How Do You Guys Utilize Kontakt?

[Danny]

Hey Guys,

Just wondering. Do you use Kontakt in multi timbral mode or do you run an instance of Kontakt for each track?

I know there is better CPU performance in multi timbral mode but I have had times where Kontakt crashed and I lost all of my loaded VST's, parameters, effects, etc.

I just finished a 16 track orchestral piece using 16 instances of Kontakt however, I had to bump up my buffer size to 512 and utilize 3 out of 4 cores on the processer.

[waveheavy]

I use Kontakt with multi instruments all the time and rarely have a problem with it crashing. I'm using the full version of Kontakt 5.

There's some tutorials on YouTube of how to optimize Kontakt.

[cassmcentee]

Multi, but I don't go much deeper than 8 instruments (I haven't composed anything that complex )
My proven method has been to just keep my fingers crossed!
3 years ago on a "less than powerful" computer it had a habit of crashing/freezing and I would lose work...
I haven't had that problem with my latest 'puter.
I do have a slight Project Freeze when I have a song running and I load in a CPU heavy instrument. 5 to 10 seconds maybe

[Danny]

My proven method has been to just keep my fingers crossed!

Ha ha ha. That is awesome! It really does make the most sense when dealing with DAW's, plugins, effects, etc.

Nower days you have to be a computer science genius to keep up with all of the specs..

[Len911]

There's another angle to perhaps look into, and that is how many disk drives and/or the type of disk drives. There's the DFD settings, or "direct from disk".

I don't use a large number of instruments at once, so I'm not acquainted with the particulars, however I have had an Ocean Way Drum install I screwed up, so Kontakt couldn't find some of the samples, they weren't in the same folder, and I had to locate the folder for those particular samples, and they happened to be on a different drive, and once located, it worked, using essentially two different drives for the samples. So I suppose that not only is it possible to put different sample libraries on different drives, but divide the samples onto different drives from the same library.

I'm just saying that the crashing could possibly be happening because of only using one hard drive, and the difference between multi-timbral or multiple instance mode may have different parameters involved and the way they operate, such as the DFD? Essentially, is the cpu taxed because of the bottleneck of instructions from only using one hard disk? My logic maybe incorrect,lol, but if you have a large orchestral library on one disk, I'm not sure how effective the DFD would be, as the disk may have to spin pretty fast and over many gigs to find a sample, especially if you have a lot of ram to load the instruments into, it may be best to turn it off??

[cassmcentee]

Danny, just to make sure it's been said for anyone new to Kontakt reading this...
...and the first question that should be asked in my opinion is...
Are you running in "Purge" mode?
I always run the tracks in "All Purge"
Don't know any specifics... I read up on that a long time ago...
It's just a regular habit now
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuAJdWNbq3w

[Danny]

Cass,

Thanks for the interesting info.

I have been using Kontakt for years but never even thought about Perge Mode. I do see the icon on Kontakt though.

Geez. This guy is running about 100 tracks of audio???????? And you thought my 16 tracks was a lot .

[Danny]

Len,

Thanks for the info.

I have a drive for my OS and an additional internal drive for my backup. Then, there's external 7200 RPM SATA drive for samples and external 7200 RPM SATA drive for libraries.

[waveheavy]

Is one of those drives an Audio drive, i.e., the drive that has your DAW's project audio and cache files? That could be a bottleneck problem.

Recommend:
OS drive
Audio drive
Sample Library drive(s)
Video drive if you're doing post for video

Len,

Thanks for the info.

I have a drive for my OS and an additional internal drive for my backup. Then, there's external 7200 RPM SATA drive for samples and external 7200 RPM SATA drive for libraries.

[Danny]

Hey Wave,

No the project files, etc are not combined on an audio drive.