Kontakt 6 100% CPU spikes audio cuts out cubase 11?

Latest verison of Cubase and Kontakt, and up to date windows 10.

Abbey Road 80s drummer and session guitarist:

Sometimes it works just fine.
Sometimes the CPU spikes (and audio cuts out) every once in a while.
Sometimes the CPU spikes (and audio cuts out) every couple seconds for prolonged periods of time.
Sometimes it only manages to trigger a couple of drums here and there .
Sometimes it just doesn’t play back at all

Its an abbey road drum kit and an instance of session guitarist electric vintage so far right now, so Its pretty light on the CPU.

Tried making a multi out version of abbey road drummer in the instrument rack. Tried making multiple instruments tracks each with its own drum sound (kick, sn, etc.)

Same problem on both ways of doing it.

Went online and a lot of advice about disabling devices in windows control panel, updating drivers, etc.
Did some of that. none of it worked.

Remade the session in Ableton Live with exact same plugins and midi and everything. It works totally flawlessly

Saw another recent thread where people were reporting native instruments and cubase 11 compatibility issues. but the problem they were experiencing was completely different so didnt want to hijack the thread.

Also wanted to mention that because this is most likely a cubase problem.

Hoping someone else has experienced this and found the fix. Anyone got any ideas?

And just when I thought I had settled into a DAW!

It’s a sample based instrument, hard disk performance plays a role…

good advises for WinXP

thanks st10ss! Yeah i’m gonna look more into the hard drive. other thing I though was maybe its some sort of ram issue. So I need to do more investigation on that for sure. I know I cant rule those out entirely.

However, , I recreated the session precisely in Ableton Live. And it has no issues at all. every instrument, midi note, effect chain. exactly the same.

I also recreated the session from scratch in cubase to make sure its not something I did to that particular session.

I think it may have more to do with midi routing in cubase and Kontakt getting confused with each other. Like somehow the midi routing architecture in cubase and the midi routing architecture in Kontakt are stepping on each others toes and resulting in a “does not compute”.

Hopefully there is a toggle switch in some settings tab for some randomly labeled option just waiting for me to find it!

I troubleshot some more. I think I was overcomplicating the Midi routing.

the new approach (and probably obvious to most people) is to use a folder track to edit the “kit” midi and color code each midi part on each instrument track in the folder. The color coding is to help with writing and editing the midi data contained on the event on the folder track.

I realized that in my initial approaches (shared copies, midi track with midi sends, multi-out rack instrument), I have like 5 times the amount of midi notes flying around cubase in all those approaches. A lot of those notes were going into Kontakt instruments that they didn’t need to go into and the Kontakt Instrument was just ignoring them.

In this new approach, there really aren’t any extra midi notes involved. So probably that is the difference.

Because so far, its been running smooth as butter!

It is a compromise in the sense that starting to write a drum track from scratch or trying to use a groove or something it is a little more cumbersome. But I’m sure I’ll figure some setup, key stroke, or PLE trick to make it easier. Its Cubase after all.

Spent some quality time in Ableton tonight first time in a long time. Its so much better in so many ways. And so much worse in so many ways.

I’ve noticed this. the difference for me is that I’m running on a 16" M1Pro with 32 gig ram and 4tb of super quick SSD internal storage.
If I play a groove and switch presets I get pops and crackles, the type that sound pretty dangerous. I have also had the CPU shooting up a few times.
For me it’s a case of waiting for Native instruments to update the plugins. They are actively doing that right now. Quite a lot of their stuff is still VST 2.
Perhaps try Kontakt 5 and the drummer series if you have it.

This is VST2 and is not native supported on the M1 MACs, as far as I remember…

okay nice so I’m not alone!

My new approach is not my optimal workflow, but it definitely will be workable. If there turns out to be an unforeseen headache in this new workflow I’ll look into reinstalling Kontakt 5 and see if it works better, I hadn’t thought of that!

I was thinking about this all some more since my post last night. I realized that in Ableton session I created, the way that the midi notes are flying around, its an approach much like the approaches that don’t work well in Steinberg. There are like 5 times the amount of necessary notes being fed into various kontakt instruments,. Most of the notes are being ignored because they go into the instance of kontakt and there is no sample loaded for that note so the note just gets fed to nothing. And Ableton/kontakt handles that perfectly fine.

So again I am back at my theory that the Steinberg midi routing architecture and the Native instruments midi routing architecture just aren’t agreeing with each other very well. Or maybe its just straight up Steinberg’s midi routing architecture that has issues. It does feel a bit restrictive from the get go, only being able to have 4 midi sends on a track, and needing to create a separate midi track if you want to have a midi event control more than one instrument. Ableton handles of that stuff so much better

At the same time, in terms of midi manipulation, its crazy what Cubase can do!

Anyway, thanks again for the feedback Harry and st10ss!

Nothing native instruments do is native m1 but everything is running good on my m1pro bar some In frequent strangeness and repeatable glitches.

I have the exact same issue happening here. Cubase 12 and Kontakt 7