OK, give me some minutes, I'm testing what Ableton and Kontakt will do with my PCs memory ...

 

No I figured out that plugging them directly into the computer (usb 4) or into a dongle that was usb 4 was causing them to disconnect. Once i downgraded to a 3.0 Hub they stopped disconnecting

 

I just was looking at this project again it was probably a bit more than I said probably 6 6 stacks and 40 plugins - and thank you for trying to help out its much appreciated

 

What happened to the Motu M2? So this Volt is the second audio interface on this machine's USB bus which does not work?

 

Nothing was wrong with it except the USB C plug in the back was faulty and was disconnecting if i so much as put a drink on my desk. It wasnt the usb port on the computer but the C port at the back of the device -- I just swapped around my usbs and connected all the SSDs with the libraries to the USB 4.0 they were not disconnecting but there was no difference at all

 

I find it hard to believe you can do barely any composing with external SSD connected to hub, let alone three. Perhaps switch to internal SSD's?

 

oh, I see

OK, I'm back. When I start Ableton it consumes 517 MB of RAM, When I load one instance of Kontakt VST3 it goes up to 650MB. When I load in a Stradivari Violin -> 2462 plus a Stradivari Cello -> 4053 (of my total 64 GB)
So every instance of Kontakt and every instrument inside of each instance eats memory because Kontakt preloads a lot of the samples into the memory of the PC. In my case one instrance with two instruments ate up 3 GB already. If you multiply that with your count of tracks...thats a lot. Too lot. PC begins to swap memory to harddisk. That makes it very slow. Plus loading of course takes time.

With VEP you can offload workload from your computer. For example, older machines that you still have around somewhere. But I don't know if Live 11 is good for that.
I do it with 2 older HPZ machines. Instead of using a Kontakt instance I use a VEP instances. The load on my main machine is now almost zero.

 

what do you mean? just that externals are slower? When i upgrade my computer im probably going to just get like an 8TB SSD

 

In Kontakts options under "Memory" you can override the instrument preload buffer size and set it down to 12 kB or even 6 kB which drastically reduces memory usage. Therefore drive streaming usage goes up, but should still be no problem with SSDs.

 

Ya mine was already set pretty low gona try and lower it more - I just lowered it to 6 and my cpu went down by like 7% - is it true that it uses different threads or cores for different instances? like if i had more instances of kontakt and less stacks it would be less strain on the cpu

 

Last edited: Aug 28, 2023

Yeah I think that my RAM is just overloaded which is messing with my CPU - I only have 32GB - Whats VEP?

 

The drives can be fast but USB 3 cannot handle the speed. You can use those USB drives for backups but not for serious composing.

 

anything is "slower" when connected to a hub because the throughput is interrupted. it's adding a physical potential bottleneck.

 

But what about an external thats directly plugged into the computer Vs. internal drive?

 

I didn't have enough time to read all of the replies, but since my computer is older at this point when I have a lot of Kontakt instances running and I run into popping or freezing or what have you I bounce the separate tracks to audio and replace the Kontakt instance with a blank channel (sampler in FL Studio) just to contain the midi. This works well because I name each midi track with the VST, library and preset, so that if I want to rework it I can simply reload Kontakt (or whatever VST). This is definitely the biggest improvement in performance I have been able to achieve when running into the issue you described. It may sound cumbersome, but once you are used to it, it really is not.

 

well yea if i wanted to freeze every track i wouldnt have any issues lol to me thats an impossibility

 

ViennaEnsemblePro = VEP
https://www.vsl.co.at/en/Vienna_Ensemble_Pro

In my opinion, no single PC with that much Kontakt and other plugins can manage to play such a large orchestra without freezing tracks.

With VEP, you can offload the workload and distribute it over several computers (as VEP servers = older machines that you may have in stock or buy for little money). Then it works.

I just looked at one of my projects, there were 33 Kontakt instruments, each with its own MiDi channels via Cubase.
That works with VEP easily.
With > 60 instruments tracks, you just take a second PC (as a VEP server), then it'll also work as well.

Spoiler: What you will need for VEP...

Two old spare PC with 32 GIG RAM and the neede Kontakt libs on a network drive (or inside the box), a 1 GB/s network adapter for each of them and a secon 1 GB/s Network adaptor for your main machine. Connect them with a small 1GB/s LAN router and dedicated IP Adresss e.g. 192.168.0.x so that it does not use the samen network as your first Network Adaptor)

 

Simple example calculation: using 24 bit and 48 kHz, as most Kontakt libraries use, playing 1000 notes with 2 channels each (stereo) result in 275 MB/s throughput of uncompressed audio. Usually, all Kontakt libraries store their samples with lossless compression (.ncw files) in large containers (.nkx) containing thousands of small samples. So throughput should be at least about 2/3rd the size (183 MB/s) with just a handful of file handles to access thousands of single samples, making it far lighter on the bus than accessing each sample as individual file.

The maximum theoretical speed USB 3.0 can reach is 476.8 MB/s (5GBps with 8b/10b encoding), so with let's say another 20% overhead you still get 381 MB/s. With the above calculation this would result in about 2080 stereo notes.

Now it depends on what instruments you're using and how many additional microphones you've enabled. And for sure how busy your arrangement is. But with about 2000 stereo notes per drive (if you spread libraries over several SSDs AND connect them to an individual USB 3 port) it should be more than possible to get some work done.

For very large orchestral templates, VEP and dedicated sample servers are indeed the way to go.

 

ok ill look into this.. what do you think about adding another 64GIG RAM and doubling the processor cores and getting a huge internal SSD and moving the libraries over to that single drive

 

That is all assuming that "new software" is worth a crap to begin with.