Kontakt Player pops & clicks?

[Mattias Westlund]

Figured it out. For some reason the SATA controller drivers on my machine had been reverted to some generic Windows version. Reinstalled the proper drivers and everything now works fine!

[Samulis]

Well that's interesting! I guess that would make sense in combination with my disk access spike hypothesis... I'll have to remember this for later.

[Mattias Westlund]

Not solved after all. The glitching is back again and I'm starting to think that the project working fine after the SATA driver update was just a conincidence. I just read an interesting forum post however, which stated that increasing Kontakt's DFD buffers might actually make things worse since not all drives can cope with all the preloading going on with a higher buffer. It seems counterintuitive but lowering the buffer to around 12-20 kB actually helps here. I'm just guessing but maybe simply loading samples on demand is less taxing on the HDD than for it to keep track of dozens of samples that it will need to load "in a moment". It sure seems that way, because the problem is much less noticeable with lower values. It still happens, but only occasionally.

Also took the time to run some diagnostics on the drive in question and it's fine. Checked it with HD Tune and WD's diagnostics and neither return any errors. Looking at the SMART status in Speccy it does say "Warning", but I'm thinking that's just a glitch in Speccy because all the SMART values are in the green. Benchmark results look normal for this type of drive on this type of system, and there are absolutely zero disk-related errors in Event Viewer.

I should of course confess that my samples are on the same drive as the OS (though on a different partition, not that it matters) which I know is a no-no. But I've never had any issues with it to date -- as mentioned I have some pretty heavy ARIA Engine templates here that have never ever given me any problems like this, not even when in conjunction with large amounts of audio tracks streaming from the disk. So I dunno, maybe Kontakt's DFD is more sensitive to interrupts from the OS or something?

[Samulis]

I've done some very heavy-duty tests with ARIA in the past (loading like 4-8 GB sample sets on crazy piano MIDI files) and its DFD system seems to be possibly more stable than Kontakt. I don't know why...

At least SSD's appear to be getting cheaper (although also possibly worse performance)... a 500 GB external SSD which looked like an extravagant purchase a few years back is now almost a reasonable buy. O.o

[Mattias Westlund]

Yeah, both Sforzando and Aria Player are rock solid in that regard. OTOH they use more RAM than Kontakt so I don't know how much of that robustness is just having large chunks of the samples preloaded, which of course means that the sampler has more time and less competing overhead to load the samples in the background.

SSD's are indeed fairly priced now, and I've been eyeing a few different ones. Still, a significant cost if I were to replace all my current HDD storage (3TB) but I guess it's not super neccessary to have SSD's for everything.

[Samulis]

(12-25-2018, 10:00 PM)Mattias Westlund Wrote: Yeah, both Sforzando and Aria Player are rock solid in that regard. OTOH they use more RAM than Kontakt so I don't know how much of that robustness is just having large chunks of the samples preloaded, which of course means that the sampler has more time and less competing overhead to load the samples in the background.

^ You can completely customize ARIA's DFD preload and RAM limits in the settings.

Interestingly it seems to continuously load samples as they are used at the start of the session, until it meets the RAM limit (?). I've noticed sometimes the first time playing a note it might have an issue, but on all subsequent times, it's fine.

[Mattias Westlund]

Here's an interesting development. I put the VSCO 2 samples on an SSD, to eliminate the possibility of OS disk interrupts and limitations of spinning disks in one fell swoop. And you know what?

I still get pops and clicks.

Well, I'm stumped.

[Nayrb]

(12-25-2018, 06:45 PM)Mattias Westlund Wrote: I should of course confess that my samples are on the same drive as the OS (though on a different partition, not that it matters) which I know is a no-no.

Why is this a "no-no"? I don't think I've ever done it any other way and really have not had any issues to write home about.

[Mattias Westlund]

Because Windows will access the drive it's on from time to time, which might interfere with sample streaming. I haven't really had any problems with it in the past either, but keeping your samples on a separate drive is usually considered good practice.

[Nayrb]

(04-06-2019, 03:55 PM)Mattias Westlund Wrote: Because Windows will access the drive it's on from time to time, which might interfere with sample streaming. I haven't really had any problems with it in the past either, but keeping your samples on a separate drive is usually considered good practice.

Now that I think of it, that makes perfect sense. Sometimes it gets a little wonky when an update is downloading or something like that. More food for thought for the next build...