My project files that use multiple instances of Kontakt and/or EastWest Play load extremely slowly and often just hang for minutes. Most of my older projects also tend to just hang forever on load and need to be force closed. It’s only after multiple attempts that you may get them to load properly. Projects on more recent Renoise versions (and sandboxing plugins) seems to have helped with the endless hangs, but the load times are still insane.
Here’s a video of how the load process goes (on an extremely vsti heavy file):
My computer specs are i7-9700 @ 4.2ghz, 16gb ram, windows10 pro. Renoise is on an M2 NVMe drive and plugins and the sample libraries are on a Samsung 860 EVO pro.
Any idea on what the bottleneck is? The problem is the same in project files that don’t even peak memory usage that much. On a related note, loading big kontakt libraries within Renoise takes ages - there’s also a similar kind of long hang before the library actually starts loading. Standalone Kontakt and other DAWs start loading the instruments instantly.
It should also be noted that the issue has persisted through multiple different PCs, Windows, Renoise and Kontakt versions.
I think this can only be solved, when Renoise would load all plugins Async like Bitwig. It seems, it currently waits till all plugins are fully load. I’ve some projects with many vst plugins and this issue, too.
The “Run all plugins in sandboxes” option Renoise → Preferences → PlugMisc will also slow down things a little bit. If you don’t need it, try turning it off.
Renoise will then only use those “Renoise Plugin Server” instances for old 32it plugins. If you can update/replace those old 32bit plugins this will help as well to speed up things.
Unfortunately the problems are the same even without plugin sandboxing / any 32bit vst’s (I’m using some really light legacy effects that haven’t been developed to 64bit). To me it seems that for some reason it just takes forever for Renoise to start loading the instruments within Kontakt itself after loading the Kontakt instances as VSTi’s (and to lesser extent in EWPlay; projects that contain only EWPlay instances don’t cause so much hanging).
Do you have maybe windows defender ON? I’ve read somewhere that kontakt loads a lot slower if ON because it is trying to scan every sound file. It was about probably Reaper but seems similar case.
No noticeable effect when turning all real-time protection off. Windows defender isn’t doing anything until the sample libraries actually start loading after the long hang when task manager says Renoise is unresponsive, and at that point the libraries load quickly anyway. You’re right in that it does seem to scan everything however, so people with slower pcs might see very sluggish behaviour after loading for a while.
