Hard drive spikes, clipping, and reinstall questions

Hello all,

I've been dealing with an issue for a couple weeks and would greatly appreciate any advice you can offer. I've learned a lot from this forum, and I appreciate it very much.

My system is a late 2013 iMac, 3.5 Ghz Intel Core i7, 32 gigs of RAM, 3 TB 7200 internal hard drive which everything is saved to/installed on. My current software is Kontakt 5, Komplete 10 Ultimate and Symphobia 1. My DAW is Studio 1 v2 pro. I have updated all software to the most current versions.

Something is causing the sound on my midi tracks to cut out with an electronic click, particularly on sustained notes. Here's an example (skip to 35 seconds for the worst of it). The dropouts do not happen when I mix down, so I recorded this on my phone's mic (sorry for the poor quality):

The dropouts correspond with a spike of the hard disk meter in Kontakt 5. There is no spike in my DAW's meter.

This happens on songs as small as 6-7 tracks of Symphobia. I believe that by the standards of my system's capabilities this is tiny. The dropouts do not happen all the time - sometimes the playback is fine. It happens seemingly at random, but once it starts happening on a track it tends to happen more frequently.

I have read as many threads as I could on this and have tried the following:

Increasing buffer size as high as 2048. No effect.
Checking polyphony levels on all instruments and on Kontakt to make sure none are set too low and that I am not maxing out Kontakt. I am not exceeding any levels.
Fresh install of new copy of Symphobia (Project SAM's suggestion). No effect.
Switching from Kontakt allocating cores (all 8 selected) to letting my DAW do it. No effect.
Using the Kontakt Memory Server. This works, but seems to be only a temporary fix as I will exceed my RAM once I add libraries I plan to add.
Apple ran a diagnostic on my hard disk. It revealed no problems. They suggested I upgrade my OS to Yosemite, which I did. No effect on the dropouts (however, now my DAW crashes a lot, ha!).

Studio One did not have any suggestions besides buffer size. Project SAM (Symphobia), who have been very responsive, offered the suggestions above.

Native Instruments sent me the Optimizing Kontakt document that folks here have probably seen. http://www.native-instruments.com/en/support/knowledge-base/show/32/ I let them know that those fixes did not work and am I'm waiting on further responses.

Clicking around my files and folders, I learned that there is a lot of duplication of Kontakt stuff on my computer. Studio One came with Kontakt 4 (which I believe I upgraded at some point) and I see a lot of duplicate files between my applications folder and Documents folder. I have two Kontakt 5s, for example, and I don't know which one my DAW is using. I am considering doing an uninstall/reinstall using these steps: https://www.native-instruments.com/...oftware-and-drivers-from-a-mac-os-x-computer/

I am thinking at worst it can't hurt to start fresh, which will get rid of the version 4 stuff and duplicates. Rather than pick and choose what to install/reinstall I want to just wipe the slate clean and reinstall everything from the NI K10 Ultimate hard drive. Does this sound like a good idea?

I know that using an external HD to stream samples is a good idea, and I do plan to do this. However, I want to make sure that I get the existing system working to its capabilities first.

Thank you for taking the time to read this, and thanks very much for any advice you might offer!

 

Should have also added, in addition to other items that I tried, that I made sure no other applications were running alongside my DAW, I shut off the internet, and made sure my hard disk is not allowed to sleep. Thanks!

 

For the record, here's an update. NI confirmed that I should try the reinstall as instructed in the link I posted above. I also moved to Studio One 3 (demo version) deleted all my old Studio One settings and let them reinstall. Also tried managing the core usage, freeing up one core at a time and seeing if performance improved. Still having hard drive spikes and crashes pretty much any time I try to close my DAW. Studio One reviewed the crash reports and believe it is Kontakt causing the crashes.

I have to conclude that NI's support is stumped, as they haven't suggested anything besides 1) referring me to the FAQ, 2) agreeing that I should reinstall (they didn't suggest this, I did and they agreed), and 3) changing my latency settings from 1024 to 512 (my understanding is that decreasing the buffer size could create problems like this, not solve them...but at any rate, this didn't work either).

Please let me know if you have any thoughts.

 

I would definitely try and do a full reinstall of the system, see what happens. If it persists, it might be that hard disk is having some minor mechanical issues that are not detectable using disk scanning software (they usually check for integrity of data), but that impact random disk seeking performance (which would in turn reduce streaming efficiency).

SSDs would definitely alleviate the issue I would say, since they have no moving parts, are silent and VERY FAST, but expensive if you need a lot of space.

 

Thanks very much for your response EvilDragon. I took the computer in to Apple, who did find mechanical issues with the internal hard drive. They swapped it out, and when it came back I installed my samples on an external hard drive (7200 RPM, 1 TB Thunderbolt). I know SSD is faster, but it seems like this should work as my demands are fairly modest at this time. I still have over half of the space free on the drive.

Unfortunately, I'm still having these disk spikes. Also, I'm not sure I mentioned this before, but sometimes in Kontakt an instrument display will go 2D, like in the attached screenshot. Could this be related? Anyone seen this before?

I'm wondering whether my version of Kontakt is corrupted somehow? It's the only thing I haven't changed out.

Thanks for your time.

 

Screenshot attached. Thank you.

