This is by far the most common issue when you modify the Samples folder. The fuckers almost always put the .nkr file there.
I say fuckers because there's an official NI Kontakt "Resources" folder that almost nobody uses. And the r stands for resources. Almost always images, some IRs perhaps,...

It's always a very good idea to backup your instruments and nkr files. In your great guide you explain the reason for the instruments. But the nkr file, that little poor forgotten guy lol... backup it too, this time because you end up losing it sometimes.
I've a WinRar profile only for that.

 

Exactly, and it's so annoying! I always make a "Resources" folder for my conversions just so that I can avoid it. And I should add it to the guide in an update.

 

Same here. Backup of instruments, nkr and nicnt (in fact anything but the samples) and then create the resources folder and move any nkr, image and so on. But backing the instruments and moving the nkr out of the samples folder is the really important stuff.

Funny thing is I was away all day but thinking perhaps I should recommend you to include that. If people follow your guide that problem shouldn't happen. But is soo tempting, speaking from experience Learned that the very, very, hard way

 

That's what I thought too, but I'm not using the Professional/expanded edition. I'm using the Standard which only has CTA. It's very weird they have an entire sample group which isn't required :s. I did get this from 'the Russians' originally so perhaps they stripped down a Professional version to make this one. Although, the sample size for the whole product does match up with SA's website so maybe it is meant to be like this.

Ah ok, I saw the nkc and nkr on the top level so thought they belonged there. I didn't know they went in the Samples folder. I checked the original folder and voila, they were in there. Thanks very much

 

Hey @rollerball !
I'm back after my first custom lite version (8Dio Symphonic Shadows - not very useful to minify, the original is 4Gb so no real point to minify it but was just for the test, to be quicker as a first try).
Everything went fine, thanks again man, love you.

I just had one question, about the "Batch re-save" part.
Just for the sake of the conversion, I re-DL the 6.1.1 ver. of Kontakt because I'm actively using the 6.6.0, and as you said in the guide, and as I already noticed myself in my daily use, Batch re-save is not allowed anymore with my 6.6.0 ver.
I just downloaded the 6.1.1 in portable version, so I can have it in a corner of my PC just for the light versions conversion, and being able to keep my main 6.6.0.
So my question was:
As Kontakt warns you when you Batch Re-Save, the process is supposed to make your lib not working on earlier versions of Kontakt, but may it corrupt the lib for later versions ?
Did you have any trouble batch re-saving from for example 6.1.1 and using the lib on 6.2/6.5.0 etc ?
And can we guess a future compatibilty issue with new versions of Kontakt ?
Just so we can think of a solution to prevent it.
Maybe I'm paranoid, sorry bro, but just wondering if we may have some troubles in the future. Even if you can't read the future, as you know the "technology" behind Kontakt and their formats, you may know a potential future trouble.

Thanks a lot, wish you the best day, and happy new year mate ! (you too @Xupito , thanks for the parts of the guide that belongs to you)

 

No problem with future versions compatibility.

Also, keeping only the executable of earlier versions usually does the trick. So you have:
Kontakt.exe ->6.6.0 version
Kontakt.exe -> v6.1.1 version in other folder or better yet, renamed to Kontakt_v6.1.1.exe
First, backup both. Then you replace Kontakt.exe (v6.6.0) with Kontakt.exe (v6.1.1). Launch it an do the resave.

NOT GUARANTEED TO WORK, HAVEN'T TESTED IT THROUGHLY.
So just in case don't try it until @rollerball confirms it or not. I have enough pissed people after my ass, no need for more

 

Hey Xupito, thanks for the answer.
It reassures me. As I said, it may looked a bit paranoid but we never know, I prefered to ask.
I have more than 10To of Kontakt libs, so I will work on light versions maybe for months lmao. But it worths the hard work. In percentage, I'll free few To, which is incredible. But yeah a lot of work. Maybe I'll try to automate some parts with AutoHotKey or whatever. I'm not a programmer but I'm a self-taught on just the things I need. I'll learn to automate this maybe Idk. Because some software interactions like Ozone RX, setting the folders paths etc may be hard to automate. At least for a newbie.
No problem, even if I need to do all the steps manually for each libs, I still think it's worth the work.
Time is precious but so is the hard drive space for us lol.

