PT10 / Kontakt 5 & Albion Clicking/Popping

[Darryl Ramm]

Ah why no mention of/questions about playback buffer size yet? What is it set to and if you increase it at what buffer size if any do the clicks and pops go away. (do everything else below first before trying that). Also what is the session sample rate and how many VI and other plugin instances (and what plugins) are you trying to run.

As always first trash prefs and databases and just see if that helps (it probably won't but its a good idea to get used to starting troubleshooting by doing that). Start at the "help us help you" link up top of this page.

Are *all* your plugins up to date?

Make sure the Mac is fully optimized for Pro Tools. Every last thing done no matter how annoying. Yes that means things like WiFi off etc. at least while you debug this.

Make sure you have followed all the Kontakt install/optimization instructions for working with Pro Tools. Are you trying to use the Kontakt memory server? If so try without. I'm not a Kontakt user so now already out of my depth... but as others have pointed out these are heavy VIs and you have to have things set up really well.

What are the # CPU settings in the playback engine? The i5 in that iMac should have 4 cores and no hyperthreading so start with #CPU = 3 (that means 3 for plugins and leaves one for Pro Tools itself). (confirm the i5 core count from the OS X System Report).

Make sure ignore errors is *not* checked and report back any exact DAE errors that get thrown (you want to see the errors that cause problems, not try to ignore them).

Confirm you do *not* have the Fusion drive option in this iMac.

Does the problem happen in multiple different sessions or just this one? Create an empty 44.1kHz session (not from template, not a copy) and insert just one of these VIs. Does that work OK? can you add more VIs? ... this is looking for a corrupt session but also problems/bugs with other plugins that may be tripping up the VI (including good old denormalization related CPU chewing by plugins like Sansamp, but also others).

Temporally move all third party plugins from their AAX and RTAS folders to anywhere else and try the above again. And just put back say the Kontakt plugins and try them in a session. Plugins, VIs or not can cause problems if they load into Pro Tools, even if you don't use them in a session. This checks for that.

If after doing the above and not getting anywhere I'd be lookign at replacing disk drives, trying to get help from plugin vendors etc.

And BTW it is not clear to me where the sampels are installed. They should be on the inernal boot/system drive and sessions and all their source/content files shoudl be on the external drive.
Can you confirm this is how things are set up now.