Kontakt, DFD and offline mixdowns...

[Mattias Henningson]

Anyone seen this?

Yesterday I was supposed to do some rough mixes for a musical I\'m working on. I\'ve been composing and recording for a while now and haven\'t done any mixdowns involving Kontakt since the 1.2 update came out, at least not with streaming samples... I\'m using Sonar 2.2 BTW.

This works good:

Load a sample in Kontakt (DXi2 or FXpansion-wrapped VSTi) with DFD disabled. Record a really silly line. Bounce to track. The result is what you\'d expect it to be.

Example 1: http://www.musikbanken.se/working.mp3 (\"http://www.musikbanken.se/working.mp3\")

This doesn\'t work:

Load a sample in Kontakt (DXi or FXpansion wrapped VSTi) with DFD enabled. Make sure it uses the DFD engine while playing. Record another silly line. Bounce to track. I get chopped notes all the way in the resulting audio track.

Example 2: http://www.musikbanken.se/notworking.mp3 (\"http://www.musikbanken.se/notworking.mp3\")

It seems to be an obvious bug in the DFD engine to me, but who knows. Hopefully I have missed something important.

/Mattias

[Mattias Henningson]

Update. After corresponding with NI a couple of times and some more tests it\'s a confirmed problem with DFD. Based on other users comments it seems that not all systems are hit by this for some reason. They are working on the problem.

/Mattias

[Bardstown Audio]

I have talked with a few people who have been having performance problems with Kontakt while trying to play large sampled instruments. As it turned out, they had their instrument samples installed on their main operating system hard drive. This most definitely will always cause severe performance problems, such as clicks, pops, drop-outs, etc., etc. After they moved their sampled instruments to a different audio hard drive away from their main system hard drive, Kontakt performed perfectly for them while playing large sampled instruments.

Having sampled instruments on your main operating system hard drive puts a tremendous amount of work and stress on your computer and hard drive. The computer is having to perform several critical tasks at the same time from one source location... running the computer operating system, running Kontakt and any VST host program that may be running as well, streaming and playing samples, processing midi information, other audio and midi tracks, plugins, etc. This is quiet a bit going on at the same time, and by having sampled instruments on a secondary audio hard drive significantly reduces the amount of work that your computer and hard drives are having to do, thus making for much better performance.

When moving sampled instruments from one hard drive to the other, you need to delete the samples from the other drive or Kontakt will continue to load the samples from the original drive, thus not correcting the problem. After you have removed the samples from the first hard drive that they were originally installed onto, you will once again be prompted to go through the searching process in order to establish their new location on the different audio hard drive.

Kindest regards,

Kip McGinnis
Bardstown Audio
www.bardstownaudio.com (\"http://www.bardstownaudio.com\")

[Mattias Henningson]

Kip,

All true, and very good advise that everyone should think about, but that\'s not what\'s happening in this case. All samples are on a dedicated fast drive. I have no performance problems at all during playback, just when doing offline bounces. There is an issue with the DFD engine not using the streamed part of the samples, but only the buffered part of each sample. The strange thing is that it doesn\'t seem to affect all systems. NI has confirmed it and they are working on a fix. For now I can live with it and as a workaround do real-time mixdowns by looping an output to an input on my sound card in the digital domain.

/Mattias

[robertf]

another solution is to maximize the dfd buffer settings for the mixdown.

but if you do not have enough ram this won\'t work.

robert