As I have the portable versions of both Kontakt versions, I think I'll keep them like this, just to ensure eveything works perfectly. But I'll keep in mind your tips to backing up only the .exe.

No risk I'll be pissed after you, mate lmao. Your help is very precious, as the Rollerball's help.

Thanks guys !

EDIT: @Xupito I read your bio and what a coincidence man, I'll see Dream Theater in concert soon, and Devin Townsend will do the first part. Didn't listen to Devin since my College days, but back in the days, I loved its music so much.

 

Will definitely include the note about the resource containers in the update!

Not at all! As explained by Xupito, all versions of KONTAKT are backwards-compatible. Stuff made in ancient versions like KONTAKT 3 still work in current versions, so current versions should be fully compatible with future versions too.

I can see why you might be paranoid. Damn that's a lot of libraries.
If you plan on doing this for your whole collection, you might like to wait for a while. Fellow user @Meric is working on a utility that automates the whole process!

If you're using Portable versions, there's absolutely nothing you need to worry about. Portable versions keep everything in a single folder so you can have as many versions as you like side by side. I have like 5 Portable versions on my machine.
IIRC I remember reading a few threads where they said even legit users can keep multiple versions of KONTAKT, so you should face no problem.

 

@rollerball I translated (almost) all inNKX strings (and dialogs) to English, care to see? Also made a small wrapper for it to use inNKX from console

 

Wow that's awesome! Would love to see how it works.
That wrapper might be really useful for the utility that Meric has been working on, since right now the only thing it doesn't do is packing and unpacking of NKX containers.

 

This is very cool. I can see @rollerball 's hard work is producing a positive rollbaling effect... wait... I mean... snowballing, was it?
(sry, I can't help it )

I only miss @bobdule in this thread, probably the biggest authority in mesing with Kontakt after R2R. Bobbbb, hang out here with us a little! Say hi at least... do something...

You mean that convNcwWav utility?

Congrats for your good progressive musical taste . What a gig! Devin is the man, and his sense of humor... I totally love the guy
I also love Nightwish

 

Thanks, it reassures me even more, Xupito's advice + yours, no need to worry about lol. As @Xupito says later, this thread is being more and more interesting, you really created a very good thing Rollerball. I think you litterally helped the future of Kontakt managing. Maybe it will be wrapped in a software, or maybe with different and more convenient tools in the future, but you definetly started it.

Yeah that's a lot of libraries, I'm a collector-producer-type sadly. I must have everything that I can, that's almost a disease. I keep DLing libs everyday as at least one is release each day on the sister site... That's a huge personal issue I understand it but can't help it lmao.
I did not know that Meric planned to do a complete tool for this, this is like... insane. I said it, you started a very huge thing man. In 2022 people will naturally minify their libs with a simple software, that's how the things are interesting. One man begin to mess with stuff, it inspires other people which tries to simplify the process of even pack it up in a software if they have the skill to, and that's how we have 90% of the open-source projects available on the internet. This community really amaze me.
But for me, even if I might wait for the utility, to minify all my libs faster, I'm impatient. I really waited so much for this tutorial. Not that you took too much time, not at all, but because personally I DL too fast and too much to be able to wait more, sadly. And I don't want to put pressure on anybody because of my collection/file manegement problems. That might be a lot of manual work, but I must start as soon as possible for my Drives' health.
But you know, with my tremendous amount of libs, even if I don't wait, I'm pretty sure Meric will release the tool when I'll have minify like 10% of my libs lmao.

