How do I receive my Ruckus instrument?

When you complete a purchase, two emails should be sent to you: a receipt from Paddle, and a separate email containing your Kontakt license key. If you do not receive the license key, check your spam folder, or submit a help request below.

How do I install my Ruckus instrument?

Install Kontakt 8 or Kontakt 8 Player, or update your existing installation to the latest version. Open Native Access, click "Add Serial," and paste the license key you received in your purchase email.

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Can I use Toni's resonance on top of another virtual piano?

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Toni is a fully sampled piano library, rather than a standalone audio effect plugin. Toni's samples and resonators are interwoven to enable strings to interact. If you are hoping to make your existing piano VST sound more natural by adding external effects, you are fighting an uphill battle. The best approach for natural sound and playability is from the ground up. That is what Toni aims to achieve.

How do I optimize Toni for my computer?

The two bottlenecks to Toni's performance are your processor and disk read speed. To lower the CPU load, you can increase your buffer size (note: this adds audio latency) and/or lower the length of the resonance IRs using the "length" knobs in the GUI. Lowering the IR length makes resonance fade out faster when you play staccato notes to excite other strings. Held chords are less affected, since they continuously re-excite the resonance buffers rather than relying on a single decaying tail. That said, sustained chords will lose a bit of complexity with shorter IR lengths. You can think of it like lowering the polygon count in a video game.

Toni's resonance IRs are loaded dynamically as notes trigger them, using Kontakt's asynchronous loading system, not preloaded into RAM all at once. Like the note samples themselves, which stream via Kontakt's Direct From Disk (DFD) system, this means resonance loading is subject to your disk's read speed. Storing Toni on an SSD (ideally NVMe) can improve performance for both.

Note that setting your project to a high sample rate (above 48kHz) will increase CPU demand without providing an audible benefit to Toni.

Also note that Kontakt's CPU meter does not measure your computer's overall CPU usage. Instead, it measures how much of the available audio processing time Kontakt is using per audio buffer.

Why am I hearing clipping distortion?

Toni features powerful resonance effects which can get quite loud when turned up. Try adding compression or lowering Kontakt's main volume fader.

Why am I hearing pops and/or delayed resonance?

Convolution resonators can be demanding on your CPU, especially at high sample rates. Try reducing the sample rate to 44.1kHz/48kHz, and/or increasing the size of your audio buffer. If further CPU savings or higher sample rates are required, try reducing the length of the string and pedal resonance with the "length" knobs in the GUI (see the section on optimizing Toni above).

Is there a difference in sound between real-time MIDI playback and an offline render?

On computers with slower disk read speeds, short/fast notes may fail to load their resonance IRs quickly enough for the resonance to be audible. This is more likely to occur in an offline render than in real-time MIDI playback, since a fast bounce can outpace disk streaming in a way real-time playback does not. Resonance bus assignment has been optimized to minimize this behavior, so most of the time the difference will be negligible. That said, if you are using an older computer and want to squeeze every ounce of resonance out of Toni, a real-time bounce may catch more resonance than an offline render.

If you need to reduce dropouts in an offline bounce, shortening the resonance IR length (see the optimizing section above) will also reduce load time per note, in addition to lowering CPU demand.

Why is Kontakt crashing?

Kontakt can crash for a variety of reasons that may or may not be caused by Ruckus' code. If you experience frequent crashes, please save crash reports and email them to support@ruckusinstruments.com.