Take Back Control of Your Memory By Adjusting the Preload Buffer Size

By Adjusting the Preload Buffer Size, Kontakt’s memory usage can be optimized for your specific computer configuration. In this video tutorial, we’ll look at how using the Kontakt Memory Server and adjusting the preload buffer size can give you more control over Kontakt’s memory usage.

In your Instrument Options you can adjust the size of each Sample portion that will be buffered in memory for instant playback. This applies only to Samples that belong to Groups whose Source Module is set to DFD mode.

And if you are running Kontakt on a 32-bit Mac, you are able to access more than 4 GB RAM with Kontakt Memory Server (KMS).

In order to use KMS on your computer, Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) or later needs to be in- stalled, and at least 4 GB of physical RAM must be available. Using KMS also requires administrator privileges. Kontakt will detect the Mac OS X version and the amount of RAM present on your computer automatically. And will display an option to enable KMS. After activating KMS you need to restart Kontakt for the changes to take effect.

Kontakt will automatically set the size of accessible RAM to a value suitable for most cases. You can find the amount of determined accessible RAM in the KMS Options dialog. Kontakt Memory Server is a separate application running in background. As long as the KMS option is enabled, Kontakt will no longer loads samples itself. All running Kontakt instances share the Kontakt Memory Server and can access the samples loaded. The Kontakt Memory Server will boot automatically as soon as you start a Kontakt instance.

In Automatic mode the KMS will keep all samples currently used by Kontakt instances stored. If an Instrument is removed from Kontakt’s rack, samples that are no longer needed will be also removed from the Memory Server’s sample pool. The KMS will automatically shut down when all Kontakt instances are closed.

In Manual mode the KMS does not remove samples from the server when an instrument is removed from Kontakt’s rack or when all Kontakt instances are closed. All samples stay in the memory as long as it is running. This can be helpful when re-opening a project in your host sequencer which is using Kontakt as plug-in and when working with extensive templates of numerous instruments. Loading times are significantly shorter, since the samples are already stored in RAM and do not need to be loaded again.

The KMS is managed via the KMS utility, which allows you to manually purge unused samples if you want to free memory. If you are running out of memory when loading additional Instruments, the server will automatically start to purge samples that are not referenced by any loaded Instrument. The KMS utility appears in the Mac OS X system bar, so you can monitor the amount of RAM used by the server process.

Until next time…now go make some music.