I'm relatively new to Kontakt (having given up on Directwave) and I bought a nice Taiko library from Heavyocity....
The drum hits keep shorting out and playing choppy from time to time. I don't understand whats causing this since all I've done is lay down a few MIDI notes - with NOTHING else in the sequencer. I opened up the settings and don't see any modulation for volume, and the envelope is unchanged.
Velocity is unchanged, no automation... nothing is altered; I open up Kontakt -> load the instrument -> play 3 or 4 notes, and there's irregularity. What gives?
Annoying Kontakt Help
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- KVRAF
- 44237 posts since 11 Aug, 2008 from clown world
Did you wait for the Library to load 100%? If it's very large it might take a while.
This is the same method MJ used when he was working on Anthony Marinelli's Thriller.
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- KVRAF
- Topic Starter
- 3369 posts since 16 Jan, 2005 from Ottawa, Ontario
...loading is fine. It's not that the instruments aren't there, it sounds more like there's a choke going on, and occasionally the hit won't play at all.
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- KVRAF
- 24456 posts since 7 Jan, 2009 from Croatia
What's the DFD buffer size set to?
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- KVRer
- 2 posts since 31 Jan, 2017 from Georgia
Not sure if this is your issue or not, but sometimes if a library is too resource hungry on my desktop(usually only happens when I have a lot of big patches open) the disk will peak a lot at 100% which causes things to be choppy and such.
Can I ask your computer specs? Depending on what you have, it might be enough. In that case you might want to invest in new parts for your computer
Can I ask your computer specs? Depending on what you have, it might be enough. In that case you might want to invest in new parts for your computer
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- KVRAF
- Topic Starter
- 3369 posts since 16 Jan, 2005 from Ottawa, Ontario
Thanks for the help guys.
- DFD buffer is set to default 60 kb. I'll have to look into this a bit
- My specs are not too great, but should surely handle a single Kontakt instrument with one library loaded
AMD FX-8350
16G Kingston HyperX
Samsung 840 120G SSD (system)
Kingston SSDnow 120G (Plugins)
WD 320G (Samples)
- DFD buffer is set to default 60 kb. I'll have to look into this a bit
- My specs are not too great, but should surely handle a single Kontakt instrument with one library loaded
AMD FX-8350
16G Kingston HyperX
Samsung 840 120G SSD (system)
Kingston SSDnow 120G (Plugins)
WD 320G (Samples)
Last edited by Debutante on Wed Feb 01, 2017 3:34 am, edited 1 time in total.
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- KVRAF
- Topic Starter
- 3369 posts since 16 Jan, 2005 from Ottawa, Ontario
...polyphony is set to ridiculous 128 or something. I actually lowered it to to perhaps save some cycles/ram if it's worth anything.
Funny thing is that if I load a single one-shot into Kontakt then no problems.
It's only happening with my commercial libraries. Like I said, I've had Kontakt about a year but never really used it yet, but I can navigate my way around it. So I'm wondering it there are some settings I haven't come across that do this kind of thing:
That's kind of what it sound like. Except sometimes a sample is truncated, too loud or too soft, or not there at all. Completely unpredictable...
Funny thing is that if I load a single one-shot into Kontakt then no problems.
It's only happening with my commercial libraries. Like I said, I've had Kontakt about a year but never really used it yet, but I can navigate my way around it. So I'm wondering it there are some settings I haven't come across that do this kind of thing:
That's kind of what it sound like. Except sometimes a sample is truncated, too loud or too soft, or not there at all. Completely unpredictable...
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- KVRAF
- Topic Starter
- 3369 posts since 16 Jan, 2005 from Ottawa, Ontario
...still chugging along, I noticed that the cutouts also show the CPU meter in Kontakt turn red, and doing so at 3-4%. How the hell can that be if I only have a single instrument loaded with nothing else happening in my sequencer?
This only happens with some libraries. Factory and some others play Ok
This only happens with some libraries. Factory and some others play Ok
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- KVRAF
- 2448 posts since 12 Sep, 2004
Link to FLStudio video? I don't get it...
