# Kontakt disk usage 0, yet flashes red?



## toddkreuz (Nov 30, 2020)

Just wondering about this. Never noticed it before, and its not causing any
audible issues, but its strange.
Kontakt disc usage meter says 0 percent, and doesnt move, yet it flashes red every few seconds.
Anybody know what thats indicating?


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## Stevie (Dec 2, 2020)

Yes, been experiencing this as well. Especially with Spitfire libraries. I think it has something to do with the scripting backend.


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## SLRSoundworks (Jun 30, 2021)

I'm getting this as well, disk meter flashes red but reads 0%. But held notes are very audibly cutting out early. And the samples are fully loaded in RAM anyway, so disk shouldn't be an issue, right? It's just a handful of notes in a given patch too. 

I'm on a 2020 M1 Mac Mini. Hoping that's not the issue. Thought the M1 growing pains would be ironed out by now. This is a very frustrating issue because it renders some patches completely unusable. I've been getting it very consistently on Audio Imperia Areia's string ensemble patch (which is very lightweight RAM-wise) which I use to come up with chord progressions. I'm gonna try some other ensemble patches from other libraries and see what happens.


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## jcrosby (Jun 30, 2021)

SLRSoundworks said:


> I'm getting this as well, disk meter flashes red but reads 0%. But held notes are very audibly cutting out early. And the samples are fully loaded in RAM anyway, so disk shouldn't be an issue, right? It's just a handful of notes in a given patch too.
> 
> I'm on a 2020 M1 Mac Mini. Hoping that's not the issue. Thought the M1 growing pains would be ironed out by now. This is a very frustrating issue because it renders some patches completely unusable. I've been getting it very consistently on Audio Imperia Areia's string ensemble patch (which is very lightweight RAM-wise) which I use to come up with chord progressions. I'm gonna try some other ensemble patches from other libraries and see what happens.


Assuming you're on the current version of Kontakt? I saw this on earlier versions of K6 but haven't seen it quite a while now... (FYI I'm not on an M1 mac. Just wanted to chime in that there was a short-ish period where I saw this regularly pre Kontakt 6.3.2.)


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## thesteelydane (Jun 30, 2021)

This is the oldest known Kontakt bug. It happens when playback reaches a sample loop point. To my knowledge no one has been able to pinpoint the cause, it happens on various systems both Mac and Windows. It particularly happens a lot in Spitfire libs, but they where not able to reliably reproduce it on their end, and NI has never said anything about it.

The only fix I know, apart from restarting Kontakt and hope for the best, is to change the playback mode for the affected groups from DFD to Sampler. Which of course eats up a lot more memory.

It would be great if everyone who experiences this would write NI about it so we could finally get them to acknowledge and fix it.


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## thesteelydane (Jun 30, 2021)

SLRSoundworks said:


> And the samples are fully loaded in RAM anyway


No, only the very beginning of the sample is loaded into RAM, the rest is streamed from the disk, otherwise your library would need as much RAM as it needs disk space. How much of the sample is loaded is determined by Kontakt’s pre-load buffer size. 

This bug has to do with loop points (see my post above).


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## Markus Kohlprath (Jun 30, 2021)

And if I'm not wrong I think it's only happening on mac is it? I had this issue with SCS on my macpro 5,1 but don't have it if I run it on the pc slave with vepro.


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## Stevie (Jul 1, 2021)

Nope, it’s happening on PC as well.


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## EvilDragon (Jul 1, 2021)

Stevie said:


> I think it has something to do with the scripting backend


It's actually more about DFD buffering and especially loop crossfades, from what I can tell.



thesteelydane said:


> It would be great if everyone who experiences this would write NI about it so we could finally get them to acknowledge and fix it.


The bug was acknowledged a long time ago, but has proven elusive to consistently reproduce, which makes fixing it extremely difficult.


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## SLRSoundworks (Jul 1, 2021)

thesteelydane said:


> No, only the very beginning of the sample is loaded into RAM, the rest is streamed from the disk, otherwise your library would need as much RAM as it needs disk space. How much of the sample is loaded is determined by Kontakt’s pre-load buffer size.
> 
> This bug has to do with loop points (see my post above).


