# Play 6 RAM usage starts very high then drops off gradually, sounds also cutting out



## alir1296 (Apr 23, 2020)

Hi guys,

I am a student and recently signed up for the East West composer cloud X stay at home deal. I am on a Dell laptop with an Intel Core i7-10510U, 16GB (15.8 Usable) RAM and a 64bit operating system. I write a lot of film music and am using East West's Hollywood Orchestra Gold libraries as well as the Gold solo violin, Gold harp, Gold bosendorfer piano and the Gold X Hollywood choir. I am also using 3 instances of Kontakt with Albion One strings and Albion One Darwin Percussion as well as 1 of Cinesamples' Tina Guo Legato Cello. I am also using Reaper v6.05/x64. The project I am currently doing has 61 tracks with 41 instances of Play 6. Each one has around 4 around articulations loaded. 

I am having several problems:

Firstly,
When I load up my project, it loads around 9,100 MB worth of samples (as shown in the screenshot below from my task manager (picture 1)). In this example, Google Chrome is using 897 MB, then windows defender is using 127 MB, the rest after that are all under 100 MB as you can see. I do not see how this adds up to 15.8 GB, maybe around 12 but I don't see how it can be more than that. There is also a screenshot of the resource monitor (picture 2) though I do not understand everything on there fully.

Secondly,
As I leave Reaper running in the background, and over the course of writing this thread, the RAM usage has dropped to 1,800 MB (picture 3), meaning I can now go and manually load in the articulations for the other 37 tracks. Why is this happening and and why does it have to load in the 9.1 GB at the start?

Thirdly,
When I am playing a project (when it is only using around 2GB of RAM), if I do not play a section of it for a while, when I come back to try and play it the sound is intermittent and cuts out very frequently. However, after playing it a few times and soloing different sections it plays normally, but a few bars later I run into the same problem. Is this because it hasn't loaded enough samples into the RAM?

If anyone could help me to solve these problems or have any suggestions of what I could do, I would be immensely grateful.

Thanks,
Alistair


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## Jeremy Spencer (Apr 27, 2020)

For starters, Win 10 is gobbling up 4GB. Two other questions....

1) Are you running the libraries from a dedicated sample drive (not the drive where Windows resides)?

2) Are you using a dedicated audio interface?


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## alir1296 (Apr 27, 2020)

Hi, thanks for the reply!
Bit of a newbie with the audio tech but:
I'm not using anything external (hardware wise), so,
1) I am running the libraries from the SSD on my laptop - which is a: 512GB M.2 PCIe NVMe Solid State Drive 
2) I'm just using headphones plugged into the audio jack of my laptop.


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## Jeremy Spencer (Apr 27, 2020)

Those are both factors that typically cause audio dropouts, etc. I highly recommend at least trying an interface (if possible) to see if it makes a difference (you really need one anyways to handle latency). And it’s good practice to keep samples on their own external drive. That’s a fairly big track count.


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## alir1296 (Apr 28, 2020)

Wolfie2112 said:


> Those are both factors that typically cause audio dropouts, etc. I highly recommend at least trying an interface (if possible) to see if it makes a difference (you really need one anyways to handle latency). And it’s good practice to keep samples on their own external drive. That’s a fairly big track count.


Ok I'll look into that. Thanks a lot!


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