You should really listen to John from what he posted above. Kontakt can take a while to load, especially with large sample libraries. there is an option in Kontakt to allow it to load samples in the back ground. See if that is checked, it will help speed you load time up.

Just an update - I've tried everything, no luck. If after cold boot I open a new blank project, add VSTI to it and close it, then open old project - loading time is around 3 or 4 minutes. If I just open an old projects right away after boot - it can hand for 8-10 minutes literally. BTW it's freezing the PC for the most of that time (I can't even launch task manager). HDD is working like crazy, if I open task monitor first I see that it's the Sonar that's doing it (duh!). Either way it's way too long. Very annoying. I hope someone finds a workaround or the fix it in the next patch (whenever it's coming?).

For Kontakt to load fast, load the instrument, then click on File and click on Batch Re-Save.
After that, it loads very quickly.
dan
Edit: I think only starting from Kontakt 5 that they have this feature.

You never did answer my question back in post #26 about what type of hard drives you're using and what your disk strategy is.

Are you streaming samples from your system drive? Is it a "green" drive? Is it an SSD or a regular HDD - if so, what speed is it running at?

To the original poster:

PLEASE detail your hard drive information.

How many drives?

What kind of drives (SATA, SATA 3, internal, external, USB, etc.)?

What spin rate for the drives?

How are things split across your drives, if you have multiple drives (are projects on the same drive as the OS, are samples and synths on the same drive as projects, all of that plays into project loads).

Questions about your drives have with my post now been asked 3 times.  Please respond with as much detail as you can provide, so that we can collectively help you get to the bottom of this.

Bob Bone

Your WD drives, being the Green versions will spin down to a power conserving mode. I had one on a work PC and it drove me crazy. That could be a part of the problem. What is your power schem ion Control Panel? Also, If you're using Bit Bridge you must be using some 32 bit vsts and vstis, which ones are they? I had a problem when using Drumagog which is 32 bit through jBridge. I was hosting Kontak with one of the Abbey Road kits and it took a while to load. Remember that your 32 bit apps can't see your higher RAM addresses.

I did do some looking at the history of the green drives from WDC, and it seems that there were issues early on with them sometimes having trouble 'waking up', and also that their spin rates tended to be slow.

I don't know that this is why you are having these troubles, but in the absence of any sizable number of similar issues from others here in the forum, it would seem that your issues are caused by something with your particular software/hardware environment, rather than some fundamental bug in Sonar.

At the same time, I have no explanation for why you do not seem to have these issues with Cue Base.

I would tend to think that any sort of green drive would be the exact opposite of what I would want for doing any sort of audio processing, as it depends so much on large volumes of data transfer needed at high speed.

I am also not sure of the mix of 32-bit plugs you have, and what any of them may be doing (or Sonar doing with them) that might be any contributing factor to your performance issues.

Perhaps you could try the following, to see if any difference is seen:


1.  Try to create a test project with no 32-bit plugins of any kind, and then see if it too has the long load times.  If you find it still takes several minutes to load, then you can eliminate 32-bit plugins as a main cause of these issues, although you should still develop a sense of their individual performance and reliability nuances - so that you know what to expect when deciding which plugins to use for future projects.  If you find that the load times go back to being reasonable (10-15 seconds or so), then it would seem that one or more of the 32-bit plugins is a contributing factor to your problems, and you would then need to work at loading and testing one at a time until you work through all of them - to get a complete list of which ones are problematic.


2.  Check your Windows power settings, and make sure you do not allow Windows to turn off any of your hard drives.


3.  Try temporarily disabling any antivirus software and testing the effect of that on the load times, obviously turning it back on prior to getting on the internet.


4.  Try running Sonar as administrator - not logged on as an administrator - specifically telling it to run as administrator.  You can set the properties for the icon to do this all the time by right-clicking on the Sonar icon, clicking on properties, then clicking on Advanced and checking Run as Administrator.  Then test your load times again.  I recommend always running Sonar as Administrator anyways.


5.  You could go pick up a single new non-green hard drive with a 7200 RPM spin rate, and then copy all of your projects and samples over to that drive and see what effect that has on things.  If no effect, you can always return the drive.  By not deleting your original data from the green drive you are copying from, there would only be the path change in Preferences to point back to the green drive should you find no difference in performance when trying out the non-green drive with the copied data.

I hope one or more of the above helps your situation.

Bob Bone

I use Avast's free antivirus, and it can stay running without giving me problems.  It can also be temporarily suspended by turning off the various scanning components, but I never have to do that.

I do not think those drives are a good choice for a machine doing audio processing, and I think you are correct in that one or more of your 32-bit plugins may be adding issues.

Bob Bone