Kontakt Demo Mode on Libraries You Own: The NI Account Typo Fix

A long-standing client’s Picked Acoustic and Strummed Acoustic libraries had gone into Kontakt demo mode because Native Instruments had them registered to an old email address with a typo in it.

I’ve supported this client for a number of years on his PC studio, where he uses Cakewalk with a number of Kontakt instruments and plugins from other manufacturers. We’d been working together tidying up some of his plugin installations, and this time he got in touch because two Kontakt instruments, Picked Acoustic and Strummed Acoustic, were showing as demo when he loaded them into one of his songs. I’d installed both for him myself a few years earlier and had seen them working, so I knew they should be there.

Checking Native Access and his NI account

I started by refamiliarising myself with his setup. Native Access was up to date and the two products still showed as demo. My next thought was that they’d become separated from his user account. He’s had several email addresses over the years, and it was possible they were licensed to a different one, so I looked at the registered products and the orders in his Native Instruments account.

Both libraries were in his order history but missing from his registered products.

Usually those two sections match up, so this was unusual. I told him we wouldn’t be able to solve it ourselves. Native Instruments would need to find where the two products were registered and move them onto his account. I suspected an older installation had been registered to one of his old email addresses and his newer products to his current one, and that the two were conflicting. I put that in an email to Native Instruments support, and we agreed to reconnect when they replied.

Native Instruments’ first answer

Their reply was a set of instructions for a full reset of Native Access. You delete its preference files in Common Files under Program Files and in the Native Instruments folder in AppData (Roaming), and Native Access starts from scratch and downloads all the licence files again from their servers.

I followed the instructions. I know how these XML preference files work, and I could see the reset had happened, because we had to enter his login details again and re-accept the Native Access terms. The two instruments were still in demo mode.

So I emailed again, confirmed I’d followed their steps, and pointed them back to the original problem with screenshots of the orders and downloads sections of his NI account. They showed clearly that he had bought the products but they weren’t registered to him.

A typo in an old email address

A few days later he had a reply, and I connected to his machine to help him decode it and explain what it meant. The support team had been very helpful. They’d found the two products registered to an old email address of his with a typo in it, one letter wrong, which is why they weren’t showing on his current account.

This puzzled me. If the address had a typo, how had Picked Acoustic and Strummed Acoustic ever worked on his system? I’d seen them working myself. The best explanation I can think of is that he registered these two with Native Access 1 and his later products with Native Access 2, and the typo had been there all along without anyone noticing. In that case any emails about those products would have gone to the mistyped address. I suppose the typo could have happened somewhere on Native Instruments’ side, though I’d be surprised, as it’s an automated system. We don’t know where it came from.

Native Instruments moved the licences to his current email address, and after that everything worked. I opened Native Access and both products were there, out of demo mode. Then I downloaded the latest version of Kontakt and the updates for Picked Acoustic and Strummed Acoustic.

Kontakt 6 and Kontakt 8

I also gave him some teaching, because he needs to start moving away from Kontakt 6, which is no longer compatible with these libraries. On his system Kontakt 6 shows as plain “Kontakt”, with no number, and Kontakt 8 shows as “Kontakt 8”. For these libraries he should use Kontakt 8 only.

He was happy to have the problem fixed, and grateful that I’d dealt with the support team for him and written the emails in the right language. A library that’s missing from Kontakt altogether is a different problem, and I’ve written up one of those in a Spitfire library not showing in Kontakt.

Some of the problems I deal with are glitches on the client’s computer that we can sort out ourselves. Others are on the manufacturer’s servers, where the user can’t fix them. Here Native Instruments’ first diagnosis put the problem on the client’s side, and their fix didn’t work. My job was to be confident about what was happening on his machine and go back to them and say it was definitely on their side. They did fix it, but I don’t think they would have without a clear account of what had been done, what was working and what wasn’t.

When Native Instruments libraries you’ve paid for show as demo, it’s worth comparing the orders and the registered products in your NI account before you reinstall anything.