Spitfire Player, is it the Player or the Libraries?

[BasariStudios]

I own over 30 high end Orchestral Sample Libraries, Kontakt 5, 6, Play, Synchron, VI, Sine
and SFA Player, so far the SFA Player is the Longest to Load any Patch or a Cubase Project,
its just ridiculous.
Am i the only one or???

Thanks

 

[colony nofi]

What SFA products specifically, and compared to which Konstantin products?
There’s lots at play.
However - having done loads of testing for read behaviours of a few different samplers recently, Spitfire‘s sampler reads data off the disk much quicker than Kontakt does in most situations. Perhaps its just loading a lot more data / there’s more depth to the libraries (either RR’s, mics, dynamic layers etc etc)

This is not as simple as just saying it takes longer to load.

 

[BasariStudios]

What SFA products specifically, and compared to which Konstantin products?

Abbey Road One and BBC SO Pro...Comparing it to Metropolis Ark 1, JXL Brass,
EW HSD, VSL Dimension and Synchron Strings Pro, Jaeger and few others.

 

[Judd]

You're not the only one. I'm on Win10 and the Spitfire Plugin only reads my NVME disk at a top speed around 230MB a sec (BBCSO Pro) where Kontakt reads closer to 450MB. Plus Kontakt remembers my settings on load. On my computer the custom block size on the Spitfire Plugin is ignored when loading a new instance or opening a project, making RAM usage much higher than it needs to be and taking even longer to load(I already notified Spitfire about it.)

 

[dylanmixer]

It's the opposite for me. I have to wait for Kontakt libraries to load, while I can open the BBC plugin and play pretty much immediately.

Check your buffer and preload size settings on the SFA player, make sure it's "optimized" in the Spitfire app, and make sure your virus protection is set to exclude that folder.

If you're running off an m.2, most likely you can have those preload/ buffer settings set pretty low since your hard drive can stream files faster.

 

[Judd]

Yeah, I've optimized and lowered the buffer to 30,000 and preload size to 9000 but it's acts the same. The weird part is if I increase the preload buffer by 1 (9001 to 9002. I called it the block size above oops.) my RAM usage drops by about third. But I have to do this every time I load a project or start a new instance of the plugin. My guess is it's a bug in windows. I was hoping the new update would fix it but I wasn't that lucky. If you've got any other advice I would love to hear it. Thank you.

 

[Yogevs]

Looks like it's the player

 

[BasariStudios]

Looks like it's the player

Of course its the Player.

 

[colony nofi]

You're not the only one. I'm on Win10 and the Spitfire Plugin only reads my NVME disk at a top speed around 230MB a sec (BBCSO Pro) where Kontakt reads closer to 450MB. Plus Kontakt remembers my settings on load. On my computer the custom block size on the Spitfire Plugin is ignored when loading a new instance or opening a project, making RAM usage much higher than it needs to be and taking even longer to load(I already notified Spitfire about it.)

Kontakt reads closer to 450MB/s?
How did you test that / see that speed? I’ve never seen Kontakt get that high before - but I also haven’t (of course) tested all drives.

So - for a standard SATA3 SSD, I see Kontakt reading around 120MB/S Under normal circumstances and Spitfire reading above 200. On a thunderbolt 3 drive (which benches up to 900MB/s - but of course that depends on the block size being read) I see very very similar numbers. Indeed, looking at the figures in ATTO, it can do much faster than 200MB/s at 128k block size - but still Kontakt reads at 120-150MB/s
I have some pretty amazing U.2 drives for another project that I‘m looking forward to benching in Kontakt as well.

@BasariStudios I’m not 100% sure its the player. We need to find out how MUCH data is being read in order to figure out if it is slow - and if it is, why it appears slower on your system than others? (It is somewhat interesting that loads of different people show quite different performance for the spitfire sampler vs Kontakt vs Sine .... there seems to be no standard pecking order.

