What's new

Impact Soundworks Super Audio Cart

Kent

sleepy member
I love this library (both Cart and Cart PC...and Boy, I guess) but loading a new instance often destabilizes my DAW (Logic X). It's been this way as long as I can remember.

Does anybody else experience this?

@zircon_st have you ever heard of anything like this?
 
We've heard about this from a lot of Logic users and we've been trying to work with Native Instruments to see what's going on. To be clear, there's nothing you can do - in theory - in an NKI that would destabilize a DAW. You can even write infinite loops all day long in KSP and it won't crash. But my guess is that some combination of zone count and modulators used makes Logic think that Kontakt is unresponsive, and the whole thing comes down. This doesn't happen anywhere else.

Could you send an email to [email protected] so we can put you in touch with NI directly? They have tried and failed to reproduce this so I'm hoping if they can work with some users who are having issues, they can solve it.
 
The only truly consistent workaround I've been able to discover is to create a new blank project, import literally everything from the old project, and write from there.

Closing and reopening the new project makes it just as unstable as the others, though. As does, sometimes, working too long? And of course it's a bit of a pain to do this in the first place...

I've been able to capture this image of the error message it sometimes throws right before crashing Logic (and verified in the Console crash logs that, most of the time at least, this is somehow an IO issue.... I get things like:

Crashed Thread: 9 com.apple.audio.IOThread.client

when this sort of error message pops up in Kontakt)
 

Attachments

  • image.png
    image.png
    165 KB · Views: 29
Looping back on this now that my projects have lightened up:

Yepp... the CPU difference between VST and AU in Kontakt 5 disappeared in Kontakt 6 (no matter which host).

Could this be the culprit? Has anybody who had SAC problems in Logic with Kontakt 5 noticed that they went away with Kontakt 6?
 
NI sent us a new private beta for K6 that should help further, based on their investigation of the issue. If you haven't had any luck, please email us and we'll send it to you. (We can't distribute it publicly.)
 
NI sent us a new private beta for K6 that should help further, based on their investigation of the issue. If you haven't had any luck, please email us and we'll send it to you. (We can't distribute it publicly.)
Do you mean we can test-drive a beta of full K6 for the purposes of resolving this issue?
 
@zircon_st I want to echo what others are saying. These are some of my favorite libraries ever used. But right now they are causing me a job-killing nightmare. ISW support is silent.

Mac OS 10.12.6
Logic X 10.4.4
Mac Pro (trash can)

I last used SAC in 2017 in a different studio and just purchased for a project on my home studio. At that time it was using "SuperAudioCart_v1_2_4.nkr"—yes it had performance issues but nothing like what is happening now. This is a fresh install. Patches load just fine in a new project. Save, quit, reload: spinning ball of death for FIVE TO TEN minutes, or a crash altogether. If a project with SAC finishes the spinning ball of death without crashing, patches play fine but this is rare and only on smaller projects. Opening up an old project from 2017 is always a crash. Opening up old projects is a need-to-have at some point in the future, but right now the software is not even working on a fresh new project with freshly loaded patches.

UPDATE: with potential lead to fix, ISW:
I deleted my Kontakt Snapshot folder for SAC that I had imported from my 2017 studio. This temporarily fixed monstrously long spinning ball of death, but still crashed when I tried to import SOME (not all) instrument channels from older projects. Then the issue resumed pretty quickly and I am right back where I started with forever-long spinning balls and crashes. My guess is that ISW needs some work on backward compatibility with patches and snapshots saved with older versions of SAC. This has now caused 1.5 days of troubleshooting when I have deadlines only days away.
 
To be clear, Taylor (our support) emailed both last night and about 20 minutes ago. The issue here is that our hands are completely tied by Native Instruments. SAC itself does not have any bugs here, therefore there is nothing we can change to fix the problem. Kontakt itself has issues, hence why the Kontakt 6 private beta fixed the issues w/ 0 changes on our end.

We are working directly with Dinos Vallianatos (lead Kontakt developer/programmer) providing him with debug information, forwarding customers, etc. That is the most we can possibly do. In our months of correspondence with them about this issue, at no point have they said we can do anything to solve this ourselves... it's entirely in their court.

I completely understand the frustration here, and if I were in your position I would feel the same way. Our tech support agent Taylor has just contacted Dinos again about any updates to the beta, since I believe the last one they sent has expired. In the meantime, if I were in your position and on a deadline, I would consider grabbing something like REAPER (free evaluation) to use temporarily to get MIDI parts rendered to audio and brought back into Logic.
 
UPDATE: with potential lead to fix, ISW:
I deleted my Kontakt Snapshot folder for SAC that I had imported from my 2017 studio. This temporarily fixed monstrously long spinning ball of death, but still crashed when I tried to import SOME (not all) instrument channels from older projects. Then the issue resumed pretty quickly and I am right back where I started with forever-long spinning balls and crashes. My guess is that ISW needs some work on backward compatibility with patches and snapshots saved with older versions of SAC. This has now caused 1.5 days of troubleshooting when I have deadlines only days away.

Hi Lance,

Lead Developer for Super Audio Cart here.

It is not possible for any facility in Kontakt scripting to cause crashes in digital audio workstations. It is a closed ecosystem with a curated and limited set of interactions with the Kontakt engine. The snapshot functionality is also a closed feature that is handled entirely in Kontakt.

All customers who have emailed our support about issues with Super Audio Cart and Logic since the discovery of this issue have been kept updated with full disclosure that this is an issue with Kontakt's instability in its interaction with Logic. The accusation that we've been silent about this is demonstrably false.

As Andrew said, Native Instruments has already repaired the problem in an experimental beta version of Kontakt with confirmed success by our customers using Logic. This is not a problem that is reparable by modifying Super Audio Cart or its code.

If you are using Super Audio Cart on a project, I would also suggest using another DAW to handle the creation of the parts. We understand that you are a professional with deadlines, however this is not something we can do anything about.
 
@neblix @zircon_st Apologies, not my intent to cause a stir. I was indeed in contact with support and, in the interest of transparency, up to the point I posted here I had received two emails from support: one asking about my DAW and the error message, then a simple follow up download of an older .nkr file to test. When I posted here it had been after reporting that the file didn't help, followed by 5 hours of no response. Thank you for following up with clarification about the Kontakt/Logic issue—looking forward to getting the K6 beta.

Again, SAC is one of my favorite libraries and is irreplaceable. The reason I can't simply use another DAW or VI is that I am needing to get into dozens of project files from 2017 using SAC.
 
Again, SAC is one of my favorite libraries and is irreplaceable. The reason I can't simply use another DAW or VI is that I am needing to get into dozens of project files from 2017 using SAC.

When we have the next Kontakt beta available, you will want to replace your current Kontakt plugin file with that of the new one using the same file name. This should allow Logic to load using the new version of Kontakt which should load the old project files just fine. If you install it as a plugin with a different name than your normal Kontakt plugin, Logic will still attempt to load the old one and still crash.

All we ask is for your patience while NI gets back to us.
 
Top Bottom