of each section.

Regarding the screenshot you attached above, the reason for the GUI breaking is that the resource container wasn't found. The resource container generally contains all the elements of the GUI as well as many scripts, so the hanging note issue might have been caused due to that as well.
Look for files with ".NKR" extension. Generally they're placed inside the "Samples" folder. It should have shown up in the missing files list.