Every time I try to use Native Instruments Session Horns plug-in, my gigfile gets unstable. Typically what happens is that when I switch away from the Horns plugin GP freezes and I have to force quit. This doesn’t happen every time but it’s not unusual. If I remove the Horns rackspace I don’t have any issues.
This has happened now is a few gigfiles and so I just can’t have the NI Horns in any gigfile that I have to rely on.
I’ve got a reasonable MacBook Pro, with 8GB RAM and a 2.9GHz I7. I hate to give up on the Horns plugin as I like it and it’s paid for.
Does anyone have any thoughts on how I can make the plug-in more stable?
Set preferences in Kontakt engine to strict so the note-stealing algorithm will kick in when CPU is somewhat high. Like David said, make sure you have enough RAM.
Thanks for the replies. I am using the latest version of Kontakt. When I load the Session Horns, either via GP or using the NI player, the RAM usage jumps up 1.5GB.
This seems huge to me. Does it make sense? My heaviest other plug-in is the Garritan CFX Grand and even at max resource usage it comes in at about 1.1 GB.
However I still have plenty of headroom in my RAM usage even with both of these plugins loaded. And the problem appears to show up after I’ve switched to and from the Kontakt plugin a couple of times (hard to be certain of this).
In Kontakt you have the option to purge samples.
Just load your instruments and play what you normally play.
Then use the option to purge unused samples (update sample pool) and the RAM usage will decrease.
This is documented in the Kontakt User Guide.
Thanks for the reply. I’ve seen the documentation on purging samples. However, it appears that that is only for the duration of the session and the next time you load the instrument you get the full footprint again.
OK this is the reason:
The state of a plugin with all informations about sound and loaded samples is stored within the VST Host.
Saving a preset is good to have a backup when you have to restore a sound.
For examnple: You change a sound in a plugin and save a preset.
Then you change another parameter - no preset saved.
Then you save the gig,
When you reload the gig the last save state is restored and not the saved data in a preset.
This is specified in the VST guidelines.
I am sure when you update the sample pool in Kontakt, save your instrument (as backup) and save the gig, all is working fine.
No, as turning off the predictive loading worked, I stopped there. I’m glad to here that saving the state of the NI session will cause the memory savings of purging to persist.
I’m not sure what you are referring to here. By ‘this’, are you talking about a purged preset in Session Horns?
In any case, I had predictive loading turned on for other reasons that are no longer relevant. For my main gigfile I don’t need it anymore. If I do need it again I’ll continue troubleshooting the Session Horns plugin (unless, of course, I’m using a different horns plugin at that time.)
I find Session Horns a resource hog, and that’s with 16Gb of memory, so use alternative brass libraries that have a lower memory footprint. In order to reduce memory usage I purge the samples, then play just the notes applicable to that song. This gives me very lower memory usage per instance.
I am sorry to pull up this old thread. But quick question:
If I purge samples in Kontakt and then save the Gig file, the next time I open the Gig file will it use the purged version of the instrument (as the saved state)? (I think Paul was saying this above, but then the discussion got mixed with a Predictive Loading discussion, so it was not so clear).