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Yes, it should. That's certainly the way it worked when Kontakt 4 was current and I last did this, and it's what the documentation indicates. If it doesn't work, I'd be interested to know why.

You indicated that you have tried it but got confused about the demo mode. Did you authorize your library? Perhaps you should go down that path again and let us know what's going on.

Of course, even if it does work, there's a good chance this will not solve your audio dropout problem (not to be too much of a downer or anything).

By the way, simpler question: have you updated your Vintage D library to the latest version? I think 1.1.1 ships but you can upgrade to 1.2 or something.

As gvfarns already replied - yes, just download Kontakt 5 from their website and use it. All you need is its Player function and that is free.

I don't know the root cause of your problem, but as I said earlier, the fact that it develops after 30 minutes strongly suggests it a RAM management problem. i.e. your RAM is apparently getting used up and is not getting freed/reused as it should. Then eventually the operating system may page-out (write part of the RAM back to a disc drive to free up RAM space for more/new samples to be read from the disc). If the operating system is paging-out while new samples are trying to be read then you may get an audio drop-out if the new samples can not be read into RAM soon enough.

We are trying to help you but you don't supply information that would help us do that.

1) What is the size of your audio buffer (number of samples)? Increasing the size of the buffer provides more time for the samples to be read into RAM and could stop the problem. But if the buffer is set too big you will get noticeable latency so that may or may not be a useable solution.

2) Are you paging-out? Start the Activity Monitor program and look. It will take about 15 seconds of your effort to do that. Check the # of page-outs when you start using the Vintage D (it will probably be 0) and then again after the audio dropouts begin.

If you are having a RAM management problem there are multiple possible causes. You are running Leopard (OS X 10.5) which is 4 generations behind the current Mac OS (Mountain Lion OS X 10.8). It seems unlikely but there could be memory management issues between it and versions of Kontakt (4 or 5) produced long after it debuted. (Memory management tends to get more sophisticated in new OS versions which support mixed 32-bit and 64-bit OS kernels and applications, and new apps don't always fully test compatibility with older OS versions.) There are other possible causes, but it serves no purpose to speculate further.

If you do decide to buy a new iMac and an external drive, consider an SSD with a USB 3 interface. OWC has external 2.5" drive enclosures with USB 3 for $35, or FW800/USB3 for $67.50. A Samsung 840 SSD 256 GB drive is about $180. You don't need something that fast for the Vintage D, but if you ever go to Ivory II it is advantageous.

Why is that when i have 4 GB of memory installed and nothing else running in the background except KP4 and the Vintage D.


The external drive i have is USB 3 but unfortunately the Macbook only supports USB 2. Are you saying i could use the same external USB 3 drive on the new iMac without the need for buying a drive with FW ports, would this speed be sufficient for the Vintage D ?

Sorry I'm fairly new to the digital domain.

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quote=gvfarnsquote

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By the way, simpler question: have you updated your Vintage D library to the latest version? I think 1.1.1 ships but you can upgrade to 1.2 or something.

Good question. I noticed being a registered NI user there is an option in Service Center to upgrade KP to version 4.2.4. There is also an option to upgrade the G2 and Vintage D Libraries by simply hitting the download button. Has anyone here done this ? and what are the benefits and additional features in upgrading both the KP 4, G2 and Vintage D Libraries ?

You have a lot of stuff running in the background, you just don't realize it. Look in Activity Monitor and you will see. The OS is using a lot of RAM and programs (Kontakt, etc.) aren't designed to simply grab all unused memory and reserve it just for themselves. Memory management in modern operating systems is very complex. The sample set in the Vintage D is about 5 GB, and I believe they are compressed on the disc (although I can't find absolute conformation of that) and so can occupy much more RAM than that.

Is there some reason you haven't used the Activity Monitor and answered the question about paging-out. I've asked multiple times and quite frankly I'm about done trying to help you because you won't answer the simplest question that would shed light on your problem. I don't get it.



Yes. USB 3 is MUCH faster than firewire 800.

You absolutely need to upgrade Vintage D. There are bugs in the original release. There is no need to upgrade KP 4 (but no harm in doing it) when you can upgrade to KP 5 for free. Why haven't you done that?

Isn't it the case that the amount of RAM used is governed not directly by the size of the library, but instead, by the NUMBER of samples and the Kontakt pre-load size? (and the pre-load size, at least on Windows, appears to be constrained to a maximum of 240kB per channel = 480kB for a stereo sample)

I know that the operating system dynamically caches (using the file system cache, at least on Windows) the after-pre-load portion of the samples as the library is played, but the memory that is used for that caching would be released when required. So, I don't believe that this caching would "take up memory" - it is simply using the available memory at the time.
EDIT: On second thoughts, I suppose that if the file system cache is NOT downsized straight away when required, paging could still occur.

Does this match your understanding?

Greg.

Greg:

I don't want to speculate on the specifics of what may or may not be happening with Kontakt and Leopard (a 4-generation old Mac OS the OP is using). You would have to be a member of the Kontakt programming team to know how it is designed. It is enough to know that if it is paging-out to the disc when the drop-outs occur, that is probably causing the drop-outs. I play Kontakt for hours with 8 GB of RAM and it never pages-out and there are no drop-outs.

In general, to try to answer your question generally, on a Mac there is active and inactive RAM. Active RAM is used by the system and apps. When there is data in active RAM that the app is no longer using it becomes classified as Inactive RAM. When more active RAM is needed the inactive RAM is swapped out if the app that was using it is still open.

