Reaper problems with Kontakt

[SirBungly]

I have been setting up a very large orchestral template recently (400+ tracks) and have encountered a number of problems with Kontakt - specifically Spitfire Audio's Bernard Herrmann Toolkit. Whenever I load two instances of Kontakt on different tracks and then record arm them both, whenever I play them with my midi keyboard random voices will cut out and it will sound very choppy and glitchy.

This problem, however, doesn't exist when playing back midi recordings.
(Although on a side note, when entering midi into the piano roll, each note will glitch its playback - an odd problem no matter what VST I am using).

Specifically, I am using a higher and lower string patch together and they just won't play nicely together. Most of the template is Play 6 (EW)
When playing multiple Play instances together, they sound fine! Even placing both Spitfire patches in a single instance doesn't solve it.

In detail specs:

Windows 10 Home 64-bit
Intel i7 6700 @ 3.40GHz
16GB RAM @ 1063MHz
All samples running off 1863GB Seagate drive

ASIO4ALL audio device - 48kHz, 16bits - Buffer Size: 512 Samples
Time Critical Thread priority (Behaviour 4 - Default)
Output to Yamaha UW500 USB audio interface _ then to dual KRK Rokit 4 speakers
405 tracks - around 70 instances of Kontakt (however 95% of these are always frozen)
All tracks are frozen unless needed

Kontakt version 5.7.3
Reaper Version v5.62/x64
5 mics loaded - only one articulation not purged

Thanks for any help given. If you need any more details please tell me.
If you can recommend a better way of setting up the template (less Kontakt instances, less tracks, etc.) please do.

Quick update - I have tried moving the offending tracks into a separate project (just 2 tracks - no extra effects) and no luck. Seems like a problem with Reaper and/or kontakt and not the ridiculous size of my project (Reaper is surprisingly efficient!). Help would be even more appreciated now! It's so frustrating!

[ivansc]

Sounds like note stealing to me.
But realistically, trying to do that much work using ASIO4ALL is a huge mistake imo.
Funny thing is that historically it has been Play that had numerous issues over the years, not Kontakt! We also have a couple of N.I. testers on here, so I am pretty sure we can get you sorted out between us.

If Yamaha don't have a current ASIO driver for your interface, you are likely to have problems anyway, as ASIO4ALL is not a true ASIO driver but a bodge to fool Windows into thinking that wave out is actually ASIO.

There are plenty of people on here doing really big orchestral and cinematic projects using reaper and kontakt with little or no issues, so it would be worth getting the driver issue sorted out and at the same time as a safety measure, download and run resplendence.com's latency checker. Run it and reaper together and see what it makes of your system and it will point you in the direction of any system issues you may also have.

Try this and get back to us.

[Allspice]

A few questions, for the sake of troubleshooting:

1. Are you seeing any Hard Drive warnings in the upper corner of your offending Kontakt instances while playing with your MIDI keyboard?

2. When you playback your tracks and have no issues, are those tracks record armed or do they have monitoring enabled? Are both enabled simultaneously?

And that's an idea, could you borrow a friends Audio interface to see if you have this issue with another interface? Just to narrow it down.

[SirBungly]

I get a red 100% disk light turn on when the glitches start happening. Any way to solve this?
Also: I have downloaded and installed new drivers for my interface (I say new, the interface is very old), but can't see the option to use them for Reaper? How would I do this?

Thanks for the quick replies!

[SirBungly]

Originally Posted by Allspice

A few questions, for the sake of troubleshooting:

1. Are you seeing any Hard Drive warnings in the upper corner of your offending Kontakt instances while playing with your MIDI keyboard?

2. When you playback your tracks and have no issues, are those tracks record armed or do they have monitoring enabled? Are both enabled simultaneously?

And that's an idea, could you borrow a friends Audio interface to see if you have this issue with another interface? Just to narrow it down.

I have reduced the number of mics used and increased the pre-loaded buffer size a bit, but no luck. Kontakt seems to be crashing a huge amount as well, any time I try and push it a little bit further than a 'boring' 1 mic patch. My CPU is reasonably perky so this is unusual. Not really wanting to invest in an SSD for my samples at this moment in time. Any other ideas?

[ivansc]

Check in reapers audio device setup menu - options/preferences/audio/device - and make sure you are using the ASIO driver for your device that you just downloaded and installed. It should be listed in the top drop-down menu along with dorect sound, wave. WASAPI etc, but make sure you use the right one i.e. NOT ASIO4ALL again. Once you have that enabled, click on the ASIO configuration window and adjust buffer settings - see what helps and what doesnt. This isnt always entirely straightforward as you can sometimes make the ASIO buffer too big depending on how the driver is written.

