Apart from the previous message I posted regarding the Avid Core Audio plug-in conflict, I thought I'd share just a thing or two about using Komplete Kontrol with Pro Tools and, I suppose, using it in general even apart from the DAW.
Having only worked with another person to use NI plug-ins and never having navigated it before, I must say, it was a bit of a head scratcher to understand a few things. A couple of things that Joe mentioned were helpful to know and, I guess in retrospect, make more sense than they did at first. Having gone through a number of things, I now have a better understanding and thought it might be helpful to point out a few things that will only seem obvious once people have spent time with a working set up. I wish there were a bit of a step-by-step tutorial or something to help in this regard but maybe the following points might be of some assistance. At first, I thought that the Komplete Kontrol stand-alone application needed to be running in the background for the system voice to speak. I thought that perhaps instantiating the plug-in in Pro Tools might somehow even launch it in the background. Surprisingly, there's no need to have the Komplete Kontrol application running. The text-to-speech engine works "under the hood" whenever the Komplete Kontrol plug-in is active. Again, that was kind of a surprise. There are two main aspects to browsing the library: the main instrument library (like AbSynth, Kontakt, Massive, etc.) and then the presets. The Browse button is the first step in both cases but, depending on the next step, you'll either be loading an instrument or a patch. If you hit the Browse button and then touch one of the first two encoder knobs, you'll be browsing the instruments either by category or by instrument name. Pressing Enter will load that instrument. Pressing the Browse key and then turning the detented knob in the Navigate section will scroll through the available presets. Pressing Enter will then load that preset. It's possible to use the preset increment and decrement knobs but that manner of moving through presets doesn't speak the preset name and seems to not follow the same alphabetical order that the presets list seems to follow when using the Browse button with the detented knob. Now, it's possible to select both an instrument and a patch in a more concise sequence by pressing the Browse button, using the first or second encoder knobs and, before pressing the Enter button, using the detented knob to select the preset and then hitting Enter. It essentially saves two button presses. The issue of instances is a bit tricky as Joe pointed out. I'll try to explain it in my own words and perhaps it'll further explain what was initially mentioned. Since the entire Komplete library is available through a central plug-in, any time you want to load a particular instrument and preset, it'll be through the Komplete Kontrol AAX plug-in on an instrument track. Once instantiated and, assuming the accessibility feature has already been turned on in the Komplete Kontrol software by holding down Shift and the Preset Up buttons (the top left and top right buttons on the S-series controllers), pressing the Browse button will begin the process of speaking the various menus, identifying the parameters, etc. Now, if you want to use another Native instrument plug-in with a different preset while preserving the first instrument with its current patch, you'll need to instantiate another Komplete Kontrol plug-in on a new instrument track. Since the S-series controller is the only way to really access the instrument and presets for the second instance of the Komplete Kontrol plug-in, you'll have to switch from the first instance of Komplete Kontrol to the second instance. This has the potential for being confusing for two reasons: there's the instrument track and then there's the controller and they're technically independent. You have to switch to the second instance from the keyboard controller by pressing the Instance button, spinning the detented knob one click to the right and pressing Enter. Now the keyboard controller is editing the second instance of the Komplete Kontrol plug-in. However, you still need to record enable the second instrument track to hear the results of any instrument or preset change. In other words, you can be changing instruments and presets on the S-series controller but you won't hear the results unless you've record-enabled that second instrument track. If you forget and, say, change a preset but the sound hasn't change, that'll be a clue that you've forgotten to record enable the second track. Using Command-up and down arrows record enables adjacent tracks, assuming one has been record enabled to begin with. This might save some time on occasion. The tricky thing, as Joe mentioned, is that each subsequent instance of Komplete Kontrol is sequential to the Komplete Kontrol engine regardless of where the actual track is in Pro Tools. So, if your first instance of Komplete Kontrol is the last track in your session and then you create a second instance and it happens to be the very first track in the session, the first track is technically the second instance and that's how it'll appear to Komplete Kontrol and that's how you'll need to think of it when accessing the plug-in from the S-series controller. I should also mention that on my system, I had the HD buffer set to 256 samples and that proved to be just a bit too small for Komplete Kontrol. 512 samples works better at least on my system. When I bought the Mac Mini for the studio, since I was using an HD system and not many virtual instruments, I figured it would be fine and it certainly was. With track freeze and Commit, CPU usage isn't really a problem but, next time I'll definitely go for a Mac Pro now that the Native Instruments world has opened up. Hope that helps somebody just starting out with Komplete Kontrol. Slau -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Pro Tools Accessibility" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to ptaccess+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
