Kontakt 3.5, Cakewalk 8, Beatscape, Dimension Pro!

Just installed to my new music comp, a Sata machine, programs on an IDE drive and samples on the Sata, have to get a couple more gigs of ram but I am ready to try it all out on my Kurzweil PCX1 keyboard and such later today!
Anyone with that combo, any advice to give?

Originally posted by sonhouse
Just installed to my new music comp, a Sata machine, programs on an IDE drive and samples on the Sata, have to get a couple more gigs of ram but I am ready to try it all out on my Kurzweil PCX1 keyboard and such later today!
Anyone with that combo, any advice to give?

I use Sonar 8.5 but never bothered with Beatscape or Dimension Pro. However I do use other soft synths along with outboard hardware for drums (Machinedrum). I have Kontakt and have used it a bit but have barely scratched the surface of it. What kind of advice are you looking for?

Originally posted by darvlay
I use Sonar 8.5 but never bothered with Beatscape or Dimension Pro. However I do use other soft synths along with outboard hardware for drums (Machinedrum). I have Kontakt and have used it a bit but have barely scratched the surface of it. What kind of advice are you looking for?

Well I know you can record the keystrokes with midi but I would like to have both Kontakt and Sonar running at the same time and route the AUDIO from kontakt to the audio recording input of Sonar, not sure how to do that exactly. Then I can use more tracks to do other acoustic stuff if I want. So do you know how to do that?

Originally posted by sonhouse
Well I know you can record the keystrokes with midi but I would like to have both Kontakt and Sonar running at the same time and route the AUDIO from kontakt to the audio recording input of Sonar, not sure how to do that exactly. Then I can use more tracks to do other acoustic stuff if I want. So do you know how to do that?

uncouple the heizenbeg compensators

Originally posted by sonhouse
Well I know you can record the keystrokes with midi but I would like to have both Kontakt and Sonar running at the same time and route the AUDIO from kontakt to the audio recording input of Sonar, not sure how to do that exactly. Then I can use more tracks to do other acoustic stuff if I want. So do you know how to do that?

In Sonar, insert Kontakt as a soft synth within a project and output your Midi track to Kontakt. Easy as pie!

Originally posted by darvlay
In Sonar, insert Kontakt as a soft synth within a project and output your Midi track to Kontakt. Easy as pie!

When you say 'midi track' are you talking about just the recording of the keystrokes (midi sends) or the audio generated by kontakt? I am after the audio, not the keystrokes.
Also, do you know of any of the piano's in Sonar, are they better than the ones in Kontakt? I see other piano's like 'true piano' and such, have you tried or compared any of them to what you hear in Kontakt, like the Steinway and such (it's a 130 meg sample). Have you ever heard of 'imperfectsamples.com'? They sampled an old German upright and the full implementation is over 30 GIGAbytes! Go to their website and listen to the demo's. Absolutely astounding! They even have the sound of the squeeks of the BENCH! And the sounds of the sustain pads leaving the strings and such! It sounds like someone is playing a real piano but it's a sample!

My sound device is an RME hammerfall DSP multiface, I downloaded the drivers and ASIO dll's for sonar. Got it running in Kontakt, used the two piano's in the orchestral library, the August Grand and the Concert Grand. It plays, hear the sound in the earphone output of the RME.
But when I fire up Sonar 8.5, I go to options, MIDI or audio, neither one shows drivers for the RME. I had this setup already on two other computers and they worked fine, but can't get midi or audio set up. If you go to midi options and do the midi inputs and outputs, it says you have no output. I though maybe it's because I have only outputs going to the RME midi input but nothing connected to the output jack, not sure though.
If I can't get the drivers to show up, I will have to make a long phone call to Sonar support which takes hours. Any ideas? Thing that is puzzling is I hear the dings when hit some of the buttons in Sonar which is weird, I would have thought with no drivers showing, I would never hear ANY sound.

Sorry, double loaded.

