The Activity Monitor shows Dorico around 35% or CPU, and the VSTAudioEngine between 95% and 106%, while playing.
This has been a problem since I’ve been using Dorico. I started last year, when Finale announced it was ending. It doesn’t seem to matter if I’m using Dorico sound libraries or not. I’m currently using Dorico’s Halion for Bass and 1 Drum track, Groove Agent for the other drum track, and 5 instances of Shreddage Archtop 3.0, through Kontack 8 for the 5 other tracks.
It’s only when a note is repeated, the 2nd notes doesn’t play. The repeated E, Eb, D, Db that I just mentioned was working, not it’s not. Instead of E, E, Eb, Eb, D, D, Db, Db, I get E, , Eb, , D, D, Db, Db, and some times it’s missing the D or Db.
Here’s a file I just created. It has only 1 note, repeated with various rhythms, with a repeated 8 bars. Different notes are missing from the playback on the repeat. Here’s the link to the audio file.
OK, well, I haven’t got Kontakt 8, so I can’t test that.
The drums are a bit weird, though. I get a pop when playback starts, and there’s some strange very low rumbling, throughout.
Here’s the file resaved with a factory playback template. Does this file play normally for you?
If so, there’s something wrong with the way the instrument playback was set up in your original file.
Don’t know why such a tiny file should still be so big, though…
Yes, I get a pop when I first try to play any file. The low rumble is a recorded trigger in the Rhythm part, that I can’t seem to find and get rid of. I usually mute that track because it’s not needed for playback. The “template” was made from a file that I worked with for quite a while getting my preferred setting in the libraries. I deleted the notes and saved it as a Template. There was a lot of adjusting to the playback in the process as well. Not sure how to purge all of that.
Hi, the cause of the problem with the copy of the file that benwiggy sent back to you is the settings that I imagine you’ve changed in the playback options under timing→note durations:
You’ve increased the default note duration from 95% to 100% and disabled “shorten note if followed by abutting note of the same pitch”. That’s causing the dropouts. If you hit “Reset to factory” the dropouts go away.
If you really want the 100% it is absolutely necessary that “Shorten note if followed by abutting note of same pitch” be checked. It would probably work OK in that scenario - if not, reduce from 100% to 99% or 98% until it works reliably.
There are also some wrong expression maps applied to tracks in the original file, so the rumbling is probably a keyswitch being applied to the wrong library and sounding.
Hi @benwiggy, you are probably referring here to the files in the Crashes folder of scarryer’s diagnostics, right?
But those files are actually not crash files, but only some “diagnostic” files. Those files might get automatically created by the OS when a program or process does not response for a certain amount of time or does a longer operation. But they also very often recover from that condition. So these *.diag files have only a minor importance for us.
The 9.2 megabyte size is generally due to the bad design of Kontakt in this regard. Most samplers work by loading all data and samples from the installation of the library on the local computer system, and what gets saved with the Dorico file are just the “settings” needed to reload all that into Dorico the next time. Almost like a series of commands like “load this instrument” “set volume to 100” “set reverb amount to 50” “set reverb room type to big hall”, so with most instruments this is quite small and doesn’t make the file appreciably larger.
Not with Kontakt, unfortunately. It has a particularly bad design in this regard where it saves basically everything for an instrument except the samples themselves into the Dorico file. The entire user interface for the sample library, scripts, programming - everything needed to run the library (aside from the raw sample recordings themselves) are saved into the Dorico project.
I’m sure the approach they used wasn’t a bad approach back when Kontakt was first developed in the early 2000’s, since there was no scripting back then, user interfaces were quite simple and programming was also simple. So the patches weren’t big and saving the whole thing with a DAW or notation file project wouldn’t make it too big. Unfortunately that is no longer the case - libraries typically have heavy scripts, big fancy UIs, and now the bad design of Kontakt in this regard causes save files for everybody (DAW and notation users) to bloat to be much too large.
If Kontakt was a new product coming out today, nobody would buy it because of this - nobody would stand for this behaviour of making their files so much bigger and wasting so much disk space. But because it has been the industry standard and so many libraries made for it, it isn’t practical to avoid it completely. I generally use as few Kontakt libraries as possible to keep my save files down, and prefer non-Kontakt options where available.
