KVR Audio

geeseaplenty · Post by **geeseaplenty** » Thu Mar 18, 2004 5:46 am

I was loading the free ns7 kit into Battery yesterday when I got the prompt: "This patch uses 484mb of memory. This might cause memory to be low. Load kit anyway?" This is a great kit, and I've loaded it before without getting this prompt. Now it plays my grooves like it's having a hard time pulling the samples from memory. The notes sounds mangled and metallic and the tempo slows down. This also distorts the rest of my audio. It causes such severe CPU spikes that my system goes into blue screen sometimes. This can't be normal.

I have an Athlon 2500 Barton and an MSI k7n2 mobo, w/ nvidia chipset. I also have 512mb of PC2100 RAM.

How do I narrow down this problem? Should a kit like this hog that much resources? And why is it all of the sudden telling me that it requires this much RAM?

ew · Post by ew » Thu Mar 18, 2004 6:50 am

No,it shouldn't.My first guess would be(if you're on a 2000/XP system)that your paging file's fragmented.I had a lot of strange issues like that last week-I never got the short on memory prompt,but my sound was horrible,and performance was down the tubes.Defragged my paging file(it's a boot time defrag-a lot of your utility suites will do it),and everything was back to normal.Do a cntrl-alt-del to bring up your performance monitor,and look at the paging file stats.
ew

geeseaplenty · Post by **geeseaplenty** » Thu Mar 18, 2004 3:53 pm

I defragged the drive with the included XP system tool. Then I restarted and opened the song. It still sounds horrible -- not stable at all.

My page file usage (with no apps running except this explorer window) is at 113mb. I have 512mb of RAM. So that seems high given I have nothing except IE running. Any other suggestions?

ew · Post by ew » Thu Mar 18, 2004 4:08 pm

It's not your normal defrag-XP doesn't do boot time defrag,and the paging file's boot time.Download something like the Diskeeper full demo or SafeXP(there's a link to Safe XP in the forum's posts from yesterday in the computer hardware and... forum).With Safe XP,it'll just dump your paging file when ever you restart though-you still might have to defrag it.I use SystemSuite as my utility suite-it permits boot time defragging of the paging file.
To give you an example of what I mean,my paging file's at 7Mb at this moment...
ew

geeseaplenty · Post by **geeseaplenty** » Thu Mar 18, 2004 4:27 pm

Thanks for the tip. I downloaded a demo of diskeeper and did a boot time defrag of the page file as you suggested. I thought that would work, but after reboot I checked the page file and it's still very high (especially compared to yours), It's at 107mb right now. Do you think this is why I have a problem with Battery?

ew · Post by ew » Thu Mar 18, 2004 4:29 pm

Yep-that's taking up 1/5 of your RAM and creating bottlenecks.Try downloading Safe XP and set it up to clear the paging file when shutting down.Then try to defrag your paging file again.
ew

ew · Post by ew » Thu Mar 18, 2004 4:42 pm

Also(if you don't do it already),clean out all the temp files on your drive(web cache,temp folders,etc.)at LEAST once a day.I defrag all my drives once a day as well,and run chkdisk once a week on all three of my drives.Keeping on top of maintenance like that really helps in the long run

ew

geeseaplenty · Post by **geeseaplenty** » Thu Mar 18, 2004 4:56 pm

ew, your suggestions are enormously appreciated. Safe XP is a great utility. Unfortunately, I still have the same problem. Both times when I defragged the paging file it said "paging file not fragmented," so I don't think that's the problem. I'm looking at my paging file right now and it still hovers around 100mb, so there is something screwy going on with my memory. I ran virus scan and nothing was found. I don't no where to go from here.

pschelfh · Post by **pschelfh** » Thu Mar 18, 2004 4:56 pm

It might also be a good idea to buy a second drive just for audio and samples (prices are low now)!

As it is now, Windows is trying to access the page file and the samples on the same drive, resulting in slower disk access.

Peter.

ew · Post by ew » Thu Mar 18, 2004 5:43 pm

Peter's got a good point-the only thing on my C:/ drive is my OS and those programs that aren't happy anywhere else.
ew

ew · Post by ew » Thu Mar 18, 2004 6:04 pm

And I'll bet I know what's filling up the paging file-your recent documents list.Call it up-I'll bet it's huge.Clear that out with an appropriate utility-Safe Xp will do that one as well.You don't need it,and all it does is hog resources.
ew

Jeremy_NSL · Post by **Jeremy_NSL** » Thu Mar 18, 2004 6:14 pm

there is just no way nskit7 should take so much ram. Its only 207mb. Did you change the .kit file at all? Or maybe Battery has an option, similar to Kontakt, to load all samples as 32-bit, and that somehow got switched on. That would double the RAM it takes to load ns_kit.

My advice is try a few other battery kits and see if their raw wav size corresponds to the size in battery, or if its 2x the RAM like ns_kit apparently is. If all kits are somehow double size in battery then you have some sort of system issue - maybe what ew is talking about. Personally I'd just reinstall if its a system issue though. You could spend days screwing with the paging file, registry settings etc. just not worth the time. good luck

geeseaplenty · Post by **geeseaplenty** » Fri Mar 19, 2004 1:56 pm

Other, smaller kits (like the Ambient Kit found here)don't tax the CPU like the ns7. But, still, I know with my RAM that I should be able to play larger sized kits. Certainly it shouldn't be hogging 484mb of RAM! Am I wrong here? The question then becomes, why is Battery prompting me with the warning that is takes up that much memory?

One Modest Kit = 484mb RAM...How Is This Possible?