Following our identification of a serious instability issue, Native Instruments has released information of a workaround to allow their Kontakt 5 sampler application / plug-in to run more reliably inside OS X 10.9 Mavericks.
Although initial impressions of the stability of Kontakt 5 under Mavericks were favourable, an increasing number of people were finding that Kontakt was crashing whilst trying to do even the simplest of tasks - such as loading an instrument. Curiously the issue appeared to only arise when using a multichannel audio interface - either with the standalone application, or as a plug-in inside a sequencing host such as Logic Pro X.
For some who had upgraded to Mavericks under the assurance from Native Instruments that there were no specific issues, the problem has proved a major impediment to workflow. We can personally attest to one client whose workflow was so severely restricted by the issue that we had to downgrade him back to OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion - by no means a straightforward process!
Since we identified the issue, we have come across anumberofpeople in NI’s user forums and elsewhere who have suffered from the same problem - and with no solution in sight.
Finally, today NI informed us that they have now been able to reproduce the issue, and a fix will be forthcoming in version 5.3.1 of Kontakt. In the meantime, the following workaround will effect a similar resolution:
▪ Instead of launching Kontakt or the host sequencer as normal, Control-click on the application and choose Show Package Contents; ▪ Inside the resulting window, go to Contents > MacOS > then double-click on the application name (which will only show as a black ‘exec’ icon); ▪ The application will now launch as normal.
In our tests so far, this has completely resolved the issue; whereas we could previously get Kontakt to crash sometimes on loading even a single instrument, we can now load up a full complement of 64 instruments with no problem.
Our thanks go to Stephen Parker of Native Instruments UK for pushing through a response to the issue.
