After researching these two nagging questions everywhere online, I decided to ask our own Kontakt guru(s) and pick their brains regarding:

1) What is the last version of Kontakt 5 I can safely run on Snow Leopard? I'm running 5.0.1.15371 at the moment, along with 4, and while that used to be just fine for most things, I'm currently hitting a wall where most of the recent library releases (Big Fish Audio's Goth, for example) require a later version of Kontakt 5 in order to run. I plan on upgrading to Lion on my old MacBook eventually, but for the moment, I'm stuck on Snow Leopard.

2) I have an old Intakt instrument, "Sound of the 70's". I can still open the standalone in Snow Leopard and play it, but, of course, I have no way of loading it into a DAW or any other method (Bidule, AE's Rax, ReWire, Jax ipMIDI) that would allow me to use it on my system. The obvious solution is to open the library in Kontakt, which I've done. Unfortunately, opening it in Kontakt 4 or 5 eliminates the GUI, keyswitches and whatever time/beat slices set up in the Intakt version, meaning that none of the looped instruments or components work the way they're supposed to -- certainly not the way they work in the Intakt instrument. A recent check on Zero-G's page suggests they're now selling it as a Kontakt instrument (though I've never seen it anywhere but there!), though their support page suggests there might be software updates that might allow the library to run properly inside of Kontakt, though it's only apparently available from the NI Service Center; I've never seen any updates posted anywhere else. Is there any way to get this to run properly inside of Kontakt?

Sorry for the pestering! And thanks in advance for any help you guys can provide!

 

i am am using 5.3.1 in Snow Leopard 10.6.8 i have not figured out how to get the Standalone to work in 10.6.8 but the VST works in Cubase 5 mac for me

 

You can use any Kontakt 5 version on Snow Leopard. So far as i know.

I have no idea about Intakt to Kontakt. Id say get the AU/VST etc for Intakt to use it in a DAW or find a way to use that library in kontakt. Or just take the loss and move onward.

Sorry i dont have better suggestions on the second question. When NI drops support, you have very few options. Any KORE owners know that.....

 

Thanks for the reply! Sorry I wasn't more specific with my second question: Intakt (as far as I know) stopped working after Tiger. For some reason, you can still open the standalone and play it in Snow Leopard -- obviously, it's different architecture -- but the AU, what I use, is the old-school Intel/PPC hybrid that no current DAW, two-track editor or virtual rack software using CoreAudio even acknowledges existing. It's invisible to any plug-in scans, so it can't even be force-loaded.

Zero-G seems to be selling just the .wav files and some .nki's on the product page, which basically is just the library folder from the Intakt installer, but I can't imagine these files weren't re-written in order to make them work in current versions of Kontakt. Just dropping the library folder into Kontakt 4 and 5, which is what they suggest owners of the intakt instrument do to play it in Kontakt, is practically unusable.

 

i have "StormDrum Intakt" Intakt instrument and i open it with Kontakt.

Look at the instrument files, if they are .nki , it will open.
You may also try to add library in kontakk , since it is Based on the Kontakt sampling engine

good luck

 

Googling for 3 minutes gave me:
http://www.native-instruments.com/forum/threads/kontakt-5-and-stormdrum-intakt-ver-incompatibility.169391/

Short excerpt:
... try this:
1. Load up one patch.
2. Open instrument edit mode (the wrench).
3. Open the group editor and make sure edit all groups is on.
4. Go to the Source module and find the Speed knob. Click in its black area to the right of the knob (where the unit of measurement is). You should get a pulldown menu. Choose "zone".
...

I've tried it with exactly the library you have, and the "Speed=zone" trick in beat machine mode did it. It also works in Time Machine 2 mode, so just play around a bit with the options in group editor. The loops will play back at constant tempo, pitch-shifted to the key you're playing. Works as it's supposed to if you don't go to extremes (as always with time machine ;-)

 

They do open in Kontakt, they just don't load or play properly, except for the non-sliced loops, which will load and play through once. The sliced loops, which are the bulk of the library, load as single sounds. Meaning, if you have a sliced version of a bassline loop, it will load up and allow you to play one note of that bassline. I assume Intakt has a special time-based slice playback that Kontakt doesn't.

I'll give it a shot! Thanks!

 

Ah, one more thing I just noticed:
For drum loops and other sliced material, with moderate bpm deviations it seems that "beat machine" with Speed=zone, Sl.Atk=30ms, Sl.Rls=3ms, Tracking and Release Trigger and internal trigger all switched off, works best. Time machine tends to kill attack transients badly.
So yes, Kontakt *will* use the Intakt slice information in beat machine mode!
Have fun

 

I actually tried the method as you suggested. While there was definitely a change in the single key trigger in the beat-sliced patches -- the speed changed -- the slices themselves are still placed across the keyboard (in other words, each key plays a sliced part one time through when pressed).

Thanks everybody for your help and suggestions! I plan on re-scouring the Web to see if this alleged "patch" that allows Intakt instruments to play properly inside of Kontakt is somehow available. There also may be an update to the instrument itself, I've just never run across it.

 

So what exactly are you missing? Shouldn't it be this way?
You can always save the loops as wave files and slice them in Recycle once you've decided which ones to use in your current project. IMHO Rex files would be a better option in this case because you can use them in mostly any DAW without eating up Kontakt resources, not to mention the advantage that the Rex files can be saved along with your project, while with Kontakt, only references to programs are saved.

As for the update, I have only seen disappointed users who just had to accept that they bought a proprietary sample library that can hardly be used anymore today. Did Zero-G care about them? Of course they didn't.
With sample library developers optimizing profit over "longevity", we'll certainly hear more about such closed-format problems in the future.
Well, in fact even the Rex format is closed-source, only the playback library is for free, but at least the major DAWs like Reaper, Logic, Ableton, Studio One, Tracktion, Cubase, Orion and others do support it.

 

Great responses Guys

smooth as butter

 

It's not even close to the functionality or presentation inside of the original Intakt standalone GUI -- it does, however, help out a little. Any insight you guys have given me here has been deeply appreciated!

As I said in a previous post, the product page on Zero-G's site is now selling just the .wav files, and I assume they're the same ones I have, as well as a collection of .nki files. I can't imagine that these are the same .nki files I have with the Intakt version, because they would load up just as mangled in Kontakt as mine do.

As for your statement, I agree! It's artificially making libraries obsolete, which is a shame, because many of them are still extremely useful. Not even Zero-G's later offerings along the same genre lines sound quite as good. NI seems to have a long history of outdating their own product for no really good reason (Pro-53, B4-II, etc.), but at least most of that stuff still runs on the newer operating systems. If they were hellbent on outmoding Intakt, they should have at least made sure there was a way to keep using those instruments at full functionality.

 

There's another way but it needs workmanship
If a group of scripters get together we can re-create intakt(maybe better too) for Kontak 5 and up above for all the old products, once we get the template in place everything else is gravy

I'll see if there is any interest from other scripters but right now is a busy time for most of us but I'll take under consideration

 

That sounds amazing, if it ever happens! And I appreciate your help with this!

FYI, I answered my own other question: depending on where you find it, there IS a way to run Kontakt 5.3 in Snow Leopard (even if it's slightly complicated to execute) ... so far, both the AU and the standalone work great on my slow-assed machine and are running libraries built for higher than 5.0.1 with no problem.