Cubase with Kontakt Libraries on External Drive Help

Cubase
1

I’m running Cubase 12 Pro with some Kontakt libraries which are off loaded to an external Sandisk SSD. When I load the Kontakt VST and the Scarbee Jay-Bass instrument I will sometimes notice that when I jump a distance between playing notes on the controller the samples will sometimes be clipped. If I stay within a certain close range of notes all sounds well. It’s just when I jump a couple octaves away the notes are clipped. If I wait a second they will catch up and play ok.

To me this feels like something related to the turnaround time it takes to trigger and load the samples for playback from the SSD. Are there any configuration tips to make this better?

I’m running an Intel i7-8565U CPU with 16GB Ram.

Thanks

2

Could be an issue with throughput of your usb bus? Ik you look at the disk activity in Kontakt in the uperright corner. Is clipping when this occurs?

3

Get more RAM and adjust Kontakt settings to do less streaming. (So it’s loading to and reading from ram).

16gb really is not enough for this kind of work. It will work, but it’s a no brainier to go up to 64 these days if you can.

4

Well, Jay-bass is not a very heavy library so it won’t consume much RAM or CPU. Unless you have used up all your RAM on other stuff in the project of course. But you can easily check that in task manager. So under normal circumstances you shouldn’t have any issue playing Jay-bass with 16GB RAM.

5

I already answered this. Suggestion will cover you for any other libraries too. Large or small.

6

The thing is more RAM just solves only one issue….and that is if you don’t have enough RAM.

But without first establishing if this is the case, it’s very short-sighted to send people off to the store and have them spend a lot(!) of money on more RAM.

Up until 3 years back I’ve worked on an i7 and 16GB for years and also with Kontakt libraries and never ran into any problems until I started using more and more orchestral libraries in multiple tracks.

But not everyone needs/wants to use 100+ tracks of Spitfire or Orchestral Tools Kontakt libraries!

Like I said Jay-bass is a fairly light library and should not be an issue on a i7 16Gb system. So it’s clear that this is bound to be another issue!

So please take the effort to first try and analyze a problem before jumping to the lamers conclusion that more RAM solves everything and sending people to the store to let them spend their hard earned cash on more RAM that most likely won’t solve their issue!

1 Like
7

Thank you!
Scarbee Jay bass is only 2.3GB and do not need a ram-bloated machine.

One of my machines has “only” 16GB and can do quite a lot with Kontakt, if used properly.
Yes it’s limited for large projects, but perfectly fine for playing 1 instrument at a time.
I use Task Mgr to see where my Ram is used (sometimes wasted).

8

Your welcome!

I just hate it when people just want to seem knowledgeable while they’re obviously not! And in this process urge people to spend a lot of money while this will not solve their issue.

9

Thanks for your responses. Unfornutately my laptop (Lenovo ThinkPad Carbon X1 gen7) doesn’t allow for anymore ram than 16GB. It’s soldered onto the board and doesn’t have any expandable RAM slots. As I said before, the Scarbee Jay bass instument is offloaded on an external Sandisk Extreme SSD. As a test I moved the Scarbee Jay bass into my internal SSD that’s in the laptop and my issue was gone. I found a video that talks about how the Kontakt memory buffer size can be adjusted. Mine was default to 60kb and was not enabled. I ended up enabling it and setting to 120kb now. I moved the Scarbee Jay bass back to the external SSD and do not notice any trigger issues as before.