I started using GigPerformer a few weeks ago and it’s my first experience in the world of soft-synths.
My machine is a Macbook Pro 3.5Ghz 16GB RAM, running MacOS Mojave
My band’s setlist is extensive and I’ve been working on my project/GigFile, which already has around 100 rackspaces and should grow a little more. At the moment, the size of my gigfile is about 160MB and it takes about 3 minutes to load.
Recently I started to realise that my rackspaces were producing noise. Initially this only happened in the rackspaces where a lot of processing power was required (CPU usage was close to or above 50 per cent) but suddenly they all started producing noise.
In particular, the rackspaces where “session horns pro”(kontakt) was used produced a lot of noise and gave me the feeling that the samples weren’t all loaded immediately when I accessed those rackspaces because after playing a few times on the keys where that instrument was assigned, it seemed to play normally.
I went crazy, not understanding the cause of this problem, reviewing the building of each rackspace, the connections, plugins, effects, everything, trying to find the culprit. I couldn’t figure out what had happened, so I decided to load an older (smaller) gigfile and the noise was gonne.
I then thought that the problem might lie in the size of my GigFile and my machine’s difficulties in dealing with all the rackspaces at the same time, and that it might be a problem related to RAM management, even though I had always been told that 16GB should be more than enough.
Then, I enabeled “predictive loading” with my most recent gigfile and everything was ok, which led me to conclude that it was indeed a problem with my machine handling all the rackspaces at the same time.
I then remembered a tip I found here about reducing the size of samples for kontakt, purging the samples completely and playing only the notes needed and saving them as a new instrument.
I did this with my “Session Horns Pro” library, so that this plugin, which used to take up almost 0.7GB on each racksape it was used on, now only needs around 50 MB, more than 10 times less! Considering that I was using this library in 10 rackspaces, I did this procedure in each of these rackspaces, which was supposed to allow me to reduce the amount of data loaded into RAM by around 6 GB!
After making this adjustment, I saved my Gigfile and restarted GigPerformer without predictive loading. Result: Noise again (and again problems with the “session horn pro” brass sound, choking in the first few seconds as if it was missing samples).
What am I missing here anyway? If I significantly reduced the size of the kontakt library I was using, then that should relieve the RAM and my computer should be able to process my rackspaces without problems, but that’s not what happened.
So I ask:
- Is there any I can find out the total amount of RAM GP is using?
- Is there any way to know how much RAM each individual rackspace is using?
- Isn’t 16 GB of RAM enough to handle a gigfile with a little more than 100 rackspaces (and 160 MB in size)?
- Wouldn’t a machine identical to mine but with 32GB RAM have this problem?
Thanks for your contributions (and sorry for the long post).