Hi People, hope you can help. Using Cantabile 3 with mostly Kontakt Plug Ins. Practicing at home everything seems fine, but at rehearsal tonight a lot of my sounds when playing chords occasionally played for a few seconds then stopped/dropped out and i had to rehit the chord for it to work again then it dropped out again!!. I am running a Dell E6440 laptop, Intel I5 4200M CPU, 2.50GHZ, 16gb RAM, Windows 10 Pro, 500gb HDD with a Steinberg UR242 sound card and Cantabile 3. Could it be the settings in Cantabile for the Audio Driver ?, or something else ive missed?.
Steve, hello. A couple of observations. I have that same laptop, but with the i5-4310m processor (at 2.7Ghz). Believe me, a couple hundred megahertz of processor speed are of more help in your setup (from 2.5Ghz to 2.7Ghz). But the best investment you could make if you want to continue using your laptop is to buy an SSD drive and clone your 500GB HDD drive to it. It is a very beneficial upgrade.
Since your laptop is a 4th generation Intel laptop I would instead recommend you buy on Bbay at least a used 7th generation Dell Latitude laptop, for example a Dell Latitude 7480 with 2.8Ghz and the Nvidia 930MX (2 Gigabytes of discrete video) and an NVme hard drive (also called M.2. This hard drive is faster than HDD and SSD) and if it only comes with 8gb of RAM you can upgrade it to at least 16GB (it handles 32GB). This type of laptop is around US$150 used, and the Latitude 5580 with at least a 2.6Ghz processor can be purchased cheaper.
For today’s standards these laptops are slow. I have not tried using Kontakt player, only VST’s that do not “overtax” the laptop.
I understand that the real time dropouts your are experiencing would be less with a faster architecture motherboard (a more modern generation laptop), as well as adequate RAM (at least 16GB, but more is better), and a fast hard drive NVMe.
In the meantime don’t forget to defrag your HDD hard drive (with Defraggler, for example), and to clean temporary files (with CCleaner, for example), for a minimum current benefit in regards to less dropouts.
Hi Joel, thanks for the reply. Yeah I guess the best bet is a more powerful laptop. I was on the same thoughts as you with the HDD, so I have invested in an SSD. Hopefully that will help.