I’m having an issue with larger setlists that are preloaded and Kontakt.
I think what’s happening is that Windows or Kontakt are unloading the “starter” sample data (it’s part of the full sample - you play a note, it plays that starter and then streams the rest from disk) from the Kontakt libraries when they need more memory. This is causing hiccups when I play notes for the first time (as Kontakt has to reload the initial samples).
I’m thinking that there may be a way to force Kontakt to load that starter sample data on song load (and I’m hoping that Kontakt is smart enough not to reload samples that are already in memory).
Anyone have similar experience with this? I suppose I could mute the output, play all the notes, and then unmute when that is done, for every song, but I may need to play multiple velocities to make sure that the right samples are loaded. It also seems like a handed way to do it, and could be riddled with other issues.
I used to use Kontakt and it would skip the first note I would play and start sounding on the second strike of the same note (after a new song load). Is that what’s happening?
Yes. Streaming samples load a limited amount of data to keep latency down, and for the attack portion of the sample, and then stream. Whether it’s the OS that clears out the memory, or the app (Kontakt in this case) - but I bet it’s actually the OS.
In all but the most time critical scenarios (and music is certainly up there), doing this really causes no perceptable delay to the user (think a word processing app that has had the pictures in memory, it really doesn’t matter. That’s why I think it’s more likely to be the OS doing the clean up.
I have experienced this, I thought by changing to SSD’s this would help reduce the problem,
it did a little.
I found reducing the sample size in cantabile and asio drivers drivers helped a little as well, default it was at 1024, so I reduced it to 512 and that helped, (inadvertently discovering I fixed my midi syncing issues between cantabile and external hardware at the same time )
I still experience this issue, its only with the instruments which have huge amounts of samples or long samples and also different vendors have different results. I have no issues with anything
by soundiron, yet many issue with those by rigid audio.
The initial hiccup is defintely an issue with memory (memory reclamation usually).
The SSD will definitely help after that initial x milliseconds/sampls:
a. Load time
b. Hiccupping later in the sample playback
I’m now trying to reduce the amount of initial loading to see if that helps (thank you YouTube search). This translates to less memory being used, so hopefully that translates to less reclamation. It also means that more data needs to stream from the SSD, but I’m not having issues with that.
I’m not really sure if this will help you, but just my experience.
I have long playlists of e.g. 50 songs with many stateds each. I use many Kontakt instruments, for the project I’m working on now I’m heavily using Session Strings, which is a pretty have vst with a lot of loading time for each instrument (disadvantage,…). I do not have issues with the first note, but if I change state it will start to load the instruments that are different. To avoid that I make that at critical switches there is no change in instruments going from one state to the next. In that case the switch is immediate, no notes missing.
In Kontakt you can change the behaviour of the loading. I found this video quite useful
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