A client’s new Spitfire and Native Instruments libraries weren’t showing up in Cubase because each kind opens a different way, and some Spitfire libraries also needed registering in Native Access.
A client got in touch about his new Windows laptop and Cubase 15 Pro. In the January sales he’d bought a number of virtual instruments from Spitfire Audio and Native Instruments and downloaded them all, but apart from a couple he couldn’t get at any of them in Cubase. He and a friend who knows computers had researched it and tried to install everything properly, with no luck. They were both new to DAWs and felt out of their depth.
As far as he knew, he’d installed everything correctly. A couple of Spitfire instruments were showing in Cubase’s instrument list, but he couldn’t find his Native Instruments libraries or some of his Spitfire ones. This wasn’t a technical error. Most of what he needed was someone to guide him through how each of his libraries is opened, and for some of them there was an extra installation step he couldn’t have known about.
Opening each library
I started with his Native Instruments guitar and bass libraries. These are sample libraries, and they open inside Kontakt rather than appearing as plugins of their own. So I showed him how to open his Cubase project, insert Kontakt as an instrument (the newest version he had) and choose the library from inside it.
Next was Spitfire’s Abbey Road Low Percussion, which he wanted to use. He’d looked for it as a Kontakt library and as a plugin in its own right and couldn’t find it either way. I showed him that you get to it from inside another Spitfire plugin, by opening Abbey Road Orchestra first and choosing Low Percussion within that.
Registering Spitfire libraries in Native Access
Some of his other Spitfire libraries weren’t showing up in Kontakt at all. He’d downloaded them with the Spitfire Audio app, a nylon guitar library among them, which is how you’d expect it to work. But these are libraries that have to be opened in Kontakt, so they also have to be registered in Native Instruments’ Native Access.
The serial Native Access asks for is the access code sitting in the client’s email.
Taking the nylon guitar library as the example, this is what we did:
- Found the email with the access code in his inbox and scrolled down to the code, which is a Native Instruments serial number.
- Copied it, opened Native Access, chose Add Serial and pasted it in. The product was now registered in Native Access.
- Clicked Add Product and pointed Native Access to the folder where the Spitfire app had put the library, the default location in his user folder.
- The library registered and installed, and showed up in Kontakt’s library list, which we could open from Cubase.
I spent the last few minutes testing the libraries in Cubase. Then we went through the activation process again together, so he can finish the rest himself and manage any libraries he buys in future.
The difficulty was a rather arcane installation procedure, caused by the complicated way Spitfire’s libraries work. Some are plugins in their own right, some open inside another Spitfire plugin, and some are Kontakt libraries that you download with Spitfire’s app and register with Native Instruments’ Native Access.
A Spitfire library that has to be opened in Kontakt also needs registering in Native Access, using the access code from your emails as the serial number.
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