I can play Vintage D for hours on a 2Gb Ram, 6 year old laptop with an old dual core processor, and it will not drop out. Granted it's at the limit of RAM space and when resuming from sleep that sometimes screws it up.

If the OP thinks that changing to a firewire/USB 3 drive will help, he will be disappointed.

Macy:
Ok. I just know that on Windows, it definitely relies on the file system cache for caching that portion of the sample that occurs after the pre-load portion. I know this because when I clear the file system cache, and hold a note for a long time, it re-loads that later portion of the sample from disk. If I don't clear the file system cache, playing the same note twice, and holding it for a long time, does NOT result in any disk activity the second time it is played.

So, given that it is only using the file system cache for the later portion of the samples, it seemed logical to me that this memory would be freed up if an application really did attempt to allocate some memory proper. (but as I later edited, it's still possible that this doesn't happen immediately)

I realise that the Mac design could be totally different, in any case.

Yes, agreed, if there is paging that occurs when the dropouts occur, of course that would be a likely cause.

Greg.

Yep, that is what I said. The Inactive RAM does not get paged-out until more active RAM is needed. Otherwise the inactive RAM simply remains filled with the previous data. So if the application needs that data again, it will become active RAM again, without reading the disc.

I'm confused now. To me, "Inactive RAM" is memory for which the data is no longer required. That memory is now available for anything - the same application, or another application. I thought that "Inactive RAM" would NEVER be paged out, because the data in that memory is not needed any more. I thought only "active" RAM would ever be paged out - paging saves the contents of memory to disk, so that that same block of RAM can be used for something else. When the paged out memory is required again, it is again loaded into RAM somewhere.

If you're saying that there is a distinction between "Inactive RAM" and memory that has been deallocated completely, then that's a subtlety I was not aware occurred.

Greg.

sulli: You terminology is not quite right (active/inactive), but you have the concept down correctly ... at least for the heap space: Unused memory will not be paged out. What would be the point? After all, heap space is just memory used by a process (or shared by multiple processes). If the process(es) have exited, the content of the memory it/they formerly owned is pure junk which cannot be used for any purpose. So there's no need to page it out. Instead, the memory can be reallocated as needed.

But in the disk buffer cache things are a bit different. Any disk reads or writes coming into the buffer cache will stay there, possibly for a long time. Even if the process(es) that fetched from (or wrote to) a file that is resident in the buffer cache have terminated, the cache content remains valid. So, a new process can open a file whose contents are already resident in the buffer cache ... and the cached content can be used instead of fetching from disk.

I don't think any of the buffer cache ever gets paged out. What would be the point? If space is needed in the buffer cache for new disk reads/write and none is available, some of the existing content can either be (a) discarded if it is not "dirty", or (b) copied to the disk file(s) to which it belongs, if it is "dirty". Either way, this frees up some buffer cache space. No need to swap/page it at all.

This is my understanding of Unix, and so it should apply to the Mac. It might be partly or substantially true for Windows, too ... not sure. But the OP has a Mac, so ...

Like I said I didn't really want to go into this because the terminology is confusing, the Mac is not like a PC, and even though the Mac uses Unix the terminology is a little different between them too.

On a Mac:

Wired RAM - is memory that is used by the OS and never paged-out and never made inactive.

Active RAM - is memory that is currently in use by a currently active application. It is never paged-out, but it can be made inactive RAM.

Free RAM - RAM that has not been used yet.

Inactive RAM - is memory that is NOT currently in use but was in use by a currently active application or the OS. It is data kept in RAM so that if a current application wants the data again it is already in RAM and doesn't need to be read from the disc again. BUT if the current application, or the system, needs more Active RAM that exceeds the available Free RAM (the amount of RAM the OS determines must remain free) then Inactive RAM is paged-out to the disc.

Data is not "deallocated completely" from inactive RAM until its application quits or the RAM was paged-out to make additional active RAM. That way any current app can get the data again that it has previously read as long as it wasn't paged-out.

OK?

This is being addressed in a separate thread here.

Macy: Thankyou! Much much better. I have done a bit of Googling as well, and it is all becoming clear. All those terms are new to me.

I was thinking that the application had taken some action to make Active RAM become Inactive RAM, such as deallocating virtual memory. The only "action" that is taken is INACTION. The OS deems those pages of memory as good candidates for swapping out simply because the application has not used those pages for a while!

A couple of points though:
1. I assume Free Memory could also be memory that was in use, but has now become free, due for example to an application explicitly deallocating virtual memory, or to the application closing. (agreed?)

2. This statement of yours does not seem to be quite right:


IMHO it is invalid to refer to the file system cache as "Inactive RAM", because pages that the OS has used to cache disk reads would NEVER be paged out - they would simply be removed from the cache and allowed to be allocated. (presumably entering the Active state at the outset if they are to be used immediately, or being marked as Free) I.e - it doesn't make sense to write the data out to the page file, because the same data is already in the sample file from which it was read. ;^)

I know we haven't yet determined whether the file system cache is used for Kontakt on a Mac.

Greg.

In the Unixes, the file system cache is used for all file accesses. (To bypass it would require a system hack.)

MacMacMac: I do not think that is correct. It is possible to do direct i/o to files which bypasses the cache. (and I don't mean raw i/o to the disk - it is still file level i/o)

Greg.