I’m using Kontakt instruments in my projects and when I play them for the first few times they lag, make clicks etc.
It’s not because they’re not fully loaded into RAM, I don’t know what the reason is, but if I want to export I need to play the whole track in loop 5 times, and only then can I export the track.
Is there a way somehow to make them play smoothly from the first time?
It’s really a hassle to export again and again until it sounds right
I’m not sure it’s related to Cubase maybe it’s some settings in Kontakt that I don’t know of
Does this also happen, if you only have one track and/or Kontakt instance open in a new project, that it lags the first time you play the VST instrument?
Also heavily depends if your samples are stored on an SSD or only a HDD, amount of available RAM, maybe processor speed etc. What are your system specs, and which Cubase edition and version do you use?
I’d just try further, maybe it’s only samples from a specific vendor which give you trouble, or due to the way you load them up in Kontakt (one instance with several MIDI channels routed to it vs. one Kontakt instance on every track)., or once you reach a certain number instrument/MIDI tracks. You could try the other way around if it changes behaviour.
You may also try the “Batch resave” feature inside Kontakt to correct internal errors and possibly (?) speeding up load times. You shoukd be really careful with this and read up on NI’s website, though. Basically this makes your NI instruments more coherent, checks for errors and may speed up loading, especially if you have lots of instruments.
Have at least the library installers ready (if you need to download a lot of data again or music production is your day job) and know the path structure, because it might ask you about missing content if it finds something not working correnctly. Skipping or wrong dialogue choices can make single samples go missing.
Thanks a lot for your answer that’s a lot to investigate, now that you mention the HDD thing, I do have many sample libraries installed on external HDD.
My specs are:
AMD Ryzen 9 4900H
32GB
with SSD and HDD connected internally and external drives too
It makes most sense that it’s the HDD slowing it down, but I don’t exactly understand why after playing the track a few times, it plays alright, maybe it’s a cache thing? I would be happy if you could somehow make Cubase do something that you can save that playing back time.
Also I will try in other DAW, it seems to happen only in bigger projects with many different Kontant libraries, so it will take some time to test it.
I load new instance of Kontakt in each channel, is it a good idea?
I never run out of RAM, I try to never pass the 26gb so there’s always free space
Thanks a lot guys!
I was hoping that maybe it’s a common problem that has a quick fix rather than trial and error to investigate and find out the cause…
first check if there is proper sound driver loaded. Sometimes there are generic ones that cause lags etc.
IMHO there’s no need to load several instances of Kontakt - that maybe also cause a problem.
Also buffer size (latency) is important. Too short will make drops and clicks.