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Native Instruments Komplete 10 - Installation and Activation Woes


The Beginning of the End

As I had needed some more effects plugins and Kontakt, I went ahead and bought the Native Instruments Komplete 10. Like East/West Quantum Leap, Native Instrments is going away from DVDs, so you have to download 400+ GB of data. During the download I had to interrupt it and continue it from another point-- however despite claiming it would resume downloading where it left off, it didn't in my case so I had to let it download everything again.

But then it basically went down hill from there when I went to actually install and activating everything--to be fair part of the complication in all of this is the *sheer* amount of individual plugins and programs and the fact I wanted to manually install rather than "download & install" afterwards. Some of the installers (particularly always the *largest* ones) cannot run extracted from the ISO which is nonsensical (especially considering the software is in 'demo' mode by default so it's not like there's a REASON for it): by habit I typically extract ISOs and just run the executable from it instead of manually mounting each and every one. Well... only a few of the Native Instruments applications will actually launch this way.

At this point I had already deleted the original .ISOs, so I had to re-download everything for a third time. In this case I recommend having a computer to run overnight and download the complete 400 GB archive, then place the ISOs on an external hard drive for safe keeping.

For the first test I tried Absynth, got it installed (chose the path D:\Program Files\Native Instruments\Absynth instead of C:\ since I typically don't install all of my plugins to C:\), and upon attempting to activate we're greeted with this message regarding the Serivce Center encountering 'a major problem' and has been terminated:

What's pretty stupid is that you have to manually navigate to the file path each time and manually create the folder path for *each and every* individual plug if you choose to install to an alternative drive volume. In other words, forget it. That will just compound the amount of time you need to mount the ISOs.

Upon going into the NI Service Center after it crashed, it just hangs when attempting to activate the license with "internal error 1":

Proceeding to install the remaining plugins, I also uninstalled Absynth and reinstalled it. I logged back into my account on the Service Center, pasted the Komplete 10 serial for all of the installed products and it seems to have activated fine this time:

The activation issues may be due to how the application wants to remember your credentials by default, if in the event they're changed the Service Center may still be trying to use the old credentials.

As mentioned previously, *all* of these plugins have to be individually installed and start piling up, check out what programs and features ends up looking like:

One quirk with some of the synthesizers (Absynth, FM8 etc) is that upon initial startup they prompt on not finding the sound database and that it has to be rebuilt... okay... wouldn't it have just been easier to program the application to know the database by default?

These problems are really caused by Native Instrument's content management and the sheer amount of plugins and effects. Perhaps if it was just ONE application 'Komplete 10' and deployed all of the necessary VSTs, it would be *far* easier to get going with less mess left everywhere, or maybe I'm just good at finding problems? With that said they do have customer support for assisting to resolve this stuff; which thankfully I didn't have to engage. AND, as a bonus I don't have to deal with my iLok dongle and can use all of this software on multiple computers one at a time-- which some products don't allow, or restrict you to carrying your iLok dongle everywhere. It's not like other manufacturers like EWQL are without their flaws, such as the terrible EWQL pianos installer. Although, the NI Service Center may be the cause why all Native Instruments VSTi plugins load slower than any other that I have used. Most plugins will load within a second or instantly, whereas NI plugins can take as long as 4 seconds, along with the interfaces having a bit of delay when you open and close them as well.



C: Drive Hardcoding

More recently it appears that the Komplete 10 installer REQUIRES to be ran from your C:\ volume; if you try launching the program from ANY other disk you get the following error message:

The reason why it states 'cannot create folder "."' is that it's hard coded to be ran on C:\, once it fails not being on that particular drive, it then assumes simply that access is denied for the reason of not being able to create the temporary files! That's some fairly abysmal programming, what a 'Komplete disaster.'



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