You should be able to load additional instance of Kompakt player. Probably something wrong with your Sonar or system, not shure, never used Sonar.

I'm running more than 8 full Kompakts on Cubase 4 Studio without problems.

- Piotr

Sonar isn't the problem. I've been able to run three full sessions of the EW sample at one time in Sonar 6 PE. The problem is either your RAM or CPU. Plus, make sure you're always adding East West as a VST soft synth under the insert option. Using it as a DXi has issues (like trying to change tempos and such).

Also, if you're just wanting to change attacks but keep the same instruments then you should check out the keyswitch options. This allows you to have one large sample that changes attacks depending on what low (lowest few notes on the keyboard) are assigned as.

Look it up or read up on it in the manual. Might be the fix you're looking for.

If you have any more questions feel free to ask.

Yes, RAM may be the problem. If you load too many samples in Cubase, it crashes too.

Also, if you want to load couple of articulations of one instrument or section, try organizing your Kompakt's so the same instruments would be loaded into one Kompakt instance - this way, if some samples are already loaded by one patch, they won't be loaded again in the same kompakt instance and you save your ram.

I mean also, if you want to double your patches - for example - you need to separate 2 voices of the same section with the same patch, it's best to load it into one Kompakt instance, so it could load samples only once and need no additional memory.

- Piotr

2 GIGs should be enough, it isn't great but enough. I have 3 GIGs and it works well.

Have you gone into the Kompakt sampler and set the voices to 248 and expert settings?

Here are the steps I follow to install a new set up:

1) Insert: Insert Soft Synth.

2) Select VST Plugins.

3) Select EW package you need.

4) In the next box set up the way you want Sonar to import it and click Okay.

5) Sonar creates two new tracks, one MIDI and one for the sampler. On the MIDI track (the lower of the two) open up the track properties. Set the input to what you need (I always use MIDI Omni) and then the channel as 1. Now open up the EW sampler itself and load your patches.

6) Each time you load in a new sampler, make sure you repeat step 5 but have it routed to the first sampler created (until all of the 8 channels are used up).

If this is what you're doing, and it is still crashing then I suggest you contact Soundsonline.com and see what they say. Perhaps you need to get a patch update?

I've had Sonar crash once I have *too* many samples loaded in, but never when I'm just trying to open up EW itself.

Keeping DFD (Direct from Drive) on is very important. This way, when you load a patch, memory usage is very low, comparing to non-dfd patch it may be something like 10 times lower.

What you should check when using VSTi's is that you have your virtual memory set off, process priorities set to background applications.

What kind of music card do you have?

Changing latency (maybe it should be set to lower or higher latency) might solve the noisy problem.

- Piotr