Issue with latest guitar libraries and Sample Modelling Brass

[meradium]

Hi all,

I am experiencing massive audio dropouts which occur at random after I am playing with my setup. When this happens Kontakt 5 instances on my VEP 5 slave start to display severe disk usage while the CPU stays almost idle. During this time the Slave is barely able to play a couple of voices. The disk usage almost immediately hits the ceiling. Usually, the setup is easily able to spit out 300+ voices in real-time without any issue.

The issues starts to appear anything from 5-30 min to 4h into a session.

With a lot of trial and error I was able to narrow the problem down to two libraries. There seems to be some correlation with the use of Sample Modelling Brass instruments and any of the loaded Orange Tree Samples (Evolution Dracus, Evolution Steel, Rick Bass). As soon as I use those two libraries in parallel I am set for failure. BTW. it all started with Evolution Dracus which I got first...

The only way to return to normal is to either close down VEP on the slave and reloading the entire template or deleting the Kontakt instance which contains the Orange Tree sample libraries. The first solution seems to solve the issue only temporarily while the second appears to offer a permanent solution (at least after several hours of operation everything was still running normal).

Separating the guitar libraries and the SM Brass through individual VEP instances on the same machine did not solve the issue.

My only option has been to take the OTSs from my Slave to my DAW and to host them there.

Has anybody experienced this kind of behavior of Kontakt before?

A few words about my setup:

DAW:
MacBook Pro which is running Cubase 8 Pro.
OSX 10.10.5
2.3 GHz Intel 4-Core i7
16 GB RAM
500GB Samsung EVO SSD

SLAVE:
Hackintosh
OSX 10.9.5
3.89 GHz Intel 4-Core i7
32 GB RAM
2x 500GB Samsung EVO SSD

Both machines are connected via 1Gbit Ethernet, WLAN on the MacBook Pro is disabled.

The Slave is setup in the following way:
One single VEP 5 instance at 64Bit. In there 20 Kontakt instances are at work. One is dedicated to all three Orange Tree Sample libraries

Kontakt memory override is set to 6.00 kb. Multiprocessor support is set to 2 cores.

Multiprocessing in VEP is set to 8 threads.

Inside Cubase there is one instance of the VEP plugin running with 11 enabled stereo busses. Its buffer setting is a 2 buffers.

Best,
Sebastian

[EvilDragon]

That is indeed bizarre. I'm not sure there are many (if any) users using OTS libraries in VEP, much less on a slave...

[Gregjazz]

I feel like an important element is the disk meter spiking, but the CPU remaining almost idle. Are you looking at the activity monitor, or the engine monitor tab in Kontakt to see the disk meter usage? They'll probably show similar results, but Kontakt's monitoring might offer more hints about the disk usage.

Have you already tried moving the library to your other SSD on the slave machine to see if you still run into the same problem?

Another thing to look into is if there's some scheduled background process that's causing the audio dropout. For example, Spotlight updating its file indexing or something like that.

[meradium]

The spikes are reported inside Kontakt and when this happens it is reported in any of the loaded Kontakt instances inside the VEP instance. The OSX Activity Monitor does not show anything unusual.

There are no background processes running.

I will try the SSD thing, but I am questioning whether this really could be a solution due to the fact that when the issue appears it is not related to the actual load of the machine. It is enough to just play a single instrument to bring the system to its knees which certainly is not normal.

Once I unload the instance with the guitar samples, everything goes back to normal. I still have to try this with another Kontakt instance to see if it can be clearly isolated to the guitars...

I will update this thread as soon as I know more details.

[Gregjazz]

The only reason I mention trying it on a different SSD is just to make sure that isn't an element to try and round down the cause of the problem by eliminating factors. If you temporarily raise your DFD buffer just in that instance of Kontakt, does it alleviate the problem?

[Tony Ostinato]

i use samplemodeling trumpet, trombone, and sax bros in kontakt in reaper live with an sata3 ssd.

no problems but i have dfd set to 80k i think and i am running kontakt as a dedicated process in reaper.

an odd thing samplemodeling does, and i havent seen it really explained why, is that they have activity on cc13 and others running sporadically within the instruments. you see it when you look at the midi automation assignments in kontakt. happens all the time even when you arent playing the samplemodeling instruments. doesnt go away until you unload em.