Hi all and excuse my poor English.

I have a Core 2 Duo 1.86Ghz and 2GB RAM laptop. It has a pretty nice SSD 128GB with about 200MBs. It's actually a Mac but I've decided with the help of this forum to use Windows for doing music (noise in my case but I like my noise :P). I can't upgrade RAM nor CPU and it has only USB2 ports.

Perhaps the biggest problem I face is using Kontakt with heavyweight libraries. Particularly Prominy V-Metal.

I use a Windows 7 x64 lite version which gives me 1.3GB free RAM at startup. Due to technical limitations I can't install a x32 Windows.

Is there a way of make it work? I'm ready to do all kind of tweaks but perhaps it's not worth trying. So I'm asking your wise advice. I consider myself a medium level Kontakt user [Edited after my second post: well, maybe beginner level haha :_( ]

Tips I know or I think so:
- With SSD and slow CPU, the first step would be decompress the library's sample containers. That would improve CPU usage.
- Second step would be reducing Kontakt's buffer as much as I can until I hear sound artifacts.
- I can easily slim down the multi instruments by keeping only important articulations (nki's). I have a pretty good idea of which ones are.
- The library has good lite patches
- I can survive using only two Kontakt instances. I could freeze one instance track, but It would put me things hard due to my beginner music level which requires frequent MIDI editing


Problems or doubts:
- Even customizing multis they're still way too big
- I don't know how to slim down lite patches as they are complex but still nki instruments
- I can plug an external 256GB SSD but with USB2 ports I can only benefit the low access time, speed won't pass 40MBs aprox.

I think I could slim down a wav decompressed version simply deleting not wanted articulations wav's. That's in the case I can figure out which files/folders belongs to which articulations. I don't know how Kontakt arranges a wav decompressed library.

Any help would be utterly appreciated.

Best regards

 

This. The problem when you change that setting is that it applies to ALL your kontakt libraries. So when you load libraries on your regular old SATA drive, you'll get glitches because the SSD's settings aren't appropriate.

 

With that much RAM u going to have to use DFD mode & change prebuffer settings. That's about all I can think of like mentioned above.

If by wav decompression u mean NCW to WAV don't think it will affet CPU usage much at all. For NCW they stored & loaded compressed & decompressed in playback realtime.

Compression just makes loading faster but has little effect on CPU usage but just gives each NKI a smaller RAM footprint.

Complex Multi's are probably going to be very tricky. With 4 gb or more u could utilize memory server on mac but if u can't upgrade then it not an option.

Could have what u mean totally wrong though

 

You need more RAM.
Kontakt was the first reason why ppl looked at X64 OS with X64 DAW and x64 plugs...and massive RAM

Even x32 OS with 4GB RAM would be enough. But not 2GB. Once removed GPU RAM, OS, DAW and more, nothing is left

 

There is not much to do taking into account your specs. You simply have a bottleneck and if you can't change it at all that's it.
If I remember well that library (I don't own it) has good lite patches so I would simply go with them.
Another suggestion would be killing any background process you don't need to free RAM and CPU.
I see you use multiple instances of Kontakt, why? Just use one with different midi channels routed to multiple outputs. This also saves RAM.
I wouldn't edit the big patches because if they are driven by some kind of script you would simply cause a mess.

 

Buy a refurbished pc and dedicate it to your music production.

I spent $40 on mine (ebay) which had a 2.66ghz core 2 duo processor and 4 gig of ram
I added another 4 gig stick for about $50 and a used core 2 quad processor for $65 and it handles everything I throw at it.

As for what you can do right this minute, Get your hands on a technical review copy of windows 10 which should be easy enough to find

 

2GB is still OK. You can make music with a lot less
As others pointed out, reducing preload will free up RAM. Or you can take it to next level and purge samples on all your loaded NKIs. I did that on numerous occasions and experienced glitches only very rarely. It should work with most fast SSDs.
Dunno what DAW you're using, but in REAPER you can make your own actions accessible through shortcuts. Like in my case, Ctrl+Alt+A - unload and freeze, Ctrl+Alt+D - unfreeze and load. Set temp directory somewhere on the SSD and freezing will only take a few seconds.
Compress to NCW all your libs. With unlocked Kontakt, it's easy. There's no CPU overhead and 50% HDD+RAM savings.

Using multiple instances does take more RAM, but there are less issues with NKI that require multiscript, and is also better for freezing. Though single instance will likely work as well. *yes*

BTW, are you sure RAM is not upgradeable? Most MacBooks do have at least one DIMM slot free. All you need is DDR3 stick that work with Apple, it's usually mentioned in their description. Corsair for instance make Mac-Ready SO-DIMMs

 

Thank you all for your answers. There have been very helpful

I was completely wrong when I thought decompressing to wav would be a good idea. It certainly improves a bit CPU usage, but it eats almost twice the RAM.

I thought decompression was made from disk to RAM, but actually is's completely on-the-fly, from RAM to DAW or sound card.

I would try converting from compressed NKM to NCW, and removing non used samples, but that's where my second big mistake comes: I only thought in RAM pre buffer, not in DFD.


Other considerations:
- It's a MacBook Air 2010, that means ultra thin. Upgrading would mean not only hardware price but Apple technical one. The hardware is wielded , at least the RAM. Anyway, even if it were possible it certainly wouldn't not be price worthy. As mate has stated hardware is cheap. But no so cheap for me, because is I need to DAW on a laptop. I have a desktop PC, but I barely have time to use it.

- I'm using the lightest Windows 7/8 version usable for music. That means lot of services are already disabled and I've disabled manually the others. GPU uses 300MB, and as I said in the opening I've 1.3GB free. That's pretty good, only 400MB used by Windows even with wifi and other not must have services for DAWing. I can't install Windows 10, Apple only supports Windows 7 drivers for my Mac. But I'm curious Vince Bramich, are you saying Windows 10 is less resource hungry than Windows 7 & 8?

- I need to use at least two instances because Prominy V-Metal is an ultra deeply sampled guitar library. That means every different chord on every different fret on every different strings is sampled to capture the interactions of polyphonic guitar sounds. I wouldn't need more than one instance if it was, say, a synth library. One instance would be rhythm track and other lead track.

Thank you all, :D

Cheers!