Yeah this advantage of Portable versions really helps me. I think I'll keep this setup with 2 versions, one up-to-date (or up-to-date for a non-legit ver.) and one in 6.1.1, the latest one that can have the "Batch Re-save". (Keep wishing that this feature will be available again in the future updates but don't really think it's gonna happens...) I think NI noticed that Batch Re-save allows us to manipulate the libs a little more than they want to. From my experience with Kontakt since years, even without the technical knowledge like you, even just as a producer pov, I've seen that Kontakt is meant to be really rigid. When you want to sort your libs, make skins, or whatever. For sort the libs in folder but keeping the main library panel (the one with the libs wallpaper etc) the only solution I've found was to make SymLink. I have all my libs in a folder, and I don't add them in kontakt in this folder. Then I "hide" this folder, I created some few folders to sort by category (like "Brass" "Winds" etc) and create SymLink for each Lib in its category. When I add the category folders to kontakt as custom folders, it recongnizes all the libs inside, and in the main library panel I can have, instead of individual libs, my custom folders with custom wallpaper (that you can add with the "Manage" utility).
I've tweaked it so much to try it all. I ended with SymLink because the 2 other options were 1) Copy/paste the libs in their category folders, or 2) Shortcuts. But Copy/pasting doesn't really fits because I have lots of libs that belongs to many libraries at once, and having libs copied 2/3/4 times takes a lot of space for nothing. And Shorcuts doesn't work as Kontakt doesn't recognizes Shortcuts. But SymLink are different, it really is recognizes as the folder you refering to. + SymLink are litterally 0Ko, not like the shortcuts. I really like SymLink. xD But with your technical knowledge I'm sure I'm not teaching anything to anyone with this lol.

Now I have another question.
Xupito and Rollerball, you too seems to be very experience with minified versions, and maybe other people...
Could you make a brief reminder on what's the mics you better have to get rid of ?
I mean, I guess almost every libs shares some mics, like you said "Mix" "Room" etc but can we have a tiny list on the complete possibilities (from your experience only) of mics and how are they likely to be removed ?
I can test it all by myself but prefer to trust some experienced people.
For the example, my test lib was 8Dio Symphonic Shadows (4.2Go so just for the test) but the mics were randomly labelled. They were sorted in folder in the Samples directory so at least props to this, but the labelled were Decca, Spot 1 and Spot 2. At least for Brass and Winds (the Sample folder is splitted in Brass, Strings, and Winds), only the Strings folder contained a Mix too. As all the folders contained "Decca" I assumed that it was the main mic. So for the test I only deleted the Spot 2 when it was here. At the end of testing, the sound is good so I think I didn't remove any essential mic but it was completly random, I may did a mistake, or not, it ended well but it was pure chance. (Tbh I didn't completly understand the tutorial part were you find the mics you want to delete by tweaking the mapping in Kontakt, pressing keys etc, because when I pressed a note in my Kontakt, it was triggering every mode in the mapping, or at least I didn't understand the mapping interface. But don't worry, I'll surely learn it by doing it.)
So yeah, if we can have basic list of most reccurent mics, and their % of utility in usage, would be awesome.

Thanks a lot mates, happy new year, have the best day !

 

Yes I'd love for a way to use inNKX from console that would be fantastic. Would you mind sharing it with me?

I sort of already have a very beta version that's kind of workable. It's quite slow however and considering you have terabytes of libraries it may take you a while. The main reason why it's slow is that it really doesn't do any threading (Aside from having the minify process and the GUI on separate threads) so it only runs through one file at a time. Once I add that though performance should hopefully be pretty good. It utilizes swr or soxr (Both through ffmpeg) as the resampler method. I haven't tested it compared to Izotope or Reaper (Which uses r8brain now). Quality wise it was better than Reapers old resampler, but I believe now r8brain and izotope are both a little bit higher quality. I don't think this matters too much however since these quality differences are pretty minute and inaudible. (And I also believe other DAWS like Cubase also use soxr) Main concern is probably speed but I haven't tested that either.


As for which mics to handle.

Generally I only leave behind 1 spot mic. I usually always leave behind the decca tree mic as the "main" mic. A good amount of ambient noise with some definition as well. Usually I'll sack anything beyond decca tree such as outriggers or surround mics. I love the room sound they give, but I don't love the disk space they take up so I usually opt for a reverb instead, even if it sounds a little worse.

 

No, Meric is working on a different utility. He listed some of its features HERE.

