NI Kontakt - update to 5.8.0 [WITH WARNING]

[EvilDragon]

Thankfully args/returns can be hacked in with a few extra variables, ehehe. SublimeKSP does that nicely. I won't argue that it wouldn't be useful to actually have them implemented. But, pretty much all devs are on SublimeKSP now so... I'd rather NI adds new functionality to KSP, and extend what can be changed via engine parameters (I have a list of things that are sorely missing)...

I don't see how recursions would be useful especially why would you use one in a realtime callback like note on/off or (even worse, because it can be pretty dense) when responding to CCs. Even loops in KSP are limited to a max of around 50k iterations. Probably for good reason.

[tack]

But Lua is not really THAT slow. It's much faster than Python. Still, even JIT compiled (as it is in Falcon and HALion 6), it doesn't match up to KSP...

Yes I think the problem with Lua would be the GC. GC is always a major problem for realtime performance.

Even with Python this can be managed (by avoiding circular references you don't need the GC and can disable it), but of course Python is painfully slow in all other ways.

KSP and even JSFX avoid this problem by not even having the concept of object references. I understand that as soon as you add on the high level conveniences you enter more complex territory in terms of memory management.

Rust actually would be a perfect language for realtime audio. No GC, memory safe, built for concurrency. Maybe too low level for something like Kontakt, though.

[Guy Rowland]

Thanks Mario for all infos, much appreciated. Just picking up on:

Anyways, Jason purely tested loading performance, rather than streaming performance, which is different. It's streaming performance which we're the most interested in - and for that Kontakt is still second to none.

Kontakt still steals a march on Background Loading, this is a big deal, agreed. I'm not so sure it's better in other streaming areas though, is it?

As for loading, I think that's under-appreciated in terms of importance vs streaming. On a good rig, K5 will stream seamlessly at preload buffers, but it might still take a bewilderingly long time to load in the first place regardless of how powerful your CPU and drives are. I'm very interested in modular templates, disabled tracks, track archives etc as a better way forward than huge unwieldily fully-stocked templates. Every operation of loading / enabling / importing is limited by loading speed. Something loading in 1s vs 10s makes the difference between whole ways of working imo. You'd wear a second's delay for every new instrument to load up, but may not with 10s.

[EvilDragon]

I'm not so sure it's better in other streaming areas though, is it?

Versus HALion and especially Falcon, it definitely is. HISE is inching in, though. Kinda hard to properly compare with PLAY and Vienna which are closed systems.

[Lawrence]

Probably because of my ancient system, but I don’t have any real problem with loading times on Mac. Streaming, though, is more of a challenge on CPU in Cubase. The ASIO meter still climbs up there.