# Migration from Kontakt 5 to 6 in REAPER



## TomislavEP (May 27, 2019)

With the possibility that Native Instruments will have a summer sale on Komplete updates / upgrades, I was planning to update to Komplete 12. My main motive is probably the new "Play" series of Kontakt libraries that sound and feature-wise seem attractive for my personal style and workflow.

I know as a fact that those libraries require Kontakt 6 to run and that it is possible to install Kontakt 6 along with the Kontakt 5. However, it seems a bit redundant to me to use Kontakt 6 only for a few new libraries as it can probably (if I'm not mistaken) also run all those that work in Kontakt 5 and that includes all my libraries purchased thus far, both from Native Instruments and the 3rd party developers.

At the same time, I have absolutely no experience with switching to a higher version of Kontakt as I've been using it only in its 5th generation, since I've became a Komplete / Kontakt owner the first time when Komplete 9 was released. So I'm greatly concerned about the compatibility issues with my projects thus far which all use Kontakt 5 in some form.

My main DAW is REAPER and I have quite a few custom track and project templates I use on a regular basis. I'm guessing that uninstalling Kontakt 5 and trying to replace it completely with Kontakt 6 would mean that I would have to manually fix all my sessions that used Kontakt 5.

So, in your opinion, what would be the most sensible and painless solution here? Is there a way to ensure compatibility with the older sessions if switching to Kontakt 6 without too much hassle or the only way to go is keeping Kontakt 5 and using Kontakt 6 only for those newer libraries that require it to run?

Many thanks for your advice.


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## Lindon (May 27, 2019)

TomislavEP said:


> With the possibility that Native Instruments will have a summer sale on Komplete updates / upgrades, I was planning to update to Komplete 12. My main motive is probably the new "Play" series of Kontakt libraries that sound and feature-wise seem attractive for my personal style and workflow.
> 
> I know as a fact that those libraries require Kontakt 6 to run and that it is possible to install Kontakt 6 along with the Kontakt 5. However, it seems a bit redundant to me to use Kontakt 6 only for a few new libraries as it can probably (if I'm not mistaken) also run all those that work in Kontakt 5 and that includes all my libraries purchased thus far, both from Native Instruments and the 3rd party developers.
> 
> ...



Yes you are right you can run K5 and K6 together.

In theory( and usually in practice) your older (k5) libraries will work seamlessly in K6 - that seems to be NI's intent - but there have been some (but few) reports of minor incompatibilities.

You are also correct that installing K6 and removing K5 will require you to rework your templates, and your existing sessions.

As a developer I have to have K4, K5 and K6 available (in fact several sub versions usually as well), I know Mario does too, so we may be an extreme example - but the overhead of this is really only a small amount of disk space. K5 and K6 will work seamlessly together in a session, on different tracks obviously- tho actually I cant see why you couldnt put K5 - running say our SARP plugin - in front of K6 and it would work - let me check .... yep K5(SARP)->K6(Hybrid key Lib) - that works too.
So you can mix and match to your hearts content. Best option here would be to keep both K5 and K6 I think.


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## TomislavEP (May 27, 2019)

Thank you kindly for a quick answer.

If I understood correctly, the best bet would be to make a pre-routed REAPER track template using Kontakt 6 and use it along with my Kontakt 5 track templates when I need to use a library that require Kontakt 6. I'm guessing I should only add those libraries to it's internal library (Kontakt Player 6 compatible ones) and keep using Kontakt 5 for everything else.


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## EvilDragon (May 27, 2019)

Reaper makes it ridiculously easy to change your existing projects from K5 to K6. Just open .RPP files in text editor, look for "Kontakt 5.dll" and change that to "Kontakt.dll". Voila! 

(Same thing works on track template files.)


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## TomislavEP (May 27, 2019)

EvilDragon said:


> Reaper makes it ridiculously easy to change your existing projects from K5 to K6. Just open .RPP files in text editor, look for "Kontakt 5.dll" and change that to "Kontakt.dll". Voila!
> 
> (Same thing works on track template files.)



Thanks for the tip! I will certainly have this in mind if I decide to completely switch from Kontakt 5 to 6 though I must admit that, for the time being, I'm leaning toward keeping Kontakt 5 to ensure compatibility with the older projects. On the other hand, the process of updating the dll path in each project is indeed not all that difficult, apart for the work itself, considering the number of projects to be updated.


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## EvilDragon (May 27, 2019)

There's no need for that though. K6 loads everything from K5 just fine...


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