GPO/Kontakt rendering problems. (update - not Tracktion)

[ceenda]

I recently got hold of Garritan Personal Orchestra which is powered by NI Kontakt.

In Tracktion, it's fine. Either as many MIDI tracks pointing to 1 GPO, or as rack-wrapped instances across tracks.

However... it won't render correctly, either when tracks are Frozen, Rendered, or the entire audio edit is Exported to wav.

The resulting wav (whether by freezing, rendering, or exporting a complete edit) seems to miss out entire sections and notes without any seeming pattern.

I have:

1 - Tried rendering out at 1x, but no success.
2 - Tried isolating Kontakt on a track and render it out on it's own. No success.
3 - Tried rendering each track with a Kontakt Rack instance on it's own. Nope.

I can stick energyXT or some other recording VST in the Master section and record the output manually, but it's very awkward.

This is bad news, as I was hoping to get EWQLSO Silver, and I'm worried that the Kompakt engine will have the same problems.

People must be using GPO without problems? Must be my setup? Hasn't happened with any other VSTs.

[pethu]

Latest verison of the GPO player has Direct-From-Disk streaming, no? Rendering with DFD causes problems on all Kontakt versions -- turn it off if it's on and see how that works.

[ceenda]

pethu: I downloaded the latest GPO update recently from NI, but I can't find a single dialogue or option anywhere that relates to DFD. I'm sure DFD was an optional download from Garritan somewhere else and not in the actual main download update.

This is driving me crazy. I have absolutely no idea why it's doing this. I've removed anything from the chain that could cause latency problems etc. and even taken GPO out of a rack and just isolated it.

Are people really having no problems with regular Kontakt use in T2 at all?

[pethu]

I'm still waiting for my group buy GPO to arrive, so unfortunately I have no way of checking on it myself just yet. But your problems (intermittent silence) do sound just like the problems people, including myself, are having when rendering Kontakt tracks with DFD active.

A possible workaround is rendering tracks in normal playback mode using Silverspike's TapeIt or Voxengo's Recorder.

[jeffn1]

I'm still waiting for my group buy GPO to arrive, so unfortunately I have no way of checking on it myself just yet. But your problems (intermittent silence) do sound just like the problems people, including myself, are having when rendering Kontakt tracks with DFD active.

A possible workaround is rendering tracks in normal playback mode using Silverspike's TapeIt or Voxengo's Recorder.

In Sonar I used to have this problem (actually, it was with Drumkit From Hell 2). I solved it in Sonar by unchecking "fast bounce". I do not knwo if a similar option is avialable in Tracktion. I also increased the amount of ram I had from 1 GB to 3. This seemed to help me with the big romplers (though GPO is not really no much of a Ram hog compared to others).

jeffn1

[jeffn1]

[Double Post]

[sghoughton]

I have no issues with the StormDrum Kompakt product. I don't have the DFD option on though.

steve

[ceenda]

AHA! I think I've figured out what it is!

The track that was screwing up was quite processor intensive. However, it was playing fine. However, there were gaps in the rendered file.

So I created a new edit, put in a midi track with an instance of Kontakt and 8 intruments loaded inside that one instance, all receiving from MIDI Channel 1, so all instruments would play at the same time. I figured it might be a RAM issue, but it played fine (if a little LOUD! ), and rendered fine.

So I then spaced out the sounds across several different tracks (still pointing to the GPO instance).

The CPU meter hit skyrocket, and began to cut out sections of the song where the CPU level was going too high. I was getting the same cracks and breaks and lost MIDI notes that I was getting when rendering out, but this time in realtime play mode as apposed to the rendered copy.

So, that seems to be it. High CPU makes Kontakt cut out. I'm not sure if this is a Tracktion thing or a Kontakt thing, so I'll test in FL Studio and energyXT and see if I can replicate it.

Is there a way to tell T2 to not cut out when the CPU hits a high load? And why would this affect non-realtime rendering to file?

I have a theory DFD mode might actually help when rendering out. Anyway, I'll continue to test it. The bad thing about this cut-out problem is that you can't usually freeze a working track in order to free up the CPU in the first place.

For the record, my PC (which needs an upgrade anyway...):

Athlon XP1800 (1.53Ghz)
RAM: 768Mb

[ceenda]

UPDATE: It's Kontakt, not Tracktion.

I just got the same out of Kontakt in it's own standalone program.

My PC just isn't fast enough.

Oh well, at least Tracktion2 is working fine.

[kensuguro]

I had the exact same problem, and I think I solved it. Go to the "Engine" menu in the left pane, and click on "offline bounce mode" and make it turn red. The bounce shold now work. I'm using Kontakt 2 on a mac using T2.

[kensuguro]

actually, on closer inspection, there seems to be some timing issues when bouncing with kontakt. I'm not too sure what it is at the moment, I'm guessing it's related to the "auto advance" thing.. my tracks sound a bit out of sync. It's really hard to tell with the tracks I'm working on right now because they're loosel quantized.
Does anyone else have the same problem?

[ceenda]

I've read a number of posts on the NI forums, Northern Sounds forums and elsewhere with exactly the same problem. People are having problems in Cubase, Sonar and all sorts of hosts.

I've managed to use TapeIt 2 as a work-a-round for the time being. Thanks for the suggestion, though GPO still uses v1 of Kontakt and I don't think that option is there.

Though I've heard people are having problems with Kontakt2 on this issue.