Latency Optimization - Native Instruments KONTAKT PLAYER Getting Started

The dialog provides the following options:
•
Driver: With this drop-down menu, you can select which of your operating system's device
driver architectures KONTAKT should use. Most professional audio devices provide
ASIO™, CoreAudio™ (Mac) or WASAPI™ (Windows) drivers.
•
Device: This menu lists all connected audio interfaces that match the driver architecture
chosen above. Select the audio interface you'd like to use for playback here.
•
Sample rate: This drop-down menu allows you to set the global playback sample rate at
which KONTAKT will operate. Common values are 44100 Hz for music and 48000 Hz
for film production. Note that this doesn't have anything to do with the sampling rate at
which your samples have been recorded—if the playback rate doesn't match a sample's
recording rate, KONTAKT will handle all necessary conversion steps transparently for you.
•
Latency: This slider sets the size of the audio playback buffer in samples. Small values
will shorten the delay between pressing a key and hearing the resulting sound (this is
called "latency"), but may cause drop-outs and stuttering when playing a lot of voices at
the same time. Conversely, setting this to a higher value will make playback more reliable
at the cost of more latency.

2.1.2 Latency Optimization

The load that typical digital audio calculations generate on your processor is often not con-
stant and predictable; parameter changes, additional voices or other processes can all cause
momentary peaks in the load, which can result in drop-outs or other audio artifacts if not
properly compensated for. That's why audio programs don't send the audio signals they gen-
erate directly to the hardware, but write them to a short buffer in memory instead. These
contents are in turn being sent to the actual hardware. This concept allows the program to
bridge short irregularities in the stream calculation and thus be more resistant to processing
peaks.
Of course, this "safety net" comes at a price—the buffering causes a delay, known as latency,
between the triggering of a note and the actual sound. This delay gets longer with increas-
ing buffer sizes. Hence, it is vital to tune the buffer size in order to find a good compromise
between latency and playback reliability. The optimal value depends on such diverse factors
KONTAKT PLAYER Getting Started – 10