Spinning wheel of death and Pro Tools Ultimate...

[itsjustmeee123]

When ever I do a larger midi score with lots of virtual instruments loaded into Kontakt and I load the session, Pro Tools stops responding after a few seconds and I get the spinning wheel of death so I have to force quit it, trash the Pro Tools preferences folder, restart the computer and it works fine. Looks like it's Kontakt that's causing it to crash (I'm not sure and that's why I'm not posting this in the virtual instruments section). There's no audio tracks, it's just Kontakt 6.2.2 with probably about 15 virtual instruments loaded into about 4 Kontakt tracks. I'm using Pro Tools Ultimate on a new iMac with 64 gigs of ram running Catalina.

And my hardware buffer is set to 1024

Any ideas what could be causing this?

[cwsand]

Do you have the Memory Server enabled in Kontakt? I don't know if that would solve your problem, but it's worth a try. Anytime I use Amplitube and then close the session, I have to restart Pro Tools before reopening the session or Pro Tools will crash. Haven't found a solution to that one either.

[musicman691]

Originally Posted by cwsand

Do you have the Memory Server enabled in Kontakt? I don't know if that would solve your problem, but it's worth a try. Anytime I use Amplitube and then close the session, I have to restart Pro Tools before reopening the session or Pro Tools will crash. Haven't found a solution to that one either.

KMS won't necessarily help especially when loading a bunch of instruments. All KMS really does is to help keep things loaded and to save load times if you're using an instrument already loaded into memory and if you go to use that same instrument in another session you'll save a bunch of time.

Are you using Amplitube 4? I've run into stability issues like you have. So bad I've stopped using AT4 which is sad because I like their Fender Collection 1 and the Mesa Boogie collection.

[TNM]

I thought KMS was originally designed for 32 bit DAWs, so kontakt could access more than 4GB ram? Actually I am sure of it..

To the OP.. you are definitely not running out of ram on reload?

Have you opened activity monitor to see your free ram?

At all times I use istat menus, cause it shows me my free ram in the menu bar. 64GB surprisingly doesn't go that far with a lot of sampled instruments (I also have 64, next build I decided on 192/mac pro).

OTOH, it could be a kontakt 6 bug.. I haven't had any such weirdness with Kontakt 5 (I haven't upgraded past K11U but will this summer sale).

Kontakt has realtime timing issues with the AAX that the VST and AU don't have in other DAWs..Kontakt is out by 1024 samples on realtime playback and only corrects itself with offline freeze/commit.. This affects a few, but not many VI's in PT, and is ironically exactly the same figure as PT's playback buffer for non armed tracks, which is 1024 sample buffer.
This tells me NI still haven't fully grasped AAX in 2020 (I have tested kontakt player 6 and it's not fixed), even though it's completely unrelated to your problem. My point is, it could be a bug, as NI still have no problems releasing buggy stuff in 2020.

That said, just to eliminate all possibilities, I suppose what moderator said should be tried, just to be 10000% sure.

But first thing is to check your free ram when it happens.. Regardless of having nothing else loaded, you just don't know.. Sometimes ram has been held up by something and not released correctly for example. I would also restart the mac and load PT and the project as first thing on reboot, and if it works then, it points to a low ram issue.

If you tried what cwsand said and it doesn't help, and you are also not running out of ram, it's a Kontakt AAX bug. It has to be.

Just out of curiosity, are you using multi timbral or stereo instances?

Do you have ANY other daws to test the au or vst in?

Finally, and this is a big one if you could be bothered,
You could try replacing all your AAX instances with the vst or au in patchwork if you have it, or metaplugin. They are aax hosts for vst/au.
Just save the patches and load all 14/15 instances as the AU for example, and if it works, more evidence that it's specifically an AAX issue and you should let NI know asap.
Those sub hosts will also fix the timing issues. You will see if you have a native aax kontakt track playing a sound, then play the same sound in the AU version in patchwork on the next track, that the native AAX is 1024 samples out of time

[JFreak]

Catalina + Kontakt crashes here constantly as well

[itsjustmeee123]

Thanks for the replies.

I have the session loaded right now and the activity monitor says that Pro Tools is using 14.90GB of ram. I have 64 GB of physical memory and 37.86 total memory used. Maybe memory isn't the issue.

I'll try turning on Kontakt Memory Sever and see if that helps.

I tried replacing all 4 instances of Kontakt 6 with Kontakt 5 AAX but I can't because some of the virtual instruments (like Chris Hein Emotional violin) won't load. It gives me the message that Kontakt 5 is outdated and I need to use a newer version.

I do have Amplitude but it's not being used for this session. As a matter of fact, the only plugin is one Avid Channel Strip on the master channel. The 3 virtual instrument plugins I'm using are Kontakt 6.2.2 (the latest update), EW Play, and UVI workstation for the piano. Everything is the latest update. The whole system is brand new including the iMac.

Oddly enough when I saw the spinning wheel of death last night, I just left my studio came back about 3 minutes later and it worked just fine. I'm wondering if it takes a bit longer to load the samples the the various libraries. I have everything on SSDs but it still may be that simple of an issue. I believe though that it is Kontakt because I tried making a new session and importing instrument tracks one at time and it did crash without Play and UVI loaded.

I'll keep trying to isolate the problem and keep everyone posted. It just may be that Catalina and Kontakt don't play nice together like JFreak suggested.

[JFreak]

Kontakt AAX really isn't Catalina ready yet. A friend of mine was just visiting and we had a testing session. Running Kontakt AU via BlueCatAudio wrapper was much more stable. Native AAX version of Kontakt is crashing all the time. I have no idea if AU copy protection is calling home less frequently or what is it, but my experience of native AAX Kontakt on Catalina has been a nightmare so far. Obviously we are all waiting for PT 2020.x as well

[JFreak]

Originally Posted by itsjustmeee123

activity monitor says that Pro Tools is using 14.90GB of ram. I have 64 GB of physical memory and 37.86 total memory used. Maybe memory isn't the issue.

I see similar numbers here. If you have video engine enabled, you can save about 4GB memory if you don't really need it.. but I'd say memory isn't the issue.

[itsjustmeee123]

Originally Posted by JFreak

I see similar numbers here. If you have video engine enabled, you can save about 4GB memory if you don't really need it.. but I'd say memory isn't the issue.

Yeah, I don't have the video engine enabled. And as far as Kontakt AAX goes, good old Native Instruments is a huge pain in the ass as far as I'm concerned. Their support is horrible. It's just that they got into the VI market early and have a hold on a lot of 3rd party products being comparable. I literally installed Komplete 12 Ultimate about a month ago and 3 of the VI instruments that come with it can only load in Kontakt 6. They just pushed out an update for Kontakt 6 about a week ago and was supposed to fix some crashing issues but it didn't seem to help in my case.

[JFreak]

So I guess my comments kind of confirmed you to put the blame on NI and please spam their customer service until they get their act together. I hate it that it crashes so often. Very embarassing when someone mainly using LogicX comes over and rolls his eyes waiting for yet another PT restart...