 

Unfortunately I have failed to resolve the issues I have been having for the last couple months. Since I last posted I have moved my Symphobia samples to an external Thunderbolt SSD drive and have tried setting up my template in the demo (full version) of Digital Performer (DP). I set up 28 instances of Kontakt with 8 instruments in each instance (cut the number of instruments in half per some suggestions). DP literally cannot load this template. As the instances load, they take longer and longer to load until its 30-45 minutes per instance.

I have been studying my activity monitor and wonder if anyone has a thought about the following observations: I noticed that in my CPU monitor, %CPU column gets very high for DP or StudioOne, 130-140%. However, the CPU load is very low, around 12-13%. 85% is idle. Seems like there must be something wrong with that?

Second, I have 32 gigs of RAM installed, but it looks like my instruments are sucking up all of that. I have about 30 gigs of samples installed (Symphobia 1, TrueStrike, and some of the Komplete Ultimate instruments), but I thought that only a small portion of the samples were loaded into memory and the rest were streamed from disk. I'm not running the Kontakt Memory Server. It can't be that you need an amount of memory to handle the full size of the installed instruments...can it? For folks who have hundreds of gigs of samples in your template, do you have hundreds of gigs of RAM? I thought that using the KMS would cause all the instruments to be loaded into memory, but I don't have it checked. Further, I'm not even playing these instruments, they are just sitting there in Kontakt instances.

Sorry about the ramble. It's driving me crazy that I can't get this system to work. I appreciate you taking the time to read this, and please let me know if you have any thoughts or questions that might help shed light on this for me.

 

I'm also experiencing problems with CPU spikes using Kontakt 5 and Cubase 8 Pro. These occur whenever I program a tempo change and result in the audio from any Kontakt virtual instruments dropping out for a moment right when the tempo changes. The CPU meter in the DAW spikes for a split second. If there are no instances of Kontakt in my project then there are no problems other than the usual glitches that occur when VIs are clocked to tempo so I can only conclude that this is an NI problem. I've tried disabling the sync to host tempo in the Kontakt options menu and various other things to no avail. Have you tried running other plugins without Kontakt in your session ?

 

Its much worse here, especially when using a gradual tempo change when a Kontakt sound has a lot of tempo driven elements to it. Even on the slave computers. Kontakt just isn't programmed properly to deal with it. Try composing to picture without tempo changes!!! This is a big deal, There are a number of Kontakt 3rd party instruments I was ready to buy but with this issue, I can't.

 

Curious if anyone found any resolutions to these problems, particularly the tempo change issues. Thanks.

 

Somewhat in response to the cutting out of plugins but moreso directly related to ProjectSAM 'Symphobia'.

I am experiencing the cutting out while playing. The library is located on an external hard drive using USB 3.0 and I think that is the problem. For this library in particular it seems it needs to be on a hard drive 'in the box.'

I have spoken to the developer directly and he could not understand why I would be experiencing this problem. His setup is all 'in the box.'

Speaking to an audio technician at Sam Ash in NYC he also said he never heard of such a problem before.

I have seen a couple of videos online of composers showing the use of Symphobia, even the Lumina library and intermitent cutting out while playing occured.

I am not having a problem with any other libraries including Albion, NI, etc.

My system is an Apple desktop, 2012 with 16GB Ram, and SSD HD. External HD is a WD.

I have the OS disk settings regarding sleep mode set to never as well as the external HD through its software set to the same. I also tried the free app known as Keep Drive Spinning all to no avail.

Just food for thought as I do not know what others setups are.

My next system is going to be a 2012 Mac Pro with a minimum of 64GB Ram and loaded with SSD's. Not sure how ProjectSAM will fare but in all reality I am not really sure I like the processed string sound anyway. However it is an awesome library all the same.

 

What are the specs of your external hard drive?

 

WD My Book 3TB 7200RPM USB 3.0

In the future it would seem recommended to go with a Lacie for external but I it seems that keeping the drives in the box is the play.

What I have found though is that in the settings parameter of the ProjectSAM instrument, disabling the release trigger has all but cured the ill.

Periodically it does still cut out. Specifically, when holding down a note and then press an additional note is when the problem is most persistent which cuts all notes off that are being played.

As I said, between no other library suffering from this problem as well as seeing others dealing with the exact same issue the only commonality is the library itself. But I just can't see what the problem would be though I am ignorant as to the way it is being called up as to ProjectSAM's logic.

 

I'm assuming you've updated all the ProjectSAM stuff. It could be a scripting thing. I've been learning that these Kontakt instrument scripts are getting pretty sophisticated and resource-heavy with every update. Have you tried copying your ProjectSAM libraries over to your main hard drive to see if that alleviates the problem?

 

Everything is up to date including Kontakt.

I have no room on the main and only HD within the box to put anything else on. If I had additional drives in the box I would surely have the libraries there which is the most realistic scenario.

Albion just cut out on me so it would seem it is the external HD incapable of getting the information fast enough though one would have to question the mac as to how it is handling these tasks.

Such as if one waits for the library to load into Kontakt completely and then while playing it cuts out intermittently, how does that work?

 

Kontakt is loading only a portion of the sample into RAM. It does this to have immediate access to the sample. It then streams the rest of the sample from the hard drive. My guess is that your external doesn't have a fast enough seek time to playback the sample quick enough after you play a note.