Devin seems like a great guy! Loved his EMGtv performances and watched a few of his videos from the "Gearwh**e" series as well, but unfortunately haven't listened to much of his work at all. What albums would you recommend listening to first?

 

I can relate to that! One of the reasons I haven't posted new LVs is that I'm trying to limit the number of libraries that I download.

That's too generous.
I was inspired by a few people who posted such LVs before, and if the response from this guide has encouraged skilled people to work on utilities to make the task simpler, I'm extremely pleased!

That might have been a probable reason, but I believe the bigger issue was that it was somewhat easy for people to mistakenly batch re-save their libraries without the proper path and render all the NKIs useless. I like the fact that they introduced the "Ignore this time" button, but they shouldn't have removed the "Skip Missing" button either.

Thanks for writing this. I hadn't considered using symlinks for this purpose before but I'll definitely try it now!

For me at least, the most important mics are Close mic and the Decca/Tree/Stage mic. Everything else is can be reasonably substituted IMHO, but not these. The Close mic is the one that captures all the details, and the Tree mic captures the proper positioning of the instrument as well as a feel of the space the instrument was recorded in. I believe they can be mixed to taste for a variety of possibilities.
I tend to remove the Room/Ambient/Reverb mics, as more often than not, they can easily be replaced by a competent reverb plugin. I also like to remove the default Mix if present, as in most cases it's easy to dial something similar from the included mics, and many a times it's just not what I'm looking for and is hard to make it fit in my context.
Of course, depending on the library I might keep other positions too. For example, in the CineBrass CORE library, the default mix is really good and I found it usable in most cases, so I kept that. I definitely recommend spending some time with the library and trying out the different mic positions to see which work for you.

 

When Kontakt gives you that warning about how batch-resaving will make the library non-compatible with previous versions, is there actually a way to undo that? I'm having a bit of trouble with some legato patches in Spitfire Symphonic Strings which crash v6.6.0 as soon as I click on the wrench icon to do the 'remove all zones without samples' stage, so I'm wondering if there's some way I can go back to pre-6.1.1 and try that method instead?

 

Last edited: Jan 1, 2022

Till now I have finished implementing the glue code for Total commander's WCX SDK and I can list all the files. Extracting is a simple call away.

So I plan to have these commands implemented:

• list - List all files in archive
• extract - Extract all the files as is
• pack - Pack back all extracted into an nkx
• check - Whether inNKX really supports the file
• delete - Delete specified files

inNKX also supports setting a callback function for reporting the progress, this however is not possible from a console. Anyways a dialog showing the process is shown by inNKX itself. By the way NKX doesn't use any compression or verify file integrity either, inNKX reports that the packed and unpacked size is same.

 

Can't believe I missed this! Way to go @Meric , terrific and intelligent work, especially the trick of replacing with almost zero .ncw files instead of deleting them. This avoids last Kontakt versions busting our ballz when we resave. Cause of the famous "skip missing" demise. Neat!

I'm just beginning to listen him. The other day "accidentally" his discography ended up in my hard drive, so I'm checking it in the next weeks

 

Sad news for y'all, especially @Meric I cannot get inNKX to run without TC (specifically, extraction. Listing file names works). If someone knows how NKX format is structured, so that we can make our own inNKX, please let us know.

 

Unfortunate but not a huge deal I guess. TC is pretty easy to install and use as is.


Anyways for anyone interested I did a few minor tweaks to my application and have a very alpha build available for anyone who wants to test it. I haven't done any speed or quality comparisons between it and any other application so if anyone wants to test it out for me please do.

I personally wouldn't recommend using this to do minimization of your libraries, it's probably a lot slower than using reaper or izotope. Just looking for testers really. If you do not want to try it out and minimize stuff feel free though. I've done it for some of my libs and haven't encountered too many errors, but I've made various tweaks to the app since then so it might break. Always remember to make a backup copy of the original library though!! (Very important!)



PM me if you want the link to it. I don't want to post it here since I'll probably forget about it and I don't want people grabbing an outdated buggy build in the future.

I'll do a proper release for it sometime later.