Originally posted by sonhouse
When you say 'midi track' are you talking about just the recording of the keystrokes (midi sends) or the audio generated by kontakt? I am after the audio, not the keystrokes.
Also, do you know of any of the piano's in Sonar, are they better than the ones in Kontakt? I see other piano's like 'true piano' and such, have you tried or compared any of them to w ...[text shortened]... e strings and such! It sounds like someone is playing a real piano but it's a sample!

"When you say 'midi track' are you talking about just the recording of the keystrokes (midi sends) or the audio generated by kontakt?

A track is a track. You can have MIDI tracks or audio tracks. Each track is usually an instrument and all the tracks together form your project. This is pretty elementary stuff. Have you tried reading the manual yet?

"Also, do you know of any of the piano's in Sonar, are they better than the ones in Kontakt?"

I have no idea. I don't really use generic piano sounds for any of my projects.

"My sound device is an RME hammerfall DSP multiface, I downloaded the drivers and ASIO dll's for sonar. Got it running in Kontakt, used the two piano's in the orchestral library, the August Grand and the Concert Grand. It plays, hear the sound in the earphone output of the RME.
But when I fire up Sonar 8.5, I go to options, MIDI or audio, neither one shows drivers for the RME. I had this setup already on two other computers and they worked fine, but can't get midi or audio set up. If you go to midi options and do the midi inputs and outputs, it says you have no output. I though maybe it's because I have only outputs going to the RME midi input but nothing connected to the output jack, not sure though. "

I would call or email SONAR. Before I invested in my soundcard, I researched quite a bit on which cards were best suitable for SONAR. Check out this link for audio hardware tips:

http://www.cakewalk.com/tips/ahg/

I don't see the Hammerfall in that list so it could be that the software is incompatible with the card. Either RME or Roland should be able to let you know definitively if they are compatible.

Originally posted by darvlay
"When you say 'midi track' are you talking about just the recording of the keystrokes (midi sends) or the audio generated by kontakt?

A track is a track. You can have MIDI tracks or audio tracks. Each track is usually an instrument and all the tracks together form your project. This is pretty elementary stuff. Have you tried reading the manual yet?
...[text shortened]... RME or Roland should be able to let you know definitively if they are compatible.

You can record midi keystrokes separate from the audio it produces, they are two different beasts. I forgot I could upgrade to Sonar 8.3.1 and did so this morning. That cleared up the Midi I/O problem. Am still left with no audio drivers. The thing is, I had used that RME hammerfall on at least three other computers with no problem. I have Sonar from around Sonar 3 and the last version was 7 and the RME was great on all those. Now for some reason doing the same thing I did before doesn't work, even after I downloaded about 400 megs, 130 for Sonar 8.3.1 and another couple hundred for an upgrade to Guitar Rig LE, not even sure what that one is all about since I have not used any of them yet! So at least I only have one problem to solve to start recording. Can you do me a favor?
You have a keyboard, since you have Kontakt. What I have found after running Kontakt on three computers now, is on the piano samples, there are two in the orchestral set, one called August and the other some grand piano. What I found was using the sustain pedal on August causes the CPU meter and the # of layers or whathaveyou, the # peaks out at 64 and when it does the sound gets very distorted and crashes for a bit. The interesting thing is the other, the grand piano, does not have that effect. I can leave the sustain pedal on full bore and the CPU meter or the other # always stays around 30 or less. The size of the samples are about the same, around 130 megs or so. So here is what I would like you to try:
See if you get the same thing, try the August sample and hit the sustain pedal while playing and see if the left hand # goes towards 64 and the CPU meter goes to max.
What is your system? I have an intel single bore processor running about 2.8 GHz and 2 gigs of DDR 2700 ram. It seems somewhat faster than the last machine which was a 2.6 Ghz job with 1.5 gigs of Rambus memory. I am hoping I can get better performance out of my present setup just by going to max ram of 4 gigs, which is going to be another hundred bucks or so. But before I do that, could you run that sample and check out your system response to the sustain pedal? Much appreciated.

Originally posted by sonhouse
You can record midi keystrokes separate from the audio it produces, they are two different beasts.

You record your midi notes into a midi track. To hear audio output, you have to route the output of the track to a soft synth or outboard hardware. The input and output are both part of a single track. If you have been running previous versions of SONAR then I am befuddled as to why my earlier statement needed clarification.

