Hi all. I was watching The MIDI Orchestra - Designing Templates by AskVideo. Surprisingly, Mr. Peter Schwartz told and show that working with multi instances is more cpu friendly. Not a big difference bu it is.



But working with 1 instance is look better to me and I still prefer to work like that. I think it's easy and better if multi-timbral is enable (maybe just a psychological thought). So I wanted to ask you how you prefer to work? Do you see an important difference between single instance and multi instances?

 

I always use multiple instances of Kontakt. Typicaly 10 to 30.
Studio One (my preferred DAW) will show only the selected track's instance so on-screen clatter never becomes an issue and by doing it this way the Kontakt's instrument that I want to fiddle with always comes into focus and there is no need to scroll through or search through opened presets which with single instance is always unnecessary annoyance and slows me down.
In other DAWs totally opposite may be true.

 

Well, do you have any performance isue with one istance? Do you find your workflow and music ideas are less interrupted if you work with multiple istances? If not then you are already answer yourself. Stay with what is working best for you and concentrate on music.

 

It's pretty obvious that it would use less resources, In Kontakt it wouldn't make that big of a difference since Kontakt is kinda just a shell and the patches are what take up processing.
But in Omnisphere, it makes a huge difference.

Let me give you a different example, singles vs multi is like opening tabs in browsers vs new window, a new window would require a new process and redundant things like your toolbar would be loaded twice.

This also happens to be the difference between chrome and firefox, chrome splits tabs into their own processes which takes up more resources (This is why people complain that chrome is a ram hog) but that means if one page crashes the others dont.

 

Depends on the library. Probably single for simple instruments (like perc), multi for (shared) CC controls.

 

Single... more control when freezing, bouncing and stuff like that

 

I tend to use single instance, unless a big orchestral thing, which isn't that often...

single instance uses from what I understand, a little more resources then multi, but with speed tradeoffs and different processing on different parts etc, I find single instance just easier...

I read somewhere that the first instantiation of Kontakt on a system required x amount of ram, and and subsequent require x-a lot, that is, (not correct values), if the first instance of Kontakt takes 250mb of ram, subsequent additions are only, say 1/4 of that, .... I also think NOT having the database in your Kontakt (depending on size, for those of you with bloated Kontakt libraries ), has a smaller footprint...

But I am interested in others thoughts on this, and especially some insight from our resident Kontakt guru, Introninja!

 

Cramming as much as you can in one single instance saves you a bit of RAM and and CPU, but it's not a huge difference if you have a fairly powerful computer.
It's mainly the cheap 400$ PCs and 700$ laptops that will suffer with multiple instances, but then again these computers also require you to bounce to audio synths like Diva, Lush 101 and Serum when mixing.

If your computer is good enough, then choose the solution which fits your workflow most.

P.S. sisyphus, what you say is true because any plugin can share the same memory. If, however, you use a DAW that sandboxes each plugins or does things differently, then each Kontakt intance including the subsequent ones will be using X instead of X-a.

 

Good that you bring this up, I'm just about to re-think my plugin handling to optimize CPU load distribution because I have 4 cores but they're only clocked at 2.3GHz.
If I had to re-choose my machine today I'd rather go for a 3.5GHz dualcore than for a 2.3GHz quad- or even octacore CPU - because most DAWs are still not able to arbitrarily distribute threads over any number of CPU cores, and having few high-clocked cores would give me less headache.

If you've never had a CPU overload, just go on making music, but if it's a problem for you, you might want to know a bit more about the subject.
I highly recommend __this__ read about optimizing cpu core load distribution by re-routing plugins.
It's written for Logic Pro/X but should be valid for other DAWs as well.

In short, you split cpu-hungry processing plugins into two or more channel strips and use buses to route from instrument to channel strip(s) to outputs.

 

LOL i'm still using a dual core i3 3,20 ghz. Runs great both on S1 and Logic. I think that Logic developers should tweak logic, the all routing for split processing it's just weird and awkward IMO

 

great point, neglected that, and I assume that we will see more sandboxing in the future to prevent crashes etc… doesn't the new Logic do this? So in that case. each instance would need it's own ram footprint, but then if you are using Kontakt memory server etc…. the samples should be fine, but the ram footprint of the plugin will still add up….

 

Well, REAPER handles quad-core just fine, it's the plugins (Kontakt) that struggle. Therefore Multi Instance for me + checking "Allow live multiprocessing on 8 cores". Standalone Kontakt surprisingly manages to load CPU well, but its VST counterpart is not that effective - for VST, it's best to set "2 cores" to optimize it for hyperthreading. *yes*

Multi Instance is easier to manage for freezing - which in turn is better for low-spec machines. Single Instance is good for single instrument with multiple articulations. *yes*