Performance issues with Maschine+ and a small 3d-party library + questions

krisbg

Hello,
I just received a brand new Maschine+ and tried to play a 3d-party Kontakt library, but having issues with high CPU usage (70+ %) and audio drop-outs even at low polyphony - 2-3 notes played together. At higher polyphony it might clog the CPU totally. The library in question is "Deepflight 2" - sampled best Roland D50 sounds. It seems to have been developed for Kontakt 5.5 and all patches come with DFD option used. I tried to change to "Sampler" and with that option there is an improvement in the low polyphony hiccups, but again, if you hold up to 10 notes, it starts cracking, and anything on top of that creates a total CPU mashup with terrible grinding. Some patches behave better, and with some like "Analog Heaven", which is very close to the main lead in "Stripped" by Depeche Mode, even 2-3 notes are enough to start the dropouts in DFD mode. That patch takes around 40 MB of uncompressed WAVs on the disc, so I would say it is not very big, and should fit well within the capabilities of the M+ hardware. At the end of the day all issues were fixed by changing the mode from DFD to Sampler AND removing the Ladder filter, which was configured on the offending instrument, without doing actually anything. Moving to Sampler fixed the small hiccups and removing the ladder fixed the 10+ voices disaster - now I can play as many voices as I can play in succession and still not issues.

There are some questions left though:

• Is this ladder filter behavior normal? Why does it kill the CPU of Maschine+?
• Is it normal to have DFD perform so badly even with a small library (40 MB uncompressed WAVs in total)?
• Could I improve the DFD behavior by using a faster SD card than the factory one?
• Is there a way to switch between DFD and Sampler directly in Machine+? I didn't find one and had to re-save the patches in Kontakt VST, but it would be tedious to do it for the whole library.
• Is there a way to remove effects (e.g. ladder filter) from Kontakt instruments directly in Maschine+?
• Why re-saved patches were readable in M+ Kontakt only when converted with Kontakt 6, while converting them with Kontakt 7 was causing an error message in M+ that Kontakt could not be loaded?

D-One

I only know some answers:

Generally, Kontakt instruments have to be optimized to run on an M+, you found one issue, there's probably many others. Hence why only selected instruments officially work. I'd report that DFD thing to support anyway.

Could I improve the DFD behavior by using a faster SD card than the factory one?

Possibly, but considering the severity of the issues you described, I doubt it will make a significant difference.

Regardless, you should buy a decent SD Card, the stock one is terrible… Those micro SD's with adapters are prone to issues and are really slow, like 25 MB/s. Get something like a full-size Sandisk Extreme Pro or similar, these are dirt cheap noaways. Dont buy cards much faster than around 100 MB/s as they wont top that speed anyway so no point buying expensive fast cards.

Is there a way to remove effects (e.g. ladder filter) from Kontakt instruments directly in Maschine+?

No, there's no advanced Kontakt Instrument editing whatsoever. The M+ is designed to just play, not design instruments.