Either way, if you are already having issues with distortion and dropouts, you need to ensure you're card/drivers are configured properly in SONAR. I don't have a sustain pedal to help you with your experiment but if you are getting dropouts from a simple midi CC message, something is obviously wrong with the settings. I have run up to 5 soft synths at one time with audio and various midi control changes and have no issues with dropouts nor have I seen my CPU meter go over 10%. Looking at your system, you should not have these issues running only one sample.

When I first started with SONAR, I was getting clips, distortion and dropouts too. I solved this problem by configuring my SONAR driver settings and my ASIO buffer settings in "Audio Settings". Initially SONAR was set to use WDM drivers. I had to change the settings myself.

Ether way, I think you should probably make a call to someone. This is about as much as I can help you. Sorry pal! 🙁

Originally posted by sonhouse
Well I know you can record the keystrokes with midi but I would like to have both Kontakt and Sonar running at the same time and route the AUDIO from kontakt to the audio recording input of Sonar, not sure how to do that exactly. Then I can use more tracks to do other acoustic stuff if I want. So do you know how to do that?

I haven't used either program, but assuming Kontakt takes MIDI information as an input and sends audio as an output, it should be fairly simple. First, record some MIDI information with your MIDI input device. Second, use this MIDI track as Kontakt's input (there must be a MIDI-In somewhere on Kontakt's interface). Third, route the resulting audio from Kontakt into an audio track on Sonar. Bingo-bango! You've recorded an audio track that sounds just like what Kontakt plays.

EDIT: Oops, looks like Darv already clarified this... 😕

Originally posted by PBE6
I haven't used either program, but assuming Kontakt takes MIDI information as an input and sends audio as an output, it should be fairly simple. First, record some MIDI information with your MIDI input device. Second, use this MIDI track as Kontakt's input (there must be a MIDI-In somewhere on Kontakt's interface). Third, route the resulting audio from Konta ...[text shortened]... ds just like what Kontakt plays.

EDIT: Oops, looks like Darv already clarified this... 😕

Yes, it has to work something like that, just haven't done that yet, I usually just record the audio directly from the earphone outs of the Kurzweil, no need for the midi interface. It is a matter of experience I suppose. Still no audio drivers showing up, I asked that question on the Sonar Forums, so far no answer, so I guess I have to join the long que on the Cakewalk support phone line. If you aren't the first caller in the morning, you wait about an hour to get to talk to someone there, I know from experience🙂

So did you try reading the manual? Specifically the section on configuring SONAR's drivers? Did you run the initial wave profiler, etc?

Originally posted by darvlay
So did you try reading the manual? Specifically the section on configuring SONAR's drivers? Did you run the initial wave profiler, etc?

Yeah, did all that, contacted Sonar support and the driver issue turned out to be a near non-issue, the driver type was set to WDM, reset it to ASIO and BOING, there they were where I always saw them! Trying to get Kontakt to attach itself as a VST instrument is a bit harder. According to the Sonar support dude, the Kontakt VST is a DLL that I could not find, and unless you know a piece of the name, the search function doesn't find it either. We looked in various folders but so far can't find it. Maybe you could sniff around and see where your Kontakt VST dll is hiding?

Also found out why the CPU crashes during high voice loads, such as what happens when the sustain pedal is used on the August Forester Piano sample: There is a setting that detects high CPU usage and high voice counts (64 is max in Kontakt) and you can set one of 4 levels of protection, where the CPU usage is at some predetermined number, say 70%, it automatically cuts back on the # of voices handled. That is in the Audio Engine Tab, it's called CPU overload protection. I think that was all that was wrong with the earlier computers I used. Sigh.

Right now, I fired up Kontakt and I can see the MIDI sends are making it from the keyboard to the RME hammerfall I/O and it was working fine yesterday but today something happened and I get no connect after the I/O, no CPU readings and the voice # stays at zero so I hear no output from the I/O. Kontakt also crashed this morning, gave error message. Restarted it and got the same thing, rebooted the comp and got the same thing. Not sure what is up with that.