Kontakt Player pops & clicks?

[Mattias Westlund]

I think I might have figured it out.

As mentioned previously I'm on a pretty old system here, going on a decade. Or more correctly my motherboard is nine years old, but I have upgraded pretty much everything else over the years (I've even switched from an Athlon II X4 to a Phenom II X4 955 since I started this thread). What it boils down to is that this nForce 630a chipset doesn't fully support the AHCI standard of more modern mobos. I'm basically bottlenecked by the on-board disk controller, clearly evident from the fact that I only get a 20MB/s or so transfer speed increase between an SSD and a regular HDD. Drivers make a difference, but only marginally so.

So that sucks I guess. But it still doesn't explain why Kontakt is so damn finicky with its disk streaming. AFAIK people have been running pretty big Kontakt libraries from 7200RPM HDDs without problem for years and years.

[Nayrb]

(04-12-2019, 11:37 PM)Mattias Westlund Wrote: AFAIK people have been running pretty big Kontakt libraries from 7200RPM HDDs without problem for years and years.

I've been doing it for ages. So yeah...

I certainly hope you can figure out a fix for this. Sometimes the solutions are seemingly as strange as the problem. Back in 2013 when I got my current PC, I had to buy a new Oxygen 49 because the one I had from 2008 just wouldn't work with the new computer. I still don't know why. I can't imaging what it had against it...

One other weird thing that sometimes made a difference for me in the past was setting the power mode to "High Performance." Again, I don't know why. I thought that was mainly a laptop thing, but on my old PC it was actually necessary to make my Komplete Audio 6 function as the primary sound driver.

[Mattias Westlund]

Yeah, it's really weird and really annoying. At this point I'm not even sure it's the disk streaming that's the issue, since literally nothing I've tried makes a difference. Changing the preload buffer settings should logically make things better or worse but it has no effect on the popping whatever I set it to. Switching to an SSD, though bottlenecked by the SATA II controller, should make at least some small difference. But it didn't. Also, if my system was being overloaded these issues would make sense but that's not the case either. My VSCO2 project runs at like 13% overall CPU in REAPER, and 25-30% RT CPU.

I think I can also rule out any global hardware or software issue since all my other projects (even far heavier ones) run just fine. It's just the Kontakt one that's misbehaving. And the only other plugin I have loaded is ValhallaRoom.

I always use the High Performance plan when running my DAW, otherwise the CPU will downclock to save power when there's only a light load, which does indeed cause crackling. But that's not it in this case.

[Mattias Westlund]

At last: progress!

This isn't disk or even hardware related at all. Updated my version of Kontakt Player to 5.8.1 and the glitching is much reduced. I still get the occasional pop but it's a major improvement over having crackling with every note on. I feel stupid for not thinking of this before, but everything's so eager to auto-update itself in this day and age that it never occured to me I might be running an outdated version. It's weird that the problem still exists in Kontakt Player 6 though.

Fingers crossed I can finally get some work done with VSCO 2 Pro

[Nayrb]

(04-25-2019, 01:05 PM)Mattias Westlund Wrote: At last: progress!

This isn't disk or even hardware related at all. Updated my version of Kontakt Player to 5.8.1 and the glitching is much reduced. I still get the occasional pop but it's a major improvement over having crackling with every note on. I feel stupid for not thinking of this before, but everything's so eager to auto-update itself in this day and age that it never occured to me I might be running an outdated version. It's weird that the problem still exists in Kontakt Player 6 though.

Fingers crossed I can finally get some work done with VSCO 2 Pro

But you can't be blamed for expecting Kontakt 6 to perform better than some iteration of Kontakt 5. That is actually kind of odd; but I suppose if you're on an older machine it might make a difference. My rig is six years old, but K6 Player actually plays nice. I think I'm actually going to have to upgrade my full version from K4 one of these days...

Glad it's going well though!

[Mattias Westlund]

I recently upgraded my motherboard and CPU to something that, while not exactly new, at least isn't as ancient as what I've had through the course of this thread. When I first posted this I had an AMD Athlon II X4 2.8GHz, which was eventually replaced with a AMD Phenom II X4 3.2GHz. The problem persisted across both these processors, no matter how many times I thought I had solved it. After my previous post the crackling returned after a while, defying all my attempts at fixing it.

Now, with an AMD FX-4170 4.2GHz, it seems Kontakt Player (and VSCO 2 Pro) finally behaves. I still do get the occasional little pop on some instruments, but it's negligible compared to how it used to run. I don't know what CPU instructions or other features Kontakt relies on that the old processors did not support, but the switch clearly seems to have done the trick.

[Terry93D]

I hope you find VSCO2 workin' for you. I've made a new template for myself over the last few days, and VSCO2 forms an integral part of it. (Though I still need to test the template out...)