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I don't know if this is the proper area for this question, but: Mac trashcan, 16GB memory, terabyte internal drive, samples and sessions on individual terabyte SSD drives in a Blackmagic enclosure, OS 10.9.5, DP 8.07, Kontakt 5.5.2.880. I have four instances of Spitfire Chamber Strings loaded into one instance of Kontakt, with just one microphone setting selected and "purge unused" selected (I know this is very sample-specific, but just in case) - point is, just four VI's loaded) and I'm getting a lot of gnarly digital interruption on playback. Yes, the buffer's set at 64 for doing input and it would sound ok if I went to 1024 for playback, but that's not practical for writing. It seems this shouldn't be such a problem...I have the host buffer multiplier at 1 and work priority at "high." I'll freely admit I've never really understood how those two setting work so before I start messing around with them, too, I thought I'd inquire here: is there something obvious I should be doing to make things smoother? Or, even with this system, do I have to suck this up if I want to use really detailed libraries at such a low buffer setting?

Use four instances of Kontakt instead of one, each with just one spitfire strings. Spreads the load across the multiple cores.

I see - well, I've heard of this before, but it seems I'd just end up with dozens of instances of Kontakt before was through with a typical project. Is this how you do it even when you've got a lot of instruments to handle?

I think you need to do something to Kontakt´s memory management. Something needs to be tweaked so it doesn´t interfere with DP. There´s a recent thread about it.

I can load lots of instruments in Kontakt, spread into one or many instances, and everything is smooth as silk. I do host Kontakt in VE Pro, though.

I think they heavily scripted instruments need to be in their own instance of Kontakt.