# The Kontakt 4 lossless compression thread.



## EvilDragon (Jun 19, 2010)

It seems that there are unused samples in Drums Of War. I got the same result as you. Weird that Cinesamples wouldn't use all of their sample content in their library.

Which other libraries did you convert that showed up with less samples than original?


I have also noticed that Kontakt does NOT release the last converted sample from memory. You can't delete it after batch compression! You have to quit Kontakt to delete the offending sample.


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## Pzy-Clone (Jun 19, 2010)

Alot of libs , well ALL of them actualy ...have less samples after conversion compared to the source folder so far.... :shock:


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## polypx (Jun 19, 2010)

Has anyone noticed any quality issues with the sample compression?


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## noiseboyuk (Jun 19, 2010)

I guess the only limitation I can see is that if you NCW your whole library, you won't be able to open older projects using K3 (or earlier). Otherwise if it is this good, I can't understand why K4's whole library isn't NCW already...


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## Pzy-Clone (Jun 19, 2010)

noiseboyuk @ Sat Jun 19 said:


> I guess the only limitation I can see is that if you NCW your whole library, you won't be able to open older projects using K3 (or earlier). Otherwise if it is this good, I can't understand why K4's whole library isn't NCW already...



yes..but surely people keep backups of the uncompressed libs , rite? 
That being said...there are issues.

The naming of samples...can be a problem.
Some libraries have stupidly given several samples the same name, typically where there are several mic postitions.

This will mangle the batch compression results i have found, even if you check "mirror source" it wont work right...

I had some big issues with converting TAIKO here the other day as well...missing samples all over the place for some reason i could not understand.


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## Frederick Russ (Jun 19, 2010)

polypx @ Sat Jun 19 said:


> Has anyone noticed any quality issues with the sample compression?



That would be my main concern too. Don't get me wrong - I think Apple Lossless is great, probably one of the best forms of audio compression. But there is no getting around that it is compressing the audio files. When a 1GB file is reduced to 312MB, one has to ask what happened to the other 688MB. Useless data? I don't think so.

Personally I would rather have the option to convert to 16bit/44.1gHz using iZotope MBIT dither & SRC than go Apple Lossless for streaming audio files, leaving lossless as a great way to compress an existing mix rather than have no way to return to the original best quality in streaming files.


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## Pzy-Clone (Jun 19, 2010)

Frederick Russ @ Sat Jun 19 said:


> polypx @ Sat Jun 19 said:
> 
> 
> > Has anyone noticed any quality issues with the sample compression?
> ...



Well, just to be clear...the reason DOW ended up at 312MB is becouse there were 50% unused sampled in there....you wont get a compression ratio like that ,its more like 40% or something. 

You can decompress the same files back again using the "collect" samles feature...altho i did not try that yet 

But im also a bit sceptical...but i have not noticed any quality issues whatsoever yet.


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## Dynamitec (Jun 19, 2010)

One thing you have to keep in mind: losless compression of samples results in a much better compression ratio than compressing music. 

It's actually possible to minimize the size of a library between 40-60% with K4 losless compression.

You shouldn't think in musical terms but in terms of information you are going to compress. If you multi sample an instrument, each sample contains much less information than a typical audio file with the same length. The higher the quality of the recording (less noise/information!) the better the compression.

You can do a quick test for yourself: take a 20s piano sample for example and a 20s portion of a song. Compress both with zip.

Back to some of the things mentioned in this thread:



> Now...I’m thinking not only do you get the obvious space benefits, but since dfd always loads a prefixed amount into RAM, you are now loading over 50% more of the sample into ram than the uncompressed version (in this case...or so it seems)...which means, you should be able to reduce the preload buffer setting by half or so...and get the benefits of reduced memory usage with the same streaming capacity as you already had?


Yes, you are right. You can decrease your DFD buffer size in that case! But I wouldn't recommend to decrease it by 50%, because there is a a slightely higher CPU overhead if compression is used. 
Anyway, I never found the CPU consumption due to NCW to be a problem even with instruments that play a lot of voices per note!



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## polypx (Jun 20, 2010)

> > Has anyone noticed any quality issues with the sample compression?
> 
> 
> Guys, what does 'losless' mean - at least if implemented correctly?  There is no audible difference between NCW and WAV. And you can always batch resave NCW back to WAV, which proves that the compression is losless.




Hi Ben,

I know what lossless means.  
But I'm thinking about the realtime decoding in Kontakt.

I've occasionally noticed a slight difference in attacks when using NCW than WAV. But it doesn't seem consistent, and I can't always reproduce it.

So I was curious if anyone else had noticed anything like this.

cheers
Dan


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## Dynamitec (Jun 20, 2010)

Hi Dan,

make sure to test such things (attack, fades, etc) with the same process buffer size (latency). There is a difference how volume changes (like attack, fades, releasses, etc) sound, depending on the buffer size (latency) you use in your sequencer.

Cheers,
Benjamin


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## Pzy-Clone (Jun 20, 2010)

Dynamitec @ Sun Jun 20 said:


> > The naming of samples...can be a problem.
> > Some libraries have stupidly given several samples the same name, typically where there are several mic postitions.
> 
> 
> ...



Well, it works as intended here, mostly...but sometimes i get two sets of folders, one "collected samples" and one mirror location at the same time. And the samples are scattered randomly (or so it seems) amongst them. But i can`t say why or what conditions needs to be present for that to happen, i didnt see any pattern so far... so i will have to mess about some more with it. 

Edit: The details regarding compressed Monolith files are somewhat unclear to me..so i will have to try it out some more first 

Thanx for the info.


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## Stevie (Jun 20, 2010)

polypx @ Sat Jun 19 said:


> Has anyone noticed any quality issues with the sample compression?



Erm, guys, this is LOSSLESS compression, like ZIP or RAR, FLAC, WavPak, TAK... Nothing get's altered! It's just more sophisticated and has some specialized audio compression methods. If ZIP or RAR would change the files inside the archive then the applications inside wouldn't start anymore, since the code is destroyed. All fine, LOSSLESS audio = the good guys.

EDIT: k, sorry, I responded too quickly


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## madbulk (Jun 20, 2010)

midphase @ Sun Jun 20 said:


> I also found that some developers tended to leave very long tails of essentially no signal to boost the size of their libraries and hence appear as if their library was superior to others.



Hellz, I would totally do that, were I clever enough to think it.


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