Once you have the proper ASIO driver installed and working in reaper, try that latency checker from replendence again and see what it reports with reaper running.

[SirBungly]

Originally Posted by ivansc

Check in reapers audio device setup menu - options/preferences/audio/device - and make sure you are using the ASIO driver for your device that you just downloaded and installed. It should be listed in the top drop-down menu along with dorect sound, wave. WASAPI etc, but make sure you use the right one i.e. NOT ASIO4ALL again. Once you have that enabled, click on the ASIO configuration window and adjust buffer settings - see what helps and what doesnt. This isnt always entirely straightforward as you can sometimes make the ASIO buffer too big depending on how the driver is written.

Once you have the proper ASIO driver installed and working in reaper, try that latency checker from replendence again and see what it reports with reaper running.

It seems like there aren't any drivers for my audio interface, any generic ones which will work better than ASIO4ALL? Also, I've been having another problem where a sample will go missing in Kontakt (or is reported as missing), although batch-resaving doesn't find any missing samples. How do I reduce the 100% disk issue as well? Ironic that Kontakt is the one not working. Amazingly, I've had no issues with Play so far!

[ivansc]

Oh dear. After I posted earlier I had a schmooze round the net and you are right. No decent drivers for your interface that I could find. Shame, but it might be time to consider a decent modern interface with up-to-date drivers.Happily there are plenty out there that dont cost much at all - even some of the sub $100 ones do a good job nowadays.

Hopefully you got some £$£$ from relatives at Xmas?
Re: the 100% disk problem that is more likely either a function of the throughput via the interface causing a bottleneck with queueing sample loads or (grin) your Seagate is starting to act like a Seagate. Semi-serious here, as the seagates have been known to give problems.
So. Seagate provide a free disk checking application that will help find any disk issues if oyu have them. Also, never thought to ask but if you are struggling to pull samples off the disk, it IS at least a 7200rpm disk, isnt it? 5400 might make things even more sluggish.

[SirBungly]

Originally Posted by ivansc

Oh dear. After I posted earlier I had a schmooze round the net and you are right. No decent drivers for your interface that I could find. Shame, but it might be time to consider a decent modern interface with up-to-date drivers.Happily there are plenty out there that dont cost much at all - even some of the sub $100 ones do a good job nowadays.

Hopefully you got some £$£$ from relatives at Xmas?
Re: the 100% disk problem that is more likely either a function of the throughput via the interface causing a bottleneck with queueing sample loads or (grin) your Seagate is starting to act like a Seagate. Semi-serious here, as the seagates have been known to give problems.
So. Seagate provide a free disk checking application that will help find any disk issues if oyu have them. Also, never thought to ask but if you are struggling to pull samples off the disk, it IS at least a 7200rpm disk, isnt it? 5400 might make things even more sluggish.

Thanks for the reply again. Unfortunately all the Xmas money just went into these sample libraries! I'll look around once I've found some more cash. The disk error has (for now) fixed itself. I ran Kontakt as standalone, found no problems, then restarted Reaper like I had so many times before, and it just worked! Very, very strange.

I've also made sure that I'm running 64 bit versions of all my plugins, it should ensure some extra stability.

Thanks for all your help.

[ivansc]

good news but for the long term a newer interface would make your life a lot easier.

And did you ever get round to running that latency checker I suggested? What sort of results did you get?
If it finds anything and it can be fixed that will help your performance in general, not just with reaper and kontakt. Good luck!

[SirBungly]

Originally Posted by ivansc

good news but for the long term a newer interface would make your life a lot easier.

And did you ever get round to running that latency checker I suggested? What sort of results did you get?
If it finds anything and it can be fixed that will help your performance in general, not just with reaper and kontakt. Good luck!

Will do ASAP, thanks.

[cymbals]

Have you tried the WASAPI driver? Latency will likely be worse, but may fix your issue.

[SirBungly]

Originally Posted by ivansc

good news but for the long term a newer interface would make your life a lot easier.

And did you ever get round to running that latency checker I suggested? What sort of results did you get?
If it finds anything and it can be fixed that will help your performance in general, not just with reaper and kontakt. Good luck!

All looks fine to me and my limited knowledge. Currently using the WASAPI drivers as suggested and seem to be achieving reasonably low latency and good performace. What is the best way you have found to measure only Reaper round-trip latency?

