# Upgrading K2 to K3 for simple playback worth it?



## PolarBear (Dec 22, 2008)

Hey there...

Currently there is a discounted upgrade from K2 to K3 (50% off). As far as I could judge my needs, I'd be pleased with what I have at the moment, that is using K2 on WinXP in Sonar for more or less simple playback mostly.

Any features I might use more when I upgrade to K3 or things that would be better with upgrading I might miss staying with K2? (I read about sometimes longer loading times and more CPU consumption a while ago.)

Can both K2 and K3 run simultaneously on the same machine/OS without interfering with each other?

Thanks for your thoughts!
PolarBear


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## José Herring (Dec 22, 2008)

Hop on the discount. I did. Is there a big difference between k2 and k3. No. But, K3 is going 64bit and I'm sure that the upgrade path will be cheap to free for current k3 owners. Perhaps not for k2 owners. Plus at $74 it's well worth the upgrade.

Jose


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## StrangeCat (Dec 22, 2008)

wow that's a great price now i am really thinking of upgrading to K3!


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## PolarBear (Dec 22, 2008)

I didn't even explore K2 fully yet. So hence the question... as discounts are also valid for K1 users I think it's possible every other discount they are going to do is also availible to me without paying the 64 Euro right now if I won't miss anything with it. I'd rather get some Tonehammer lib or something for that money if I don't miss too much, you know.


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## JT3_Jon (Dec 22, 2008)

I'm in the same boat as you PolarBear, but I'm choosing to wait. I'm still on a PPC G5, and since I use K2 only for sample playback, I dont think its worth risking to upgrade to a software probably designed for Intel, and could be problematic on a PPC. This will probably be even more true when they do upgrade to 64-bit. 

This wont the last time they will offer a discount on upgrading, and like you said, they have proven in the past to off the same price to upgrade regardless of which version you run. I dont see any immediate benefits (and many potential detriments) in upgrading now.


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## JohnG (Dec 23, 2008)

NI have previously said on their own chat board that the upgrade to 64 bit will be free to K3 users.

However, I am not racing to upgrade either.


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## Frederick Russ (Dec 23, 2008)

K3 has a lot more features than K2. The GUI is also an improvement.

_Only on PPC Mac_: K3 can be a resource hog. K3 crashes Logic more often too. I've experimented with many settings and find K2 to be far more streamlined and can load more instruments without problems. Just my 2¢.


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## Ashermusic (Dec 23, 2008)

Frederick Russ @ Tue Dec 23 said:


> K3 has a lot more features than K2. The GUI is also an improvement.
> 
> _Only on PPC Mac_: K3 can be a resource hog. K3 crashes Logic more often too. I've experimented with many settings and find K2 to be far more streamlined and can load more instruments without problems. Just my 2¢.



+1.


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## Nickie Fønshauge (Dec 23, 2008)

K3 doesn't come with a DXi plugin, so if you use Banks and Sonar (S6.21 can't send Program changes to VST; I don't know about S7+), K3 is a dubious upgrade.


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## Big Bob (Dec 23, 2008)

K3 is at least 20% slower at running scripts and I for one am concerned about the significance of this extra molasses. I also encountered some terrible crashes when trying to add a 16th group to an instrument I was building. When I reported it to NI they confirmed that it is definately a bug in K3. K2 is hardly faultless but so far, it performs better than K3. It's a shame because there are many things about K3 that have the potential to be quite useful.

Another problem that I think is a major one, instruments developed with K3 cannot be imported into K2. K3 should have some form of 'downward' export that could create a K2-useable subset of any instrument developed in K3. In the absence of this, you almost have to develop in K2 and then import it into K3 if you don't want to exclude the K2 user base (which includes most K3 users that are still a little unsure of K3). For example, I'm not sure I would buy an instrument that ran only under K3 and not K2.

I agree with Nickie that K3 is a 'dubious' upgrade at best. I suggest no one totally cut their ties with K2 for a while yet.

God Bless,

Bob


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## PolarBear (Dec 23, 2008)

So thanks everyone for your opinion!

Can I run both at the same time and use it the same time in the same Sonar instance?


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## Frederick Russ (Dec 24, 2008)

Using both in a Logic sequence works here Polar. Should work for you too since K3 doesn't overwrite K2.


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## PolarBear (Dec 25, 2008)

Thanks for clarifying that, Fred and Nickie!


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## Ashermusic (Dec 25, 2008)

Dynamitec @ Thu Dec 25 said:


> @Bob,
> this is strange. I don't have a significant slower scripting performance as you mentioned in K3. I also work with >100 groups without crashes.
> I strongly recommend K3 over K2. Since i've been working on a lot of different libraries the last year i have a lot of experience with K3 now. And i never look back to K2. Also the new _PGS callback alone is a reason for me to develop for Kontakt 3 (and of course the raised zone limit to 8192, not to mention the monitor view).
> 
> Benjamin



Interesting, because a guy I know who develops libraries for Kontakt says K3 is still buggy, and the bugs he has reported to N.I. they are aware of but are still not resolved. As a result he has to program around the bugs for 3, which takes him longer than the K2 version.


