Native Instruments & PT 6.7/6.9

[Soliton]

Is anyone successfully running Elektrik Piano and/or Garritan Personal Orchestra ?
(Or any other NI soft-synths for that matter?)

I have a rock solid system that would never crash, until I installed Elektrik Piano.

I get faint clicks when using stereo parameters. I get big pops that never go away when I max out the system usage. Only removing and re-inserting the plugin fixes it - and after 10 min of use, PT will unexpectantly quit.

My DP 1 GHz Quicksilver, with 1.5 GB of RAM should be able to handle this.
I've played with low and high buffers in both PT and EP.

This is a clean system, with a clean PT (cs8). I frequently go through all the steps in the troubleshooting guide. My plugins are the latest (right? EP: 1.0.2, GPO 1.1.0) They check out fine with the validator. I repair permissions, etc. etc. In short, I know how to maintain a healthy system. Except this plugin is bringing down everything.

I dowloaded 6.9, but after reading posts on here, I've hesitated installing it.

Please help!

[John Pisciotta]

Im using Intakt, and Kompakt, with 6.9. Pretty dang solid here.

[danickstr]

i can tell you that we had lots of softsynth trouble on a dual g4 1.0 Ghz and never could resolve it even with the most ridiculously a.retentive methods of coaxing and prepping the comp. the dual 2.5 g5 will run them now fairly solidly, so i gave up on the g4. i did try it all with 6.7 and 10.3.x in the earlier part of this year to no avail.

[danickstr]

and NI was the hardest to keep running too...fwiw

[Soliton]

Thanks for the replies.

John, most NI software (or at least the two I'm using) gets played through that kompakt sampler right? That the 'engine' for these samples? If that's the case, I'll move to 6.9 since it's running fine for you.

I can't believe no one else has bought Elektrik Piano or Garritran - anyone? I can't be the only one having clicks and crashes.

Thanks for the help.

[Soliton]

I knew it wasn't just me.



From NI support:

We are aware of this issue and have an alternate RTAS component that should perform better. Unfortunately, this has been through a test phase and may take some time before releasing it.

The issue is not RAM or processor speed, neither latency. Unfortunately, it is how the DAE engine of Pro Tools is handling the callbacks from software sampler instruments. *It is best to use Elektrik Piano without DFD. *For the moment there is no workaround. *Increasing the hadrware buffer in Pro Tools sometimes helps this issue, but introduces more latency. Digidesign is aware of this issue and has improved the architecture of RTAS in Pro Tools 6.9. However we must recompile our software to meet this specification.

In a nutsehell, the small process buffer allocated to RTAS plug-ins within Pro Tools 6.7 framework causes a larger CPU overhead. This leads to audio dropouts and crashes.

Best regards,

[Jeff Bova]

I was having the same problem on a DP 1 gig G4. Thanks for doing the research and getting that info.

You're not alone .....

[Soliton]

You WERE having the same problem? Did 6.9 or something else fix it?

It's pretty discouraging that (according to NI) there is no workaround. That kind of info would be useful to the customer BEFORE the purchase, but from their point of view that would deter sales.