Very interesting. I had always assumed all a patch's samples were fully loaded into RAM. Makes sense why disk is so important then. So this is just a random bug we're stuck with for now then? I'm going to try to run Logic in Rosetta x86 mode and see if that helps at all since I have the feeling this may also be related to the M1.


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## thesteelydane (Jul 1, 2021)

SLRSoundworks said:


> Very interesting. I had always assumed all a patch's samples were fully loaded into RAM. Makes sense why disk is so important then. So this is just a random bug we're stuck with for now then? I'm going to try to run Logic in Rosetta x86 mode and see if that helps at all since I have the feeling this may also be related to the M1.


I'm pretty sure it has nothing to do with the M1. The only workaround is to open up Kontakt and change the affected groups to Sampler mode - which will indeed load all the samples into RAM.


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## thesteelydane (Jul 1, 2021)

EvilDragon said:


> The bug was acknowledged a long time ago, but has proven elusive to consistently reproduce, which makes fixing it extremely difficult.


Good to hear it's acknowledged. I really hope it gets fixed soon because many, many users have suffered from it.


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## EvilDragon (Jul 1, 2021)

Without a 100% consistent reproducible case it's unlikely it's going to be fixed any time soon, unfortunately. And the biggest problem is that a patch that showcases issue on one machine, doesn't necessarily reproduce the issue on another machine. And even yet worse, when debugging, internal event timings are different than when running a release version (a consequence of running in debug mode), which makes things yet even more difficult to reproduce.


(By the way, sometimes also changing the DFD buffer size helps, rather than changing groups to Sampler mode.)


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## tcb (Jul 17, 2021)

I am suffering from this bug today too😂


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## Fizzlewig (Jul 17, 2021)

Yep same here, same issue.


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## dts_marin (Sep 3, 2021)

Any news on this?? Incredibly frustrating bug. Some libraries go crazy with DFD usage. Mine doesn't flash red but it fluctuates up to 90%. I've been using Kontakt on HDDs and SSDs on my previous machine with zero issues. On my newer 9900K PC something is wrong with Kontakt DFD. All drives are Evo 860s 1TB NTFS formatted. All energy saving and Windows Defender crap disabled. Still no luck... The last thing to try is to build another Ryzen PC in hopes this one won't have this issue.


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## EvilDragon (Sep 3, 2021)

No news, please read my previous post about why this is far from easy to solve.


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## Satorious (Oct 10, 2021)

Not tried the sampler trick, but had a similar DFD issue with a Spitfire library and changed the preload buffer size (under Options/Memory in the Kontakt config) - the problem seemed to then disappear, but I appreciate every set-up is going to be different.


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## thesteelydane (Oct 10, 2021)

ka00 said:


> I'm having this issue with a Spitfire library. I'm trying the sampler vs DFD trick, and even though I've re-loaded all the samples, Kontakt won't let me change it, stating "this group contains purged samples. Playback mode cannot be changed." Anyone have any ideas on how to get around this warning message?


Sounds like you are trying to change it for groups that aren't actively playing samples, for example an unused mic channel. Make sure to open expert view and see what groups are actually triggered when you play a note (and contain long looped samples). Select all those groups, then "set edit flag for selected groups" before you change their playback method.


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## ka00 (Oct 12, 2021)

thesteelydane said:


> Sounds like you are trying to change it for groups that aren't actively playing samples, for example an unused mic channel. Make sure to open expert view and see what groups are actually triggered when you play a note (and contain long looped samples). Select all those groups, then "set edit flag for selected groups" before you change their playback method.


Thank you! I will try exactly this.


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## El Bura (Dec 26, 2021)

Hey all, I've come across this issue a few times with the VST Kontakt instantiation in Ableton, I'm using a Mac and I've (so far) managed to get around it by switching from using a VST instantiation to using an AU in my Ableton project when this issue occurs. I'm not sure why this would make any difference but may be worth a try for any Mac users that can choose either VST or AU plugins for their DAW. Be mindful though that using VSTs and AUs in the same Ableton project isn't advised by Ableton, I've not seen any issues when doing this however but good to be aware. Cheers


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## Fever Phoenix (Jan 6, 2022)

bumping this thread again, as I just ran into this problem as well with a patch in Spitfire Albion Iceni.. super weird, never experienced this before.. Computer is far from its usual workload..