__________________________________________________ __________________________________________________ _____
CONCLUSION
__________________________________________________ __________________________________________________ _____
Your system appears to be suitable for handling real-time audio and other tasks without dropouts.
LatencyMon has been analyzing your system for 0:03:53 (h:mm:ss) on all processors.


__________________________________________________ __________________________________________________ _____
MEASURED INTERRUPT TO USER PROCESS LATENCIES
__________________________________________________ __________________________________________________ _____
The interrupt to process latency reflects the measured interval that a usermode process needed to respond to a hardware request from the moment the interrupt service routine started execution. This includes the scheduling and execution of a DPC routine, the signaling of an event and the waking up of a usermode thread from an idle wait state in response to that event.

Highest measured interrupt to process latency (µs): 205.220411
Average measured interrupt to process latency (µs): 2.973935

Highest measured interrupt to DPC latency (µs): 182.985696
Average measured interrupt to DPC latency (µs): 1.019831


__________________________________________________ __________________________________________________ _____
REPORTED ISRs
__________________________________________________ __________________________________________________ _____
Interrupt service routines are routines installed by the OS and device drivers that execute in response to a hardware interrupt signal.

Highest ISR routine execution time (µs): 160.639085
Driver with highest ISR routine execution time: dxgkrnl.sys - DirectX Graphics Kernel, Microsoft Corporation

Highest reported total ISR routine time (%): 0.106425
Driver with highest ISR total time: dxgkrnl.sys - DirectX Graphics Kernel, Microsoft Corporation

Total time spent in ISRs (%) 0.128142

ISR count (execution time <250 µs): 211916
ISR count (execution time 250-500 µs): 0
ISR count (execution time 500-999 µs): 0
ISR count (execution time 1000-1999 µs): 0
ISR count (execution time 2000-3999 µs): 0
ISR count (execution time >=4000 µs): 0


__________________________________________________ __________________________________________________ _____
REPORTED DPCs
__________________________________________________ __________________________________________________ _____
DPC routines are part of the interrupt servicing dispatch mechanism and disable the possibility for a process to utilize the CPU while it is interrupted until the DPC has finished execution.

Highest DPC routine execution time (µs): 321.549296
Driver with highest DPC routine execution time: nvlddmkm.sys - NVIDIA Windows Kernel Mode Driver, Version 388.13 , NVIDIA Corporation

Highest reported total DPC routine time (%): 0.121396
Driver with highest DPC total execution time: Wdf01000.sys - Kernel Mode Driver Framework Runtime, Microsoft Corporation

Total time spent in DPCs (%) 0.252649

DPC count (execution time <250 µs): 1119001
DPC count (execution time 250-500 µs): 0
DPC count (execution time 500-999 µs): 4
DPC count (execution time 1000-1999 µs): 0
DPC count (execution time 2000-3999 µs): 0
DPC count (execution time >=4000 µs): 0


__________________________________________________ __________________________________________________ _____
REPORTED HARD PAGEFAULTS
__________________________________________________ __________________________________________________ _____
Hard pagefaults are events that get triggered by making use of virtual memory that is not resident in RAM but backed by a memory mapped file on disk. The process of resolving the hard pagefault requires reading in the memory from disk while the process is interrupted and blocked from execution.


Process with highest pagefault count: none

Total number of hard pagefaults 0
Hard pagefault count of hardest hit process: 0
Highest hard pagefault resolution time (µs): 0.0
Total time spent in hard pagefaults (%): 0.0
Number of processes hit: 0

[SirBungly]

Any good ways to reduce WASAPI latency (especially from midi devices), it's low but still noticeable. Would a better audio interface improve latency?

[ivansc]

Well Latency checker is happy with your setup, so any improvement you can make on your current latency figures will have to come from an interface that has better ASIO drivers, or indeed drivers full stop.
Whilst you could maybe get better latency from adding more ram, faster cpu, etc., getting an interface with really good ASIO drivers will do more for less money.

I am a spoiled old bugger who got on the RME bandwagon via a couple of really good used buys, but there are many other interfaces from companies like Steinberg, Native Instrument, etc. that will give you good performance.
Hopefully the experts on these interfaces will wade in with recommendations in terms of bang for the buck & reliability. I had several bad experiences with the budget Focusrite interfaces a while back but I gather that they have now gotten their act together on the driver side. Their hardware was always good.
Maybe time to get a paper round? (grin)