 

[Wlad]

Just a little tip for those who don't know or are not aware...
When dealing with sample libraries and DAWs, you should always have your anti-virus software turned off. The thing is that anti-virus is scanning your sample libraries upon launch and thus it takes a lot longer for them to open.

 

[Judd]

Kontakt reads closer to 450MB/s?
How did you test that / see that speed? I’ve never seen Kontakt get that high before - but I also haven’t (of course) tested all drives.

So - for a standard SATA3 SSD, I see Kontakt reading around 120MB/S Under normal circumstances and Spitfire reading above 200. On a thunderbolt 3 drive (which benches up to 900MB/s - but of course that depends on the block size being read) I see very very similar numbers. Indeed, looking at the figures in ATTO, it can do much faster than 200MB/s at 128k block size - but still Kontakt reads at 120-150MB/s
I have some pretty amazing U.2 drives for another project that I‘m looking forward to benching in Kontakt as well.

@BasariStudios I’m not 100% sure its the player. We need to find out how MUCH data is being read in order to figure out if it is slow - and if it is, why it appears slower on your system than others? (It is somewhat interesting that loads of different people show quite different performance for the spitfire sampler vs Kontakt vs Sine .... there seems to be no standard pecking order.

I got the speed just by looking at disk access in Windows Task Manager. The drive those synths are on is a Samsung 970 Pro NVME, it's top speed is supposedly 3500MB/s. Have a good day dude.

 

[Lisa Mueller]

I can confirm that the SA-player is the weakest link of all major plugins I use. Kontakt is my favorite as I haven't had any problems since years. Sine is sometimes a problem, but it did improve a lot since release, so I am hopeful! Play is not as flexible as Kontakt but it doesn't create problems which is ok. SA is definitively my least favorite sample player. It doesn't do anything special (as Sine) and it is the least stable. For future purchases, this will be a deciding factor to me.

 

[dylanmixer]

I mostly prefer SFA and Sine libraries now since they both have resizable GUIs, and Kontakt is teeny tiny on my 4k monitor. However I will agree SFA is the weakest of the bunch in pure functionality. Hoping they continue to optimize and improve. I heard a rumor that they were going to have a major redesign soon. Don't know how true that is though.

 

[curtisschweitzer]

I can confirm that the SA-player is the weakest link of all major plugins I use. Kontakt is my favorite as I haven't had any problems since years. Sine is sometimes a problem, but it did improve a lot since release, so I am hopeful! Play is not as flexible as Kontakt but it doesn't create problems which is ok. SA is definitively my least favorite sample player. It doesn't do anything special (as Sine) and it is the least stable. For future purchases, this will be a deciding factor to me.

Just to add to the anecdata-- I have exactly the opposite experience. I have problems with a multitude of Kontakt libraries (and have since v4) and very rarely on other players-- excluding SINE, which I still feel has some teething issues. SFA, PLAY, etc.-- all seem to work perfectly well and rarely cause problems.

 

[Lisa Mueller]

Just to add to the anecdata-- I have exactly the opposite experience. I have problems with a multitude of Kontakt libraries (and have since v4) and very rarely on other players-- excluding SINE, which I still feel has some teething issues. SFA, PLAY, etc.-- all seem to work perfectly well and rarely cause problems.

As I said, I don't have issues with Play. I use Kontakt in Cubase and VEpro and there was no trouble worth speaking of. Sine does still have its share of problems in my setup, but not nearly as many as SA in the current version! And I also consider the fact that Sine is a LOT newer and has already adressed most of its stability problems where SA didn't in spite of multiple reports. Now, there are mostly problems with Sine standalone left and I miss a number of features from Capsule dearly ...

 

[BasariStudios]

Gotta get back to this. I can basically confirm and guarantee that
this is the slowest loading Player, no matter which, i own about
6 Libraries in this Player. All of them set to NO PRESET on start up.
Still the same, empty instance takes forever to load.

 

[cqd]

You're on windows are you?.. yeah, it sucks..

 

[BasariStudios]

You're on windows are you?.. yeah, it sucks..

Yes on Windows 10...problem is...NOTHING else sucks. LOL