Anyway, I used to run modest Kontakt 1,2,3 projects on a Pentium4 w/ 4GB, and some "screaming fast" 7200RPM drives. Anyhoo... your setup is plenty for what you're trying to do... down the line the 320GB drive may be a bottleneck depending on proper config, but really an older drive like that should still be able to do 30MB/sec straightline read, which in real world terms... say 50% throughput = 15MB/sec = 15,000,000byte/sec throughput... 2 * 44.1kHz * 3bytes = 264,600byte/sec/stereo voice... 15000000/264600 = 56 stereo voices ~ 100-120 voices. And that's a conservative estimate assuming a lot of seeking around, 10msec access time, etc... in practice Windows is going to use a big chunk of that 16GB if it can (at least in my experience), so a lot of that reading wouldn't even hit the disk. So that hardware can probably do upwards of 150 voices (75 stereo). If you're interested, disk "cluster size" also helps maximize read performance on sets of large-data elements (like .5-1MB samples)... 64K clusters is good, or 32K, which I think I settled on in general for data partitions.
Is that a PATA or SATA drive? 5400 or 7200 RPM? Do you have antivirus enabled? Make sure your BIOS and Windows are configured for max throughput on the drive... drive probably supports UDMA6 (133MB/sec through the controller) if PATA... if SATA make sure port isn't configured as "IDE" in the BIOS, which is a compatibility mode that would slow the disk to a crawl... simple disk benchmark can verify the linear read performance of the drive... should be 30-40MB/sec on the outside, dropping off to maybe 20-25 on the inside.
In any case, you're seeing CPU spikes, so disk probably isn't your problem. What host are you using? Is standalone better than hosted? If standalone try disabling multicore in Kontakt (you can tell it how many cores to use in config screen)... maybe the OS is thrashing context switching between cores. Speaking of which... low-cost test is to try core parking: https://steamcommunity.com/app/239140/d ... 220044076/ ... you can find a simple registry tweak to disable core parking in windows. Basically it tells windows to not disable cores just because it feels like it, which it does to save power. Other than that you can try to run kontakt standalone on 1 or 2 cores, see what the performance is. The disk should light up more than the CPU, and CPU shouldn't be hitting red.
Then there's always https://support.native-instruments.com/ ... KONTAKT-5-
Anyway, I used to run modest Kontakt 1,2,3 projects on a Pentium4 w/ 4GB, and some "screaming fast" 7200RPM drives. Anyhoo... your setup is plenty for what you're trying to do... down the line the 320GB drive may be a bottleneck depending on proper config, but really an older drive like that should still be able to do 30MB/sec straightline read, which in real world terms... say 50% throughput = 15MB/sec = 15,000,000byte/sec throughput... 2 * 44.1kHz * 3bytes = 264,600byte/sec/stereo voice... 15000000/264600 = 56 stereo voices ~ 100-120 voices. And that's a conservative estimate assuming a lot of seeking around, 10msec access time, etc... in practice Windows is going to use a big chunk of that 16GB if it can (at least in my experience), so a lot of that reading wouldn't even hit the disk. So that hardware can probably do upwards of 150 voices (75 stereo). If you're interested, disk "cluster size" also helps maximize read performance on sets of large-data elements (like .5-1MB samples)... 64K clusters is good, or 32K, which I think I settled on in general for data partitions.
Is that a PATA or SATA drive? 5400 or 7200 RPM? Do you have antivirus enabled? Make sure your BIOS and Windows are configured for max throughput on the drive... drive probably supports UDMA6 (133MB/sec through the controller) if PATA... if SATA make sure port isn't configured as "IDE" in the BIOS, which is a compatibility mode that would slow the disk to a crawl... simple disk benchmark can verify the linear read performance of the drive... should be 30-40MB/sec on the outside, dropping off to maybe 20-25 on the inside.
In any case, you're seeing CPU spikes, so disk probably isn't your problem. What host are you using? Is standalone better than hosted? If standalone try disabling multicore in Kontakt (you can tell it how many cores to use in config screen)... maybe the OS is thrashing context switching between cores. Speaking of which... low-cost test is to try core parking: https://steamcommunity.com/app/239140/d ... 220044076/ ... you can find a simple registry tweak to disable core parking in windows. Basically it tells windows to not disable cores just because it feels like it, which it does to save power. Other than that you can try to run kontakt standalone on 1 or 2 cores, see what the performance is. The disk should light up more than the CPU, and CPU shouldn't be hitting red.
Then there's always https://support.native-instruments.com/ ... KONTAKT-5-
You need to limit that rez, bro.