Native Instruments - Knowledge Base

The amount of RAM memory available on your computer is restricted by two main factors:

1. the physical RAM memory installed in your particular computer
2. the addressable memory space of your operating system (Windows/OS X)
   

Obviously adding more RAM to your computer can help. But note that the amount of memory you can actually use is also limited by the second factor, the limitation of the addressable memory space. Depending on your operating system, an application can only address a certain amount of memory.

• In Windows, the maximum standard addressable memory is 2 GB, "extended memory mode" (if enabled in your BIOS settings) and if the application supports this feature, would allow to use 3 GB at maximum.

• In OS X, the maximum addressable memory is 4 GB.

Note that within these limits, a significant portion of the addressable memory space is already in use by the application itself, the operating system or possibly other plug-ins that you have loaded, so it is not available for loading samples into.

For example with KONTAKT 2 on OS X you can expect to load approx. 2.7 GB of samples (approx 1.5 GB less than the maximum addressable memory), on Windows you can expect to load approx. 1.7 GB (approx. 300 MB less than the addressable memory space).

In addition, note that plug-ins loaded into a sequencer have to share the sequencers memory space. This means that only 2 GB (Windows) or 4 GB (Mac) is the maximum available for your sequencer and all of the plug-ins loaded into it, even if you have much more physical RAM installed on the machine.

Please note that these limits are likely to change in the future as 64-bit operating systems become more widely used both on the Mac and Windows platforms. This will allow applications to address much more RAM. However, the OS as well as the sequencer, the instrument plug-ins, and the hardware drivers on your system must all be updated by their respective manufacturers to run natively in 64-bit environments before this will become a reality.