Building Orchestral Template, but PT Hangs

[johnnyv]

Originally Posted by JFreak

Would be great if NI got their act together

Agreed. Imagine how many people are pulling their hair out trying to get Kontakt working speedily in ProTools. You would really think that NI would get with Avid and get this situation improved...

[Michael Carnes]

Originally Posted by johnnyv

JFreak,

Michael, I'm using a new Mac Pro with the full 8TB of internal storage. I wonder if it would behave any differently from yours if your storage is PCIe cards?

I already did some tests on that (written up a couple of months ago on PTE). As it turns out, the PCIe M.2 storage is quite a bit faster than the solid state storage that comes on the Mac. I used Blackmagic Speed test and was rather surprised at this result.

[Michael Carnes]

Originally Posted by Marsdy

I’m pretty sure a lot of Kontakt loading happens in the background. You get the initial load of an an instrument but it’s still chugging away in the background loading samples after that.

You're right about the pre-load, but I don't think Kontakt is alone in that. It's a sensible use of resources. Assume that you've got a nice piano with long natural decay. You're probably not going to play all 88 notes (unless you're Conlon Nancarrow) so you wouldn't want to tie up memory with the full duration of the notes. The first bit of every note is loaded and then the sample player streams what's needed from the library.

I'm wearing my old developer hat to try and understand what's going on. In Pro Tools, a great many things must happen within the 'heartbeat' that's dictated by the buffer size. All Kontakt scripts related to loading would need to happen within that heartbeat or bad things happen. Orchestral Tools uses much larger scripts than Spitfire, so the chances increase that a script won't get finished within the heartbeat. For me, I started getting buzzy audio--unless Pro Tools hung first. The more instantiations of Kontakt, the higher the odds of trouble.

When VEPro is loading, it's not subject to that heartbeat--you load it up before you launch the DAW. So I don't think it's affected in the same way. There are probably some ways you could still get into trouble if you try hard enough. But I don't think you'd usually work that way. There are still probably some ways to step past the heartbeat if you don't set up your thread counts right, but I'm still learning my way around.

At any rate, that's my guess about what's going wrong in PT. I'm probably way, way off.

[falcowe]

I wish someone from the AVID ProTools team would chime in on this. It is mildly frustrating, and somewhat confusing why ProTools is so bad at dealing with Kontakt hosted VIs (and VIs in general). I mean I took the VEPro route and haven't had too many issues but still even VEPro will occasionally have issues in ProTools. In fact in earlier troubleshooting (which still hasn't officially been resolved) I was having issues where VEPro was causing ProTools to crash/hang because apparently I had many VEPro streams feeding Exponential Audio reverbs. Not sure if this is still an issue but I haven't seen anything official mentioning a fix for this. And I haven't been having issues with it since switch back to OSX a month or so ago.

Anyway Michael your heartbeat theory sound pretty good to me. Certianly better than anything I could come up with.

[cqd]

This is a Mac problem obviously is it?.. kontakt is fine in Windows..

[midnightrambler]

Just chiming in to say I had this exact same problem - I spent quite a lot of time trying to set up a template and I just ran out of patience in the end. There are only so many SWODs you can put up with...

[massivekerry]

One (kind of separate but somewhat related) thing to say in favor of VEP is that the Decoupled instances do cut down Save times. I’ve seen big DAW-hosted-Kontakt-Instruments templates in PT, Cubase and Logic, and when you have a bunch of instances (or even a particular few heavily-scripted instances) the Save time is OB-SCENE.

[falcowe]

Sorry this is going to be a newb question but what are you talking about when you say scripts Michael and/or massivekerry? Obviously it has something to do with how the VI's function but I'm not clear what exactly this script is. (I am not a programmer :))

[JFreak]

Kontakt Scripting Processor, nothing you need to worry about. It works internally and unless you are developing a Kontakt Library you don't need to know anything about it.

[falcowe]

Thanks JFreak! I'm not terribly concerned about it but I am curious to what they are referring to. But you have given me enough to start my own research :). Thanks for the reference.