Often times (maybe even everytime) I load up an instrument directly in kontakt or in sibelius, i get the spinning beach ball for around 15 seconds before the instrument will start loading. Is this normal?I only have one hard drive at the moment, i'm going to format my external firewire 800 later and load the library on there to see if it's much different. Can anyone offer advice?

Also, in sibelius when I perform an instrument change, the template works fine but the sounds will not load in kontakt until I press play (I always try to do the change a measure before if possible, or just drag the invisible box just to the left of the barline) Am i missing a setting somewhere? I'd much prefer they load immediately.

[quote author=perpetualpoet link=topic=2601.msg13815#msg13815 date=1216065786]
Often times (maybe even everytime) I load up an instrument directly in kontakt or in sibelius, i get the spinning beach ball for around 15 seconds before the instrument will start loading. Is this normal?I only have one hard drive at the moment, i'm going to format my external firewire 800 later and load the library on there to see if it's much different. Can anyone offer advice?
[/quote]

Ok  moved my library to my firewire800 drive and the same thing happens. Spinning beachball for about 12ish seconds before the samples acctually start loading.  :(

[b]Update:[/b] reinstalled everything, still has massive delay. This did not happen with VDL 2.0 and ";Tiger";. But seems to be a problem with 2.5, Leopard.

[quote author=perpetualpoet link=topic=2601.msg13815#msg13815 date=1216065786]
Also, in sibelius when I perform an instrument change, the template works fine but the sounds will not load in kontakt until I press play (I always try to do the change a measure before if possible, or just drag the invisible box just to the left of the barline) Am i missing a setting somewhere? I'd much prefer they load immediately.
[/quote]

[b]Update[/b]: Watched this http://tapspace.com/support/tutorials/sib51VDL/7-instrumentChange.mov and I guess it's normal. So instrument change question is solved.

As far as the high school graduation beachball session before kontakt decides it wants to start loading my files, I'm totally lost. My processor(s) are just chilling. I've done all the updates (minus sib 5.2) I'm totally out of ideas.....

Charlie - if you find that the long delay before a patch loads into KP2 occurs on the [i]first[/i] instrument you load, but successive loads move more quickly, this may be something that's normal while Kontakt Player locates the nkx container files and verifies their validity. I sometimes notice this on the first load, but instruments that load after that move much faster.

Another thing you may want to try (in Sibelius) is this:

Load the playback configuration that's causing you the slowness. Delete it. Then recreate it. I recently experienced a similar phenomenon and the newly created playback configuration operates much faster. I don't know why, but thought it was interesting.

Thanks! After some toying around I did notice that the first 1-3 instruments have the delay, but then it goes back to normal. I'm doing this using the stand alone cause it's a little easier to observe. In Sibelius I can only notice it when I first start it up. Every instrument change i make after that is normal. I guess it's just a quirk then:) Wish it could find those files a little faster but 15 seconds isn't that big of a deal i guess :)
I wasn't too terribly worried as this isn't that big of an inconvenience, but I had to be sure this is normal :)