FR : Make CBB Work better with Kontakt

[Mark Morgon-Shaw]

As many have found, if you load a new Kontakt instrument in CBB as soon as you stop playback the volume gets turned way down in the VSTi which renders it fairly unusable

To get around this we can disable the " Zero Controllers When Play Stops " option in the Preferences.

 

Although it fixes the problem however this cause another issue where certain Kontakt instruments just " hang " and by that I mean they are usually the phrase based libraries and they keep playing even when Cakewalk is stopped. I presume the two are connected and CBB is no longer sending something required to make it stop.

All you can do at this point is hit the panic button in Kontakt to silence it 

 

So my question is  - can anything be done to remedy this ? Kontakt is pretty popular so it's not exactly a niche instrument that hardly anyone uses

  

[msmcleod]

Some of NI's instruments completely break the rules of MIDI, e.g. using CC#1 as a volume control is madness.  CC#1 is defined as modulation, not volume... and CC#1's default value is zero.  It's in the MIDI spec.

So the question is, should Cakewalk start ignoring the MIDI spec just because NI does?

There's probably some extra work we could do to be a bit more selective about which controllers get zero'd,  but that's just a workaround.

Given that NI have already made the decision to break the spec, the best thing to do is manually add a CC#1 to the beginning of your MIDI clips in the event list.

[Byron Dickens]

3 hours ago, Mark MoreThan-Shaw said:

So my question is  - can anything be done to remedy this ? Kontakt is pretty popular so it's not exactly a niche instrument that hardly anyone uses

You'd really have to ask Native Instruments. Its their fault for not adhering to the MIDI specification, not Cakewalk's for working properly.

[David Baay]

1 hour ago, msmcleod said:

There's probably some extra work we could do to be a bit more selective about which controllers get zero'd,  but that's just a workaround.

I agree it would be inappropriate to implement this just to work around NI's non-standard MIDI implementation, but I have long wished for the ability to selectively zero controllers anyway. The only controller I typically need or want to have zeroed on stop is CC64 - Sustain. In most cases all others can stay wherever they are.

 

[Mark Morgon-Shaw]

5 hours ago, msmcleod said:

Some of NI's instruments completely break the rules of MIDI, e.g. using CC#1 as a volume control is madness.  CC#1 is defined as modulation, not volume... and CC#1's default value is zero.  It's in the MIDI spec.

So the question is, should Cakewalk start ignoring the MIDI spec just because NI does?

There's probably some extra work we could do to be a bit more selective about which controllers get zero'd,  but that's just a workaround.

Given that NI have already made the decision to break the spec, the best thing to do is manually add a CC#1 to the beginning of your MIDI clips in the event list.

Thanks for the reply, I always thought they used CC#1 because it triggers different velocity layers in the sampled instrument  - I .e.  a violin playing pp Vs ff is not just a difference in volume  - there's also difference in dynamics and you need to be able to control that with something that's on every midi keyboard controller.

I didn't realise they had broken the midi specification so it raises another question as to how other DAWs  deal with it ?  Adding a CC#1 to every clip would be pretty tedious with the amount of music I make each year but from everything I see & hear Kontakt is pretty much the defacto standard in the Production Music industry ( music libraries for TV & Film etc ) for sampled instruments so it must be used pretty widely and I don't see much of an outcry about this issue.

I searched the NI Support site and found this : 

https://support.native-instruments.com/hc/en-us/articles/115003479549-KONTAKT-s-Volume-Resets-When-I-Press-Play-in-my-DAW

 I think I tried this once before , changing the settings within the Kontakt Instrument to not respond and it didn't seem to make any difference to the instrument I was trying to use  but I had only just started using Kontakt back then and was desperate to get it working so once I found that disabling the 'Zero Controllers  When Play Stop' worked for the most part I just got used to dealing with hanging notes every so often. That was probably 5 or 6 years ago.

It would be great if there is something else that can be done - Like David Baay mentions I think it would be useful to have more granular control over individual instruments and their controllers.

NI ( glibly ) say  " You can alternatively configure your DAW not to send the standard MIDI commands CC7 and CC10 when pressing play or pause. To learn how to do so, please consult your DAW's documentation. " 

I don't know whether that would have to be a Gobal option or is there any way it could be selected on a per instrument basis  ,i.e. on the insert soft synth options ?  

 

 

Edited March 6, 2022 by Mark MoreThan-Shaw

[Xoo]

30 minutes ago, Mark MoreThan-Shaw said:

NI ( glibly ) say  " You can alternatively configure your DAW not to send the standard MIDI commands CC7 and CC10 when pressing play or pause. To learn how to do so, please consult your DAW's documentation. " 

Does right clicking on the volume widget in the controlling MIDI track and choosing "Disable Control" not do this for CC 7?  Ditto MIDI Pan for CC 10?

[David Baay]

Disabling the Volume widget will stop CC7 from being sent when playback starts but won't have any effect on what happens when playback is stopped.

In any case, the issue here is CC1.

[Mark Morgon-Shaw]

14 hours ago, bdickens said:

You'd really have to ask Native Instruments. Its their fault for not adhering to the MIDI specification, not Cakewalk's for working properly.

https://support.native-instruments.com/hc/en-us/articles/115003479549-KONTAKT-s-Volume-Resets-When-I-Press-Play-in-my-DAW