VE Pro and Kontakt-audio droputs

[Benjamin Morsberger]

Hi.  As a very early adopter of VE Pro, I quickly ran into problems with Kontakt (3.5).  With Kontakt hosted in the server

on the same machine, I got lots of audio droputs.  Eventually I gave up and have enjoyed using VE Pro with other AUs.  With the latest build,

and Kontakt 4.1, I thought I'd give it another try.  The problem persists.  Since I know there are happy Kontakt users out there with similar

setups, I'd be grateful for any thoughts as to what I should try tweaking, in Kontakt or elsewhere.  It seems clearly to be a Kontakt and VE Pro

issue here. Other apps in VE Pro do not behave this way.  And when all the audio from VE Pro craps out...Logic plugs running in my

sequencer continue playing happily.

Logic 9.0.2, 10.6.2, Mac Pro 2.8 8 core, 16 gig Ram.

I'm running several instances of Kontakt in the 64 bit server, each loaded with a bank of, eg, strings.  Works great...except when there is no

sound!

Thanks for any help.

ps it's not a drive issue.  I can run the same orchestration from the same drives running Kontakt inside Logic.

[civilization 3]

Hi

I am using a MacPro 2.93ghz 8-core. As a slave (master = a MacPro 2.66 quad). I have (in local host/same machine) transferred older projects from Kontakt 3.5 as plug-ins (into Cubase, which is another can o worms) to Kontakt 3.5 in VE Pro, and I expect from the overall behavior that I would have had unusably high latency to avoid dropouts, latency my RME card doesn't even support. 1024 samples, and no joy. (Mind you, this is inside a 32-bit process and the attendant memory limits.)

However, running VE Pro as a slave on this machine, I got decent performance with K3.5 - a LOT of K3.5 in some projects. There were occasional issues I blame partly on a conflict using KMS inside VE Pro. The performance with build 5814 and K4 has been kind of excellent here. I'm sorry I have no K tweaks... I wouldn't personally try to do all that much on one machine. As local host, I only ever really used VE 2 with VI; which wasn't bad. Logic will have maybe 4x better latency in your local host situation than Cubase, and if you're using it with the x64 kernel, you won't be bothered by RAM max-out; but even with Logic I think I would use more than one machine to get a viable orchestration up at one time.

I would ask the question of 'happy' users in local host setups: 'how much latency?' (I require low latency per se). One question for you: are you selecting 'x2' in the latency settings in VE Pro?

[Benjamin Morsberger]

Hi Gianna,

thanks for your thoughtful reply.  I *seem* to have solved this problem by disabling mutitcore support in kontakt.

I'm always unclear how this should be set, standalone, AU etc....Regardless, that seems to have done the trick.

I composed all day with no drop outs.  

Definately not agreeing with your assessment of the one machine setup.  Especially with K4, VE Pro, 64 bit etc...there has never been

a better time to work on one machine.

I do use the x2 setting, for the most part, except for drums and perc...and even strings sometimes are hard to play at that latency.

Thanks again.  I'll report back after a few more days.

[civilization 3]

You know, I should have remembered that, I too have always had that disabled, per se, as a plug-in in anything. That's NI's position on kontakt as a plugin; you either have the host set to do multicore distro, or kontakt, and they advise do it w the host.

Also, the VE Pro manual suggests you get as low a latency as you can in the sequencer and add that x2 in VEP, as there is excellent latency compensation to be had. I have found that to be right. With 'record latency compensation' off in the sequencer. You can get a lot of hits that are too early with both on, it's hard to predict too.

Now that kontakt is viable x64 you might get away with one machine. You realize there are still people with VE Pro and like 8 machines...