Which NI plug-in is the lightest weight?

BLG

I just got started with NI (bought an S49) and I'm overwhelmed with all of the software that if comes with. I'll save questions about that for another time. For now, when I add a plug-in to a track my choices are: Komplete Kontrol, Kontakt, Maschine 2, and possibly Massive. Several seem to give me access to the same library of sounds. So let's say I'm going to use 10 tracks with 10 different sounds. Which plug-in would I use to minimize resource usage?

Tony Jones

If you want synth sounds, go with massive. If you want sampled, go with kontakt

tribepop

Ideally, you should be freezing your tracks or bouncing them to audio and then disabling the plug-in to free up resources after you’ve written the parts using those instruments. NI just added the auto-sampler to Maschine which allows you to run a process that creates a multi-sampled instrument of audio files from some piece of hardware or software you have attached. So you can create a multi sampled instruments of your favorite hardware synth or VST patch.

In terms of which plug-in is the lightest, I would probably have to say maybe Massive and FM8. They did port those sound engines over to the Maschine stand-alone and I would imagine those audio algorithms aren’t super complicated compared to something like Serum or Massive X. Kontakt is all sample playback and manipulation so ideally those instruments should be pretty lightweight once loaded into RAM as well. As with anything, pay attention to how many instances you have, what settings are enabled on those instruments (some have an HD mode which uses more resources).

Milos

Reaktor Player, Reaktor Factory Selection and Blocks Base free edition are the lightest weight, memory wise.