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## Dynamitec (Dec 25, 2008)

Oh, i didn't want to say that Kontakt 3 is bugfree! There still a lot of bugs left to fix. I just wanted to say that for me and in my opinion K3 runs more stable than K2 did. Especially when working with large scripts and a lot of groups. The only thing you have to know is, how to work around the known bugs - it doesn't take *me* longer than in K2. As i already said: for me the PGS callback is the best new feature. It allows me to keep the size of the scripts much smaller - and more stable.


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## Nickie Fønshauge (Dec 25, 2008)

I wish I could share your enthusiasm, Benjamin. I would so love to use PGS. But, alas, K3 is buggy, as Jay mentions. Some Instruments I created with (and used succesfully in) K2 simply don't work in K3; when I play them legato the entire audio engine is switched off somehow. The only way to get the sound back is to restart the engine. Needles to say this is totally unsatisfactory. NI has acknowledged this bug and I hope it will be fixed with K3.5.


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## Dynamitec (Dec 25, 2008)

I fully understand. But it's a big difference if you have developed a complex script for K2 and you now try to run it in K3 or you completely start from the scratch developing for K3 (which is what i'm doing). It's not that i have too much enthusiasm about K3, it's just that i need features for the libraries i develop which simply aren't available in K2:
- larger scripts are possible without slowing down the editor too much
- GPS Callbacks
- Multiskin support
- 8192 zone limit (which is very important)

Needless to say, that i would like to see a lot of unfixed bugs fixed soon, too!


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## tmhuud (Dec 25, 2008)

JohnG @ Tue Dec 23 said:


> NI have previously said on their own chat board that the upgrade to 64 bit will be free to K3 users.
> 
> However, I am not racing to upgrade either.



Cant say I blame you. In a way I wished we haddnt. Plenty of bugs abound. Scripting slower. Organizational architectures changed to where I really dont like it. And honestly I can say this for the first time ever: The included sample library is NOT very inspirational or useful for me. (maybe I have too much) but thats how I feel. 

I upgraded because I didnt wan to get caught with my pants down when 64 bit hits AND a lot of newer libraries I know folks are working on will be K3 only.

Cheers,


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## Big Bob (Dec 26, 2008)

Dynamitec @ Thu Dec 25 said:


> @Bob,
> this is strange. I don't have a significant slower scripting performance as you mentioned in K3. I also work with >100 groups without crashes.
> I strongly recommend K3 over K2. Since i've been working on a lot of different libraries the last year i have a lot of experience with K3 now. And i never look back to K2. Also the new _PGS callback alone is a reason for me to develop for Kontakt 3 (and of course the raised zone limit to 8192, not to mention the monitor view).
> 
> Benjamin



Hi Benjamin,

I fully realize that the PGS callback (as well as the whole PGS system) is a very valuable feature of K3 versus K2. I tried to make it clear that I felt that K3 has some nice features that I would like to use but, those features pale if one has to suffer with various new problems. I assure you there are several glaring problems, even serious crashes that can occur under certain conditions (while K2 can accomodate these very same conditions without problems). If you want to know more about some of these issues, I'll be glad to send you copies of my dialog with NI's support group where you will be able to see that they admit to these problems and claim that they will be corrected in a subsequent release (let's hope that part is true).

As to script execution time, all you have to do to observe it is to benchmark any compute-bound process and compare K2 with K3. For example, take the new *Root3* Math Library routine and put it in a timing test loop that runs it 10,000,000 times. Of course you will need to make sure that you insert a 1usec wait for each 4000 calls or so since Kontakt's watchdog loop counter will otherwise kick you out every 40,000 nested loop passes or so (and the *Root3* algorithm has a normalize loop which can run about 10 times per call of the routine). With K2,* Root3 *can be run 10,000,000 times in 14 secs while in K3 it takes 19 secs.

I suggest you download the latest (V210) of the *KSP Math Library *and take a look at the new *Appendix A*. I have tabulated the execution times for most of the library routines running on K2 and K3 and it is obvious that K3 is noticeably slower, typically 15% to 25% slower! Of even more concern to me is why is this so? What is the cause of this additional molasses in running the interpretive code?

http://www.andrewkmusic.com/filearea/SI ... ackage.zip

Believe me, I wish this were not so because I would like to start using K3's new features. In fact, I have written a OS that uses the PGS callback machinery to support nested subroutine calling and allows a single slot to contain a subroutine library that can then be called from any of the 5 script slots. But after running into various problems with K3, not to mention all the problems left over from K2 that are still with us in K3, I put my new OS aside for now. I wish it were otherwise but until NI gets it right, I'm staying with K2 because I know pretty well how to work around all of its problems :lol: .

God Bless,

Bob


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