Routing Kontakt in Reaper?

It's done to preserve resources and to have multiple instruments in one place if you need to configure them (like sections, etc.) and for tidiness. 1 instance of Kontakt with 2 instruments will use less resources than 2 instances of Kontakt, each with only 1 instrument. And let's say your Violin library has multiple articulations, and each one is in a different .nki, so you load them all up and your Violin's articulations are all in one place.

Open Kontakt on a track, load whatever instruments you want. If you're just double-clicking them, by default they'll be assigned to the first MIDI channel available, up to 16 total. You can change that in the options. You can also reassign them once they're loaded up so that two or more are on the same midi channel - MIDI on that channel will trigger them all.

There's a View icon in Kontakt, which will let you decide what parts of GUI you want to see. Enable "Outputs". Here you can configure Kontakt's inner routing by first creating outputs. There are batch options which will let you create an output for every instrument. If what you need is different, create them yourself by clicking on the + icon, choose number of channels (2 is stereo), number of outputs to add and a Kontakt out at which Kontakt should start routing them, it's usually whatever is right after your "st.1".

Once you have your outputs, you can assign each instrument to a certain output in in the instrument info tab, same place where you have MIDI routing.

Okay, now you can add outputs to Kontakt VSTi (this is in Reaper, different from Kontakt's inner ones) by clicking on (X Out) when Kontakt's window is open and adding them so they correspond to whatever you configured (if you have 4 outs in Kontakt, it's 8 channels total, given that you're using them as stereo, so keep clicking + in that menu till you have all 8).

This is when you add new tracks and create sends form the track that has Kontakt on it to your newly created ones. You can alternatively let Reaper try and do that for you, but it might mess up sometimes. This is done by opening the FX window for the track that Kontakt is sitting on, right clicking Kontakt and clicking on "Build multichannel routing for output of selected FX". Now that you have audio outputs done, there are a couple of ways to play instruments on different MIDI channels.

Option 1: Play them all on a same track/same MIDI clip and switch channels inside the MIDI clip on lower right section of the MIDI editor. I've used this option sometimes when I used strings on electronic productions since it was all on one track and very tidy. I don't use it anymore. If you MIDI controller supports playing on different channels, you can play as well.

Option 2: Create a track for each MIDI channel, 16 in total, and have them send their MIDI 1 to the corresponding MIDI channel in Kontakt. Now you can play on your controller's MIDI 1 and the tracks will send it as MIDI 1 through 16, depending on track, to Kontakt to trigger whatever instrument(s) are receiving on this MIDI channel. You can create these tracks automatically for each and every VSTi by right clicking them in the FX window and clicking on the option right below aforementioned one, "Build 16 channels of MIDI routing to this track".

Option 2 is how most templates are set up, from what I gather. You can then enable Record Monitoring on all MIDI tracks and, selecting them all, right clicking on the "Record Arm/Disarm" button, next to the Record Monitoring one, select "Automatically record-arm when track selected". This will let you to just click on a track and play on your keyboard, as the instruments will be receiving MIDI since the track is armed. Once you select another, previous one isn't armed anymore. If you want to play two or more instruments, select multiple tracks and they'll automatically arm, and just play/record.

I've skimmed through it but this seems to cover the automatic way of audio routing. Check other videos and if you're still not finding it, let me know.

I'd highly suggest trying to do it on your own from either this write-up or the video because you'll learn about the software you're using. Once you do an empty set-up, you can then create a group track and save it as a template, so that you don't have to create routings and arm tracks manually every time, you just load a track from track template and it's an empty Kontakt waiting for you to drop instruments right in.

Here are mine (attached) if you're stuck, but really, try and make 'em yourself. You're only hurting yourself if you don't, plus if something gets messed up, you won't know where to find it to try and fix it These normally sit in C:\Users\USER\AppData\Roaming\REAPER\TrackTemplates

One is 16 MIDI -> 1 Out, usually used for multiple articulations of a same instrument. And the other is 16 MIDI -> 16 stereo out. This one has a special track for Kontakt which is inside the group at 0.00db which is where the receives are going to, and from where the audio is sent. It has "Parent send" disabled in routing so it's not sending any audio to the parent track, only to the configured audio tracks, which are then in turn sending audio to the parent track/bus. Main bus for then first one / Audio tracks in second one are set to -14.00db because it's my starting point for mixing.

I'm not sure if you know, but you can hide tracks in Reaper with Track Manager, hide MIDI tracks from the mixer and hide audio tracks from Arrangement since you won't really need them there.

 

Glad I could help! Reaper is a tough nut to crack, especially if you're new to DAWs, what with all its incredible flexibility which is also why it's so complex. So if you're stuck with anything and can't find an answer on the Reaper forum, just shoot me a message!

 

A lot of folks do it this way. I'd personally recommend this approach -- one that uses a Kontakt instance per track, where each instrument has its own Kontakt instance. (i.e instrument per track). This allows for much simpler routing than the multiout approach: you now only have one single track for all MIDI and audio for a given instrument, which means track automation and MIDI can be seen together. Duplicating tracks is a trivial thing because there's no routing relationship to other tracks to adjust after.

You can use this script to enable/disable tracks and bind it to a key for easy access. By keeping your instrument tracks disabled until you need them, this -- for me anyway -- resulted in a substantial net decrease of memory used over my previous template which took the multiout approach (where Kontakt instances are shared across multiple instruments on different MIDI channels and then routed back out to separate tracks). Of course if I enable all tracks in my template, the overall memory use would be higher than the multiout approach, but in that case I'm using so much memory for samples anyway that the Kontakt overhead remains a rounding error.

tl;dr: track per instrument, Kontakt instance per track, disable tracks you don't need. All routing is very simple to understand and manage. Net memory use actually lower due to disabled tracks.

 

cant sleep, but too tired to do anything productive. I kind of fumble around a little - sorry ahead of time. But this way is extremely fast - as an alternative to track per instance. In my case I'm trying to min/max my CPU cores to create headroom by manually filling kontakt instances. But if you get lost in that video I'll type the BASIC idea out.

1.) Make new track
2.) Add Kontakt (64 out)
3.) go into kontakt options, handling, and make sure "1st free" for new instruments is selected(instead of Omni)
4.) drag 1-16 instruments
5.) go to output section, batch > clear outputs and make new for each instrument
6.) Go to reaper FX window(not the kontakt floating) and options > Multichannel Output routing for selected FX
7.) Delete unassigned tracks
8.) Go to reaper FX window, options > build 16 midi channels
9.) name midi channels and delete unused.

that's the quick and dirty - but I go more into detail on how to set up multiple kontakt instances with the same routing(useful for sections with multiple articulations keeping the same input/outputs to stay organized)

hope that helps.

 

don't fear the reaper

I left written instructions but I'll make another video that is me performing this without any interruptions - so if you get lost just follow along and it'll jog your memory

 

that's the quick and dirty

 

Scott, definitely try both approaches and see which works best for you. Having come from the multiout setup, I could never go back. Kontakt instance per instrument track combined with disabling unused tracks is, for me, superior in every way.

 

One good advice would be also:
Create new project, set Kontakt multi-out with number of channels of your wish, create folder and put everything inside that folder, set color, name, etc... and then save that as "Track preset".
That way you have always on one click "Load track from presets" opened and routed Kontakt correctly, and then you just need to load up instruments inside. This is also good for process of creating template.

 

A lot of us run one instance of Kontakt per instrument in Reaper. Less complicated routing that way and the difference in resource usage is minimal, in my experience.

 

one could even argue that it is more efficient load distribution for multi-core setups