Native Instruments Komplete 15

[gwestmusic]

Native Instruments Komplete 15

Does anyone have any advice on the ideal memory/ram requirements to run this plugin effectively? I recently purchased the package, and because of the size, had to download onto a Lacie drive and access from there. This makes the plugin extremely clunky and virtually unusable. Thinking a computer upgrade is in my future, but want to make sure the specs are correct.

[cosmicdolphin]

What’s your current setup? Might help to pinpoint where the bottleneck is.

[telefunkin]

When you say 'this plugin' what exactly are you having problems with? Komplete includes many plugins, such as Kontakt, Reaktor, Battery, Massive, Massive X, etc...., as well as a lot of FX plugins. Also, its normal to install the main components on your C: drive (as with any other program), but its also perfectly normal to put the sound libraries on one or more external drives.

My guess is that you'd want to spend most of your time using Kontakt, and the newer versions (I'm still on 7) do take a while to load. Once loaded, its responsiveness depends on what library I load into it. Some (eg Session Percussion) can make it even more sluggish whilst other simpler libraries are pretty slick.

Or do you mean using Komplete Kontrol, perhaps with an NI keyboard? I don't use an NI keyboard so I don't know whether there's any additional load from that, but I wouldn't expect there to be. However, Komplete Kontrol scans ALL my libraries as well as 3rd party plugins and vst instruments every time I run it, so its is definitely slow to start up but OK after that. I avoid using it though and hoped that NI would find a way to stop the scan every time, or maybe scan on request. Perhaps they have, but I just haven't looked lately. Could that be your issue?

My aging PC with an Intel i5 has 16GB of ram and copes (just about) with most of what I throw at it within Cubase. The important thing as I see it is to have a SSD for Windows, then all my Komplete stuff runs pretty well from an external drive, although it certainly isn't the fastest and I'm looking forward to making that a SSD soon.

[gitanosoy]

It's hard to say without knowing your computer specs. You need 100GB of space on your hard drive, the whole package is 300 GB. Unless you have a very fast external hard drive then it works otherwise don't download the the whole package but what ever you need on your computer HD, for example you don't need to download all drum VST 's or every piano. I am on a 2015 Mac desktop with 8GB of ram which is not great as they recommend 16GB but I will upgrade soon when the Mac M4 studio when it is released in June.

For now I am making it work but yeah slow on opening the instruments and frustrating crashes sometimes but there are other tricks that I am sure you can search on YT that I apply like bouncing your midi track to audio to save on CPU.

Good luck!!

[BradleyHagen]

The NI stuff is tricky to download and install to be sure..... I believe that you will need over 300 GB of Free space on just your main drive just to download and install it, even if you are putting the sample libraries on an external SSD
Their installers are wierd like that, and I am not a big fan of Native Access either..... Once everything is where it is supposed to be however, it runs pretty smooth....I am on a Mac, and have Komplete 14 Ultimate, but as telefunkin said above, I don't have EVERYTHING installed either. Kontakt 7 seems to work pretty well though. I am on Mac M1 Max with 64 GB RAM....I don't know your specs, and I haven't used a PC for music production in a very long time either, so that is about all that I have - Best of luck!

[gwestmusic]

Thanks for all the comments. The version I bought is Komplete 15 ultimate, and, with everything installed (Kontakt 8, Reaktor, Battery, Massive, Massive X, etc ++++++), needed almost one TB of memory for all the sounds. My DAW is Reaper, and to date I've been running the free sound plugins Reaper suggested to start with (Joined Taxi earlier in the year).
I'm currently running an Acer Nitro laptop (2 yr old) with 8m ram (pic of my set up attached). The computer has space for 32mb ram, but doesn't have enough memory to hold the entire sound library (I think it's a 500 G drive). Because there will always be communication between the external drive and the computer, I was thinking I'd still have a bottleneck/slowdown from that. The set up was running great, and have had fairly quick and seem less workflow until I install Komplete 15 ultimate.

[BradleyHagen]

SInce PC Ram is relatively cheap, I would up it to 32 GB, and make sure that ALL of your sample content is on an external SSD Drive (1 TB was less than $79 on Amazon recently...) There is a way to do this in "Native Access" but it is not super intuitive to say the least:)

[cosmicdolphin]

You are are definitely short of ram and if your Lacie drive uses an older connection protocol like USB 2 then it could also be causing a bottleneck if it can't read or write fast enough.

I would definitely max out the ram to 32gb and then get something like a Samsung T7 external SSD drive ( they come in 1, 2 or 4 TB..2TB is the sweet spot right now ) as they are USB 3.2 Gen. 2 (10 Gbit/s transfer speed ) and suitable storing your libaries.

The other thing you can do is perform a "batch re-save" on each library as this can often speed up load times considerably although NI say it's not such a big deal anymore I find it can still help.

[gwestmusic]

Thanks guys. I'll give it all a go, fingers crossed.

[BradleyHagen]

The computer has space for 32mb ram, but doesn't have enough memory to hold the entire sound library (I think it's a 500 G drive). Because there will always be communication between the external drive and the computer, I was thinking I'd still have a bottleneck/slowdown from that. The set up was running great, and have had fairly quick and seem less workflow until I install Komplete 15 ultimate.

I think you are confusing memory (RAM) with hard drive space. More RAM will help instruments load more quickly, and allow more of them without hiccups. I agree that you should probably up your RAM to the Max, 32 GB, and get yourself a nice 2 TB SSD Drive for all of your sample libraries. The forementioned Samsung drives are fine, I own a couple....Although installing the NI stuff is a royal PIA, you may want to reinstall everything after you take these two key steps....Just be sure to tell Native Access where to install the libraries (external SSD, and be sure to name it beforehand) ) Also, be sure to connect your laptop directly to your router via Ethernet, as Wifi can take a Looooong time to download Komplete. And if you are 100% positively NOT going to use certain libraries, then just don't download them. I for one, do not use any of the NI drum stuff, or fake guitars and bass, and that saves me a ton of space right there...