Kontakt Player pops & clicks?

[Mattias Westlund]

Less than a week ago I received VSCO2 Pro Edition as a kind donation, which in turn meant my first orchestral foray into the world of Kontakt, or Kontakt Player to be precise. This is a plugin that I haven't used much at all except for the Drum'Mic'a kit years ago and the occasional ethnic instrument from the factory presets. I know that Kontakt is quite well optimized, but my computer is getting long in the tooth (Athlon X4 2.8GHz, 16GB DDR3 RAM, samples on a WD Black 7200 RPM 1TB HDD) so I had no idea what to expect in terms of performance.

The thing is, with only one instance of Kontakt Player loaded and only a handful of instruments playing, I'm getting pops and clicks at almost every note start. And before you say "ah-hah! that's your dinosaur computer!" let me add that this single Kontakt instance occasionally peaks at 15% CPU but normally hovers around 8-10%, with the disk streaming going up to 25% from time to time. None of these peaks appear to correlate with the pops. Looking at REAPER's performance window, my total CPU hovers around 18% and my realtime CPU at ~30%. So these numbers seem to indicate that I'm nowhere near running out of horsepowers, yet I get pops.

Increasing my ASIO buffers to even non-realtime playable levels makes no difference. Neither does increasing Kontakt's DFD buffers. Using Kontakt 5 or Kontakt 6 makes no difference either. So what the heck is going on here? Is this some weird bug that I've come across or are Kontakt's/REAPER's performance meters not showing me the whole picture?

That said, it's not unusable. Performance is snappy enough otherwise and VSCO2 Pro is a lovely yet idiosyncratic library that I'm going to have to review once I get everything up and running smoothly. Popping and clicking is just annoying and makes me feel like my system is about to go into a hard freeze at any moment.

Edit: REAPER's "Buggy plugin compatibility mode" doesn't help either, though it has for me in the past with plugins that throw random glitches. The only thing I haven't tried at this point is running Kontakt Player in another DAW, which I guess I should do just for troubleshooting.

[bigcat1969]

Can you run Player as stand alone with the instruments and see if it has the same problems? I haven't used Player in a long time, but in the full Kontakt I can run it stand alone. This might tell if it is a conflict with Reaper. It is also easy to run Task Manager along side the stand alone to see actual CPU/HD usage.

Have you tried the shorts to see if they pop? The longs tend to run three x-fade samples and then pop three release samples? The shorts are less sample intensive.

You could try turning the max voices down a lot as well to see if that fixes some of the problems.

Oh try turning off the convolution reverb. That can be a big resource hog.

Saw someone fixed a popping problem by matching the sampling rate between Kontakt and DAW.

[Samulis]

Just a single pop right after the very start of the sample? I've seen this problem before. For me, it went away when rendering the final audio in non-realtime.

I believe it's related to DFD streaming with many samples being called at the same time. Possibly a strong disk access spike or something. I've noticed it only in a heavy-multi-mic instrument which load several samples instantaneously, but I've never noticed it with VSCO 2 Pro.

[Mattias Westlund]

(10-25-2018, 11:14 PM)bigcat1969 Wrote: Can you run Player as stand alone with the instruments and see if it has the same problems? I haven't used Player in a long time, but in the full Kontakt I can run it stand alone. This might tell if it is a conflict with Reaper. It is also easy to run Task Manager along side the stand alone to see actual CPU/HD usage.

Good call. I tried this, and the popping still happens. In fact it's even worse than in REAPER.

(10-25-2018, 11:14 PM)bigcat1969 Wrote: Have you tried the shorts to see if they pop? The longs tend to run three x-fade samples and then pop three release samples? The shorts are less sample intensive.

The shorts pop too.

(10-25-2018, 11:14 PM)bigcat1969 Wrote: You could try turning the max voices down a lot as well to see if that fixes some of the problems.

This doesn't appear to make a difference either.

(10-25-2018, 11:14 PM)bigcat1969 Wrote: Oh try turning off the convolution reverb. That can be a big resource hog.

The convo verb has been off all along while testing this.

(10-25-2018, 11:14 PM)bigcat1969 Wrote: Saw someone fixed a popping problem by matching the sampling rate between Kontakt and DAW.

Not sure how I'd go about doing that. Can you set Kontakt's sample rate independently of the DAW?

(10-26-2018, 01:57 AM)Samulis Wrote: Just a single pop right after the very start of the sample? I've seen this problem before. For me, it went away when rendering the final audio in non-realtime.

Yes, exactly. Like when there's a chord change, there's a slight pop. Not that buffer underrun stuttering or anything.

(10-26-2018, 01:57 AM)Samulis Wrote: I believe it's related to DFD streaming with many samples being called at the same time. Possibly a strong disk access spike or something. I've noticed it only in a heavy-multi-mic instrument which load several samples instantaneously, but I've never noticed it with VSCO 2 Pro.

That might be it, but Kontakt's disk meter never goes over 25%. Still, like I said, I'm suspecting that the meter might be incorrect. Looks like this old computer simply isn't powerful enough to run more than a patch or two in Kontakt Player. Or more correctly, the HDD isn't keeping up. The CPU usage seems fine to me.

Ah, well. It's long overdue for an upgrade anyway.

Edit: Can you disable disk streaming entirely and load everything into RAM?

[bigcat1969]

To load all samples for a patch straight into memory, turn on all mic positions and then click the wrench. Select only Group Editor. Click Edit All Groups. Click the Source menu which should say DFD and select Sampler instead. Watch the samples load. Click edit All Groups again to turn off all the groups except the first. Click Wrench to return to the regular instrument view. Turn of the mics you don't want to save memory.

Click the Disk Icon and Save As... and save the patch under a new name, I added NDS to the end.

I don't know if this works right with the TM patches?

[Mattias Westlund]

You can't get to any of those things in Kontakt Player, sadly :/

[bigcat1969]

Ah crud.

Hey Sam can I try creating and sending an nki with disk streaming turned off to Mattias to see if that helps or is that breaking copy-write or just wont work or something?

[Mattias Westlund]

An nki shouldn't be a problem, we both have the samples in question so it's basically just like a user preset right? But of course I'll let Sam decide. The question though is whether the functionality of switching to RAM instead of DFD is even there in Kontakt Player.

[bigcat1969]

I asked on the VI-C Kontakt forum, so maybe they have a workaround.

I'm not sure with the sort of block encrypted files on a Kontakt Player instrument if the nki could be pointed to the right samples on a different computer?

This is frustrating isn't it...

[Mattias Westlund]

Well it's a little annoying but for me it's just another reason to put a few more dollar bills in the virtual computer upgrade piggy bank. Seriously bigcat, you don't have to hunt down solutions for me. I'm well aware that I can't expect wonders from this machine (though it is odd that I've been running some pretty heavy Sforzando/ARIA projects with DFD without problem), but I just keep pushing the issue ahead of me. Yes, this computer has served me well but I seriously need to get a better one. Even a machine that is four or five years old would be a significant upgrade, so it's not like I have to fork out a ton of dough to get a better one.