Mainstage 3 and Kontakt Player 5 - CPU issues

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Level 1

0 points

Mainstage 3 and Kontakt Player 5 - CPU issues

Hey there!

I am new to Mainstage 3 and I totally love the way it lets musicians focus on making music live. I have spent a great deal of time to optimize the software for my needs and I have come across one issue that I could not solve. Maybe you can help:

I want to use Mainstage mainly for vocal effects and piano. Although I think that the Mainstage pianos are quite nice in their price class I want to use my Galaxy Vintage D piano that runs via Kontakt Player 5 by Native Instruments. Thing now is: When I open up Mainstage and use it solely for vocal effects and at the same time open up Kontakt Player 5 and use it as stand-alone for piano my Macbook Pro faces no problems. CPU is the bottleneck I guess (Intel Core Duo 2) but RAM should be fine (8 GB) and my SSD also improves performance I hope. So, when I open up both softwares separately there are no problems here.

When I try to play my Vintage D piano within Mainstage 3 by creating a software instrument, selecting Kontakt Player 5 and open the Vintage D library Mainstage 3 fails badly. After playing 2 or 3 (!!) tones my CPU crashes and it is impossible to play. Why is that and what can I do here? I mean, opened up separately both softwares work just fine at the same time, but my piano is not included in Mainstage 3 😟 And when I include it my CPU crashes. So there is a huuuuuuuuuge difference in performance I cannot explain. Maybe some of you face similar problems and know what to do? I tried to play aroung with audio settings a little, but I didn't succeed.

Thanks for your support!

MacBook Pro (13-inch Mid 2010), OS X Yosemite (10.10), 8 GB RAM and SSD

Posted on Nov 18, 2014 2:43 AM

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Answer 1

CCTM

Level 6

13,045 points

Nov 18, 2014 3:15 AM in response to bluepian

Hi

You can try to reduce the CPU load in Contact instruments by a number of steps. Try

Turn off any internal Kontact FX, particularly any Convolution type reverbs

Reduce the polyphony of the instrument

CCT

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Answer 2

bluepian Author

Level 1

0 points

Nov 18, 2014 3:39 AM in response to CCTM

Thanks for you quick answer! I am thankful for your help. I tried the above, but there is no great effect here. Now I can play 4 tones before it crashes 😀 What I simply don't get is that I can use both instruments separately (Vintage D even with Kontakt FX like reverb and high polyphony!) and everything works totally fine. In Mainstage I am so far away from any stable setting and that makes me wonder. I assume this has to do something with how CPU is used or divided up between software. Or the integration of Kontakt 5 is absolutely bad. Or I am making mistakes in my set-up. I hope to receive more input and thanks again for helping me!

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Answer 3

CCTM

Level 6

13,045 points

Nov 19, 2014 6:19 AM in response to bluepian

Hi

What are your Audio I/O Buffer Preferences set to ( including the Advanced ones)? Have you tried upping the buffer etc?

Do you have any other Kontakt libraries that you can try to compare performance over the Galaxy?

I also note that you are Running Yosemite OS? I think that K5 Player may not be fully compatible?

CCT

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Answer 4

Nov 21, 2014 12:15 AM in response to CCTM

I had the same problem when I started to use mainstage. That was with mainstage 2 And Kontakt but know I use version 3.

I had a lot of different patches with kontakt and it crashed all the time, but I started to use kontakt as a standalone player and created external instrument in mainstage and controlled it with program change with a instrument bank in kontakt.

I don't know why it crashed but it works fine this way since then. Been using it for 3 years.

Hope it works out!

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Answer 5

Nov 26, 2014 7:18 AM in response to bluepian

...very important: disable multicore support within kontakt (preferences)!...

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Answer 6

bluepian Author

Level 1

0 points

Nov 29, 2014 6:16 AM in response to danielfromeskilstuna

Thanks for all your help. I tried all of your ideas and I can now state that CPU or buffer size doesn't seem to have any great effect. When I increase buffers etc. problem is all the same. I can't see any improvements here. I would be interested in knowing more about the external instruments solution. That seems to be interesting for me too, since Kontakt in stand-Alone and MainStage in stand-alone work fine together. Very strange thing though 🙂

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Answer 7

aerol

Level 3

555 points

Dec 1, 2014 8:59 PM in response to bluepian

Try disabling the multi-processor support in the Kontakt plug-in as suggested above. Let us know if that helps.

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Answer 8

dmbono

Level 1

98 points

Dec 18, 2014 7:55 PM in response to aerol

I initially reproduced the same problem as bluepian was having. I disabled multicore support in the Kontakt track in MS3 and the CPU load stayed much more reasonable.

Definitely seems like a compatibility issue between MS3 and K5. The workaround is simple enough.

Good luck.

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Answer 9

Zayph0d

Level 1

4 points

Jan 13, 2015 9:46 PM in response to bluepian

I've been hunting all over the web to find a solution for this issue of Kontakt in MainStage, but I have found nothing so far. I would like to add some of my experience to this thread to maybe define the problem further.

I have loaded up Kontakt 5 as an input for a single patch in an empty concert in MS. The Kontakt 5 multi uses Scarbee A-200 and Mark I layered on the same midi channel. If I play 4 or 5 notes with the sustain down, my cpu meter in MS goes up to 100% - sound crackles and drops out. Conversely, cpu usage in activity monitor shows only 40%. MS memory indicator stays in a range lower than 1/4. Additionally, I verified that multi processor support was turned off in Kontakt, as it is not recommended when in use with a host application.

Now, when I switch to Kontakt 5 as a Standalone and load the exact same multi as I used before, things are very different. In this mode, I can use the sustain pedal and hold down as many keys as possible with my forearm and run my hands up and down the keyboard with the resulting cpu load only being about 25-30%.

Finally, when I try loading Kontakt 5 in Logic Pro X and used the same multi. The result was better than MS, with cpu monitor going to about 75% when holding the pedal and pressing as many notes as possible. This is strange, since the cpu usage in Logic should be much higher than MainStage, yet MS is still the bigger hog.

In all instances, latency is set to 64 samples, and I have only safari open, to compose this message. I have been working on this for several hours over the last two days - My wife and kids need me to come out of my cave and join them, so I have to move on, but I really hope someone can shed some light on this, as I am at a complete loss for how to get this to work properly. When so many thousands of dollars are invested into a setup, it's really disappointing when it doesn't work.

Regards,

Macbook Pro

2.3 GHz Core i7

8GB RAM

OS X 10.9.5

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Answer 10

dmbmke

Level 1

0 points

Jan 25, 2015 7:45 PM in response to Zayph0d

Does MainStage 3.1 seem to help with this issue? All of my machines are in a theater production right now so I can't update until after closing.

I run Alicia's Keys in Kontakt Player. Anyone running a similar setup?

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Answer 11

Feb 4, 2015 7:02 AM in response to dmbmke

3.1 is much worse for cpu usage with kontakt. do not update yet

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