Kontakt ram experiment

[Michael Allen]

Using QLEWSO in C5 on a 32 bit PC I'm always looking for more economical ways to use ram. I was playing around with the Kontakt Player free download the other day and noticed an empty instance took up around 40mb while an empty instance of EW Kompakt took up around 140mb. Considering you can load more instruments into Kontakt 16 out than the Kompakt (which is 8 out) I could free up a considerable amount of ram to load more instuments. But alas the free Kontakt Player goes into demo mode and eventually times out using a Kompakt library.
I was wondering If any Cubase users out there with Kontakt 3 or 4 could run an experiment for me and open an empty instance and report back on how much ram it uses? I'd hate to go out and buy Kontakt only to find the full version takes up a lot more ram than the free player version.

cheers

michael

[Animus]

It's the same. Ram management has changed since Kontakt 3.5. It's more more efficient and deals with ram allotments on the fly.

[Michael Allen]

thanks Animus. So version 4 would be most economical version of Kontakt?

[Animus]

I think 3.5 or 4.0 will be basically the sam memory management. They might have tweaked it a bit I guess.

[Michael Allen]

I decided to have a little test of sample players just to see how much ram they used with an empty instance opened. KONTAKT 2 and 4 are 16 out and KOMPAKT is 8 out.

KONTAKT 4 1st instance (75mb) 2nd (27mb ) 3rd (28mb)

KONTAKT 2 1st instance (105mb) 2nd (82mb) 3rd (83mb)

KOMPAKT 1st instance (131mb) 2nd (111mb) 3rd (111mb)

PLAY 1st instance (326mb) 2nd (24mb) 3rd (25mb)

It seems that anyone who's conscious of ram usage will be able to load more instruments using KONTAKT.

cheers

Michael

[robotpriest]

Its a little tricky...K3.5-4 seem like they are more efficient (and are if you have no instruments loaded), but what happens is they allocate voice memory on the fly. So where before you would set your voice memory in the prefs and it would be the same for each instance of Kontakt, now it allocates it on the fly based on the max voices you have set in your instruments. ...and this is Cubase ram, not KMS ram! So watch your max voices.