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Kontakt Question


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Which would take up less RAM in FL Studio?

One Kontakt instance with 4 patches loaded, each routed to a different mixer track,

or...

4 Kontakt instances with 1 patch loaded in each, with each instance routed to a different mixer track?

Or are they equal? I sure hope it's the first one, because the second seems to cost me 1 GB of RAM. Wtf?

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Here's what my own testing in Sonar reveals.

One instance of Kontakt with two large patches: Kontakt says the RAM commitment for the samples is 1.1 GB. The Sonar process (which is Sonar plus Kontakt plus samples) uses, according to Task Manager, 1.46 GB of RAM.

Two instances, each with one large patch (same patches as before): Same RAM commitment for the samples, but Task Manager says Sonar is using 1.52 GB of RAM.

So using an additional instance of Kontakt has an overhead of 0.06 GB (60 MB). It does save some RAM to load all your samples in one instance of Kontakt (probably on the order of 180 MB if you drop from four to one), but the bulk of your RAM commitment is from the samples themselves.

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Shoot. I'm using some pretty big libraries. Neo-Soul Keys, Strawberry Electric, Shreddage, and East West Quantum Leap Stormdrums. :|

If you're running out of memory, bounce or freeze your tracks (whatever FL Studio calls it) and unload the samples. You can save a Kontakt multi with the project so that if you need to unfreeze the track, you can easily reload the samples.

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  • 1 month later...
It turns out that condensing them down from wav files into ncw files work well enough. I also transferred them all to an external hard drive, which I've read makes it slightly less RAM intensive.

Moving a sample to a different drive shouldn't make any difference on the amount of RAM it uses. It may be better or worse for CPU, depending on how slow the drive is compared to the old drive and how many samples were being streamed from disk at once from the old drive. I don't see how the RAM usage would change at all though.

Also, with NCW files, I don't know how Kontakt is coded, but if it reduces RAM usage, then I'd guess they're decompressing on the fly rather than decompressing when the patches are first loaded. If so, again, that might be worse on CPU.

Most likely, your RAM and not your CPU are the limit, so you probably won't notice any issues doing either of those things.

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