![]() Some of my favorite sounds for orchestra come from Spitfire Audio, and these high-quality sounds come at a price of massive voice counts, since they offer complex layers of microphones and articulations. This is because the better sound libraries trigger multiple layers, and have long release tails that “pile up” eating voices for lunch. ![]() The Hosts with the MostsĮven with all this, when working on dense projects, things would get bogged down. Other sounds that don’t need such a real-time feel, have a slow attack, or that are quantized, get played through the plug-in instance from the beginning. When it’s time to mix the track, I switch the piano part to a plug-in version of Kontakt, since DP9 will compensate for delays upon playback, recreating my timing, at least fairly closely. Kontakt very helpfully calculates the latency for you, and this setup keeps it below 3ms, quite playable. I send the audio from this app directly to the outputs of my interface, with a buffer of 128 samples (in the Kontakt audio settings.) I do this because sending the audio through DP9 would add delay. The answer is to run a stand-alone version of Kontakt alongside DP9 and to rout my piano tracks to that. For me, delays of more than a few milliseconds really bother me, and I have run tests to see how much delay I can tolerate before I feel “detached” from the instrument, particularly with piano. (Not proportionally, however doubling the buffer does not get even close to doubling voice-count.) DP9 will compensate for this buffer and keep things in time.Įven at a buffer setting of 256 in DP9, the latency for real-time playing is still not ideal for keyboard and piano parts, where my “feel” as a keyboard player is important. This makes the key-response sluggish, but more voices will play. When playing back and editing, latency is less of an issue, so I raise the buffer size to 512 or even 1024. Buffer settings: I use a buffer of 256 samples for sequencing, which makes latency (delay) tolerable.Setting it to 2 cores made it purr like a kitten. Be careful to match the number of cores to the actual processor you use Kontakt somehow thought my laptop had 4 cores, and this bogged everything down. Settings: NI suggests selecting “multi-processor” mode only in the stand-alone Kontakt app, while leaving it off when using the plug-in (I run both, for reasons I will give below.) It turns out NI is wrong, at least with DP9 turning multi-processing on in the plug-in (Audio Units) nearly DOUBLES voice-count.Kontakt streams these, so the faster access time makes a big difference in voice-count. Solid-state drive for samples: More recently, I removed the DVD drive and installed a second SSD just for sample libraries.This made a huge difference in performance. Solid-state drive: I replaced the system drive with a 512gb SSD a while back.Maxed out the RAM: Unfortunately, my Mac will only take 8gb.My particular system uses a Macbook Pro 17″ running Digital Performer 9, and Native Instruments Kontakt 5 sampler (among other soft-synths.) I did the following to get the most out of this rig: There are certainly ways to optimize your system to improve voice-count and avoid the dreaded drop-outs, clicks and other problems indicating system overload. Working on orchestra or other large-ensemble music using a sequencer can be very taxing on a computer system in terms of processor power, memory and disk usage.
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