Why Audio Stuttering is occurring?

Edu Camargo

Hello people, hope everything is fine and you have had an awesome weekend and an incredible easter. Greetings from Brazil.

I've recently gone through an issue and I needed to post this to the community.

I was producing a music project using sounds from Kontakt 7 and I needed to create tempo changes, basically some rettardandos, but while I was recording, during these tempo changes audio started stuttering.

The instruments in question were the Picked Acoustic Guitar from Kontakt Factory Library 2 exclusively, and also the brass sections that canbe found on Kontakt Factory Library 1 as well.

I have finished now a test projectg to find what was going on. In this test I've used Steven Slate drums 5, Bass from Kontakt Factory Library 2, Alicias Keys, The Picked Acoustic Guitar and the Trumpet Section, Trombone Section and Sax Section from KFL 2.

When I sequenced the acoustic guitar, stutter occurred when playing the note during the tempo transition. When I activated the limiter on the instrument, the stutter stopped.

Then came the brass sections. Stutter occurred when I released the note during the tempo transitions. I've tried enabling the limiter on the instrument, but audio didn't stop stuttering. The solution was to load these brass patches from the Kontakt Factory Library 1. After doing this, stutter was gone for good and I was able to record my performance without audio glitches.

Setup is as follows:

Motherboard Asus Prime H270 Plus;

Intel Core i7-7700';

32 GB DDR RAM;

Dedicated SSDs for system, projects and sound libraries;

Audio interface is Roland's Octa-Capture (UA-1010);

MIDI controller Roland A-88 MKII;

Using latest Kontakt 7 version, 7.9.0;

And also the latest REAPER version, 7.12.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Peace,

Edu Camargo.

LostInFoundation

I would try also to play a little bit with the audio interface settings (sample rate, buffer size,…) in the DAW you are using (or directly in Kontakt, if you use it standalone), to find the right spot for your set up to work flawlessly

Edu Camargo

Thanks @LostInFoundation for your comment. It's funny the fact that this only happened with some instruments from KFL 2. In my case I'm using all the settings from the interface itself, including the buffer size which by the way is adjusted to 128 samples, as it is the optimal solution when recording midi performance.