How to Fix Long Load Times for Instruments

Hello,

When I load an instrument in the Kontakt 8 library, it can take up to 30 seconds to load that instrument before I'm able to use it. I'm using Cakewalk, by the way, to run Kontakt 8. I currently have all my Kontakt vst's on an external hard drive connected USB. I'm wondering if this is why it takes so long to load? This makes it very tedious to switch between instruments to sample what sounds I'd like to use.

See pic for the loading bar example. My external hard drive LED flashes while it is loading, so again, if this is the problem, what can I do? I need an external drive to hold the massage library of files from Komplete 15.

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BassManPete

*massive (typo above)

DunedinDragon

The first problem is external hard drives unless they're SSD and you have a sufficiently fast USB connections. My computer is configured with ALL SSD both internal and external. It takes roughly two seconds to load Analog Dreams with Kontakt 8 on Windows 10 with 16 gb of memory.

Vocalpoint

"I currently have all my Kontakt vst's on an external hard drive connected USB. I'm wondering if this is why it takes so long to load?"

If your instruments are not a super fast NVMe - 30 seconds is about right.

USB is - by far - the slowest transfer speed of any reasonably modern storage types.

Michi_NI

Maybe we can check the disc speed:

When Kontakt is loading libraries slower than expected, one reason could be the speed of your Sample Drive.

The Read and Write speed is above 800 Mb/s. This is an optimal value and Kontakt libraries will load as fast as possible.

If you have results under 150 Mb/s, this could be the bottleneck of the slow loading times. We highly recommend using SSDs as sample drives in order to get the fastest and best performance while loading Kontakt Libraries.

On Windows, I recommend AS SSD Speed Tool:

https://www.alex-is.de/PHP/fusion/infusions/downloads/downloads.php?cat_id=4

Choose the drive where your samples are located and click Start:

Can you send me a screenshot of the results here?

Or a Batch Resave is also often very helpful:

https://support.native-instruments.com/hc/en-us/articles/210274985-How-to-Batch-re-save-a-Kontakt-Library

BassManPete

Should this entire test take several hours to complete? I'm an hour in already and still going. But the numbers do look slow: please comment on your thoughts about this SSD.

I'm also wondering if I try a different USB port (maybe I don't have it in a 3.0) if that would help. Here's the specs on the hard drive, model :

Well, crap. This is NOT a SSD as I thought it was, it's a mechanical hard disk.

Toshiba Canvio Advance 4TB Portable External Hard Drive USB 3.0, Green - HDTCA40XG3CA

I think I need to replace it. Thoughts?

Vocalpoint

That drive is not even close to being usable for Kontakt Libraries…and no amount of port changing will improve that situation. Slow is slow in this case.

Here's a shot of my main library drive (Samsung 990 EVO Pro (NVMe) :

And here is my Western Digital Black - which I use for those Kontakt libraries that need to load via the Files menu exclusively:

However - despite what @Michi_NI is saying above - and despite having some of the fastest drives available today - I still have libraries like these from Output:

That can still take anywhere from 2-12 seconds to load. Not a huge deal but dependant on the library - Kontakt is NOT as optimized for loading as NI might think.

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