EDIT: 

allright, fixed! By changing buffer in Kontakt.. weird..


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## jbtproductions (Jan 10, 2022)

This just started happening to me today. Spitfire Tundra. Like others here, changed the instrument preload buffer size (increased it) and that fixed me.

jbt


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## RSK (Jan 10, 2022)

This thread has been super useful. I thought I was the only one who was having this problem.

Spitfire libraries with lowest possible buffer, on an M1 Mac (if anyone is collecting user data).


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## pmcrockett (Jan 10, 2022)

I've encountered this. In my case, it was happening with Spitfire Olafur Arnalds Evolutions. As others have mentioned, going into the edit mode and disabling DFD fixes it.

-however-

I've also found that disabling the onboard convolution reverb fixes it. In OAE's case, it's enough to just drag the reverb slider all the way down because that seems to internally disable the reverb, but you can also bypass it manually in edit mode (Edit Mode > Insert Effects > Conv.). It also seems to fix things if, instead of fully disabling the reverb, you go into the reverb settings and disable latency compensation or set it to 0 ms.

It was about a month ago that I discovered this. I've just now gone back into the library to try to recreate the bug, and now Kontakt isn't doing it at all. Weird. But maybe the info will help someone else.


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## fiction (Jan 10, 2022)

I'm also having this problem in my template from time to time. 

It's usually with SCS but today was also with Aperture Strings. 

Increasing the DFD size or restarting logic usually solves it but sometimes it comes back.


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## jcrosby (Jan 11, 2022)

El Bura said:


> Hey all, I've come across this issue a few times with the VST Kontakt instantiation in Ableton, I'm using a Mac and I've (so far) managed to get around it by switching from using a VST instantiation to using an AU in my Ableton project when this issue occurs. I'm not sure why this would make any difference but may be worth a try for any Mac users that can choose either VST or AU plugins for their DAW. Be mindful though that using VSTs and AUs in the same Ableton project isn't advised by Ableton, I've not seen any issues when doing this however but good to be aware. Cheers


I'm in Logic, the AU version does it too. I also use Live in addition to Logic, I've seen no difference between either plugin format in Live. Both suffer from the same behavior equally, at least IME...


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## thesteelydane (Jun 6, 2022)

If NI buys me a new Mac, I’ll give them my old, on which it is easily reproducible.

Then maybe it can finally get fixed.


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## adaagaard (Jun 8, 2022)

Hi.

For the last few days, I've been trying to find a solution regarding CPU spikes when playing a few specific instruments in Kontakt (especially those which benefit from a sustain pedal...
I wanted to avoid the option of changing the sampler playback source from DFD to Sampler, as this will eat up my precious ram. To my surprise, it was changing the multithread option in Kontakt from off to 8 cores – both in standalone and in my DAW – which made it possible to play more than three notes with the sustain pedal engaged on two of my favorite pianos – the Walker 1955 and 1985 Passionate Grand. 
This solution seems to reduce the CPU usage quite drastically, especially in Logic, when playing the mentioned heavy CPU-hitters in the standalone application.

Earlier, I searched and read a lot about whether I should keep the "Multiprocessor support" option in Kontakt turned off when I instantiate the plug-in in Logic or if it would be more efficient CPU-wise to turn it on.
My impression is that the overall recommendation is to leave it off if you got "Processor Threads" set to automatic (or specified number of cores/threads) in the Logic preferences panel.

For me, and in terms of glitches, dropouts, and CPU spikes, the solution indicates that Logic and Kontakt will benefit from «sharing the load.» 
I have no idea if this will ease the CPU load for others affected by the same issue, but I thought it was worth posting on relevant threads/forums.

I've tested this on my iMac 2012 running OS 10.14.6 (Mojave), Logic 10.5.1, and Kontakt 6.7.1.


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