Native Instruments KORE stable?

[travista00]

anyone have experience with native instrument's new kore sound module/controller? is it stable for pro tools hd on mac? i've gotten kinda wary of their buggy software for this platform... any info would be appreciated as it does look like an interesting concept. thanks, travis.

[Vaphoron]

I am wondering the same exact thing. Since I didn't upgrade to Komplete 3 yet, they have a decent upgrade offer till the end of June which I may take advantage of if there are reports of it being nice and stable.

[Lee Blaske]

anyone have experience with native instrument's new kore sound module/controller? is it stable for pro tools hd on mac? i've gotten kinda wary of their buggy software for this platform... any info would be appreciated as it does look like an interesting concept. thanks, travis.

If you want to get serious about NI Komplete and Kore, run it on a separate computer, Mac or PC. If you ran it on its own Mac, and not within PT, you can use the AU version that takes full advantage of OSX's Core Audio which is much more efficient and stable than RTAS. PT does not take full advantage of what the Mac OS can do. Running Kore on a separate PC would also be cool.

If you want to run a ton of stuff and are really serious about stability, don't try to do everything on one machine. That's just asking for trouble. Since Kore is a shell, it's perfect for installing on an outboard machine.

Lee Blaske

[PhilBuckle]

I've heard of 2 people returning it because it was very unstable for them. Go check out the NI forums. Always good for a laugh.

I saw Kore running on a G5 Dual 2.5 at my local dealer. Even in stand alone mode it was bringing that machine to its knees. Lots of crackling and popping.
I would be scared to run it within PTools.
I've heard that NI plugs run much better on PC.

[axiom]

So far, it's not really useable for me. I have problems using it as an RTAS plugin on PT7.1cs7/OSX 10.4.6. Presets aren't changing properly with the Kore browser, so nothing sounds like it should. I have been emailing back and forth with NI tech support in hopes of getting it working. I might end up trying it on it's own system running standalone to see if it helps. I'd recommend holding off on any purchase right now. As another poster said, read the NI Kore forums and you'll see a lot of people having trouble, even to the degree they have returned it since it didn't work for them.

[ronwasserman]

Considering NI is still tweaking Kontakt after 3 years I've lost faith in their stuff. Same with Arturia and a few others.

[Lee Blaske]

I would be scared to run it within PTools.
I've heard that NI plugs run much better on PC.

I run a lot of NI plug-ins on outboard PCs. It's definitely the way to go. Bring the audio back into PT via lightpipe. LSRC eliminates the possibility of clicks and pops, and still sounds good. You can hook up MIDI via LAN if you don't want to buy a lot of extra interfaces.

Unless Digidesign adopts AU on the Mac platform, I don't think we'll see any stunning native plug-in performance within PT. There's probably enough for the average user, but if you're going to push things and want a stable situation, an outboard machine is the answer.

NI Komplete is very deep, and can use a lot of horsepower (especially in PT, where track freezing is not an option). Someday, we'll be able to do everything we want to do in one machine, but that day hasn't arrived.

Lee Blaske

[Lee Blaske]

Considering NI is still tweaking Kontakt after 3 years I've lost faith in their stuff. Same with Arturia and a few others.

Have you tried running these products as AU or VST? I've found them to be very stable. Unfortunately, I think RTAS is the problem.

Lee Blaske

[command_shift]

not wishing to hijack this thread, but since Lee has brought up the recommendation of running NI stuff on PCs into PT, which is what I do as it's all far too unstable in RTAS, I am wondering why in the PCs' VST V-Stack host I only ever see the two hardware midi ports (on an RME9652 interface) available as emulated ports?? It would seem the midi timing is sloppy as a result. Any advice would be appreciated on this.

[PastaViking II]

I bought Kore two weeks ago and so far I've been very disappointed. I was very excited about this product until I learned that it didn't have any DSP and basically is nothing more than an environment for loading plugins, a simple audio/MIDI interface and some buttons to go. Nevertheless I decided to buy since I generally like NI stuff and I needed the NI Komplete 3 upgrade anyway. (Until June 30 the upgrade is complimentary if you have Komplete 2)

Unfortunately, Kore requires massive amounts of processing power to run and doesn't work on my 2.4 GHz/2 GB RAM Asus Pentium 4 PC dedicated to softsynths on half the presets. Reports on the NI Forum about how it runs on Mac are very discouraging.

Furthermore, the great thing about the Kore environment still eludes me as a V-STack user, where I can do almost the same thing much easier and without high loading times. (Didn't anyone at NI think about how stupid it is that you make a great sound browser but kill it with a 10-30 sec. loading time for every preset?)

As it stands some people might find Kore great. However, to me not only does Kore not resolve past NI software problems, it introduces some new bugs and the cool features don't really change my view that Kore in it's current form is of limited use to all but the most die hard button freaks and/or live musicians.