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KONTAKT 4 audio dropouts on MacBook

Discussion in 'KONTAKT' started by stakhanov, Mar 13, 2011.

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  1. stakhanov

    stakhanov New Member

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    Hi!

    ...apologies if this has been discussed, but my problem appears
    in so many different permutations that it's hard for a newbie to
    see the wood for the trees.

    I've got a very straightforward setup. I have a normal MacBook
    in a pretty out-of-the box setup. (normal white plastic MacBook,
    not the Pro or Air; bought it in May 2010; 2GB 1067MHz DDR3 RAM;
    2.26 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo; Mac OS X 10.6.3). The only possible
    problem I see with my machine is that the disk is quite full, but
    probably not wildly fragmented, i.e. I had plenty of space
    yesterday, but then I installed KOMPLETE 7, and now 221GB
    out of 249GB are used).

    I configured KONTAKT 4 with the normal 512 samples buffer,
    and I'm having it output to the normal built-in audio device.

    When I use the Vienna concert grand (which was my main
    motivation for getting the whole rig in the first place), I hit
    the sustain pedal, and play some of the low keys as fast as
    I can: That will give me some really ugly audio dropout
    artefacts, where the samples kind of tear off.

    What should be some of the first things I should look into?

    I noticed that whenever I hit any key, the label "DISK" lights
    up, but it doesn't show any utilization. I've also watched it in
    activity monitor and found that some sample files are getting
    closed and re-opened while I'm actually playing. Are the
    samples not actually getting loaded into memory and accessed
    from there? (i.e. is disk speed an issue at all?)

    My first intuition was to try and put the sample files for that
    instrument on a ramdisk, but shouldn't the OS's disk cache
    make that somewhat superfluous? (it's always the same two
    files getting accessed during my testcase)

    What can I do to upgrade my MacBook hardware-wise that
    might help? Would more memory help at all?

    Also, I'm trying to understand more generally what happens
    when I use KONTAKT as a plugin for downsampling, so I then
    set "offline interpolation quality" to "perfect" and configured
    Sibelius to use KONTAKT as an instrument. I then recorded
    my frantic test-playing into Sibelius which, in realtime produced
    artefacts. I then used the "Export Audio" functionality of
    Sibelius and, in the downsampled audio file, I could still hear
    the artefacts. Any ideas what might be going on there?

    Thanks a lot! Any help would be much appreciated.
     
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