Kirk Hunter load times: is it just me?

[EvilDragon]

I presume KH libraries are using a lot of groups and a decent amount of modulators for each group. Coupled with very extensive scripting, yes, the load time can be longer.

[egbert]

Loading times of minutes really sound like there is something wrong. In 15 minutes you can download couple of gigabytes from internet with decent connection so shouldn't really take that much time to load them from hd.

Some libraries have several thousand samples. You have to locate and access every single one and copy a small section of it to RAM and create a look up table (I guess) for where the rest of the sample starts. Smart programming would do what Fxpansion did with BFD - load a single sample for every instrument/articulation and the GUI and load the rest in the background - giving almost instant access to a 10 GB drumkit. Kontakt for years left me staring at an almost blank GUI while some sluggish thread on one core ran on forever and the machine remained unresponsive till it finished. This was improved markedly by the changes I mentioned but still a bit of a pain.

[EvilDragon]

Smart programming would do what Fxpansion did with BFD - load a single sample for every instrument/articulation and the GUI and load the rest in the background - giving almost instant access to a 10 GB drumkit.

This is exactly what Kontakt's background loading is now doing. Even more - the samples you used more than others the last time (in case you saved the NKI) get priority while loading, too.

[sockofgold]

Loading times of minutes really sound like there is something wrong. In 15 minutes you can download couple of gigabytes from internet with decent connection so shouldn't really take that much time to load them from hd.

I agree completely, but I think the issue is that it is not loading samples most of that time. The 7 minutes I mentioned was just, as someone else mentioned, starting at Kontakt's GUI frozen. After that 7 minutes, it only took about 60-90 seconds to actually load up the samples.

It's just the frozen GUI thing that annoys me. Honestly, I like the KHS stuff enough that I will probably just have to remind myself "have something else to do the first time you load these up" and work on something else for a few minutes. I certainly don't want to deride the KHS stuff, because they really are nice. It would just be nice if there were a way to fix the pre-load freeze.

Thanks again everyone for the suggestions!

(Also worth mentioning that my hard drive is probably in desparate need of a defrag, after downloading both the Independence Pro updated library and all of KHS's stuff over the past couple weeks. That's like 160GB, plus most of them were zip files that had to be unzipped and moved. I doubt it will actually solve my problem, but I will definitely have to do that today. )

[musicdoc]

If Kirk would let us have the pre TVEC Kontakt patches that had much less programming, that would be great. Many times you just want to load up a particular articulation without having to load a gargantuan file.

I have the older pre-TVEC version of pop rock strings, and it works beautifully. Maybe not as fancy and interface but o well.

I also have the newer brass with TVEC and never use it because it takes such much memory and time to load even with samples purged. I asked kirk about the old patches but he said they were not available anymore.

Old patches for like 1 articulation are like a tenth of the size.

[sockofgold]

If Kirk would let us have the pre TVEC Kontakt patches that had much less programming, that would be great. Many times you just want to load up a particular articulation without having to load a gargantuan file.

I have the older pre-TVEC version of pop rock strings, and it works beautifully. Maybe not as fancy and interface but o well.

I also have the newer brass with TVEC and never use it because it takes such much memory and time to load even with samples purged. I asked kirk about the old patches but he said they were not available anymore.

Old patches for like 1 articulation are like a tenth of the size.

Yeah, that's a bummer. I am a far cry from a "real" composer, so I can usually make do with just the smooth/accent/short articulations, as well as the basic key-switching between them. I don't need all the "VibratoLive" and "Body Modeling" and "InternalLive" junk. I just need the delightful sound of the libraries.

I am still using them, but I keep my laptop nearby so that when I have to wait for one to load, I can work on something else for a minute or two (e.g. post this reply on KVR ).

Maybe if enough people express interest in this kind of thing Kirk would consider a "TVEC Lite" interface or something, designed to load quick without all the fancy scripting.