Current state of Kontakt, Kontakt Player and Native Access?

Discuss running non-Linux applications and plugins on Linux, for example via wine

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RockMaster
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Current state of Kontakt, Kontakt Player and Native Access?

Post by RockMaster »

Are there any known hacks I should know of about installing and running these three?
I've installed Native Access and opened it once, but after it throws an error and closes down it's no longer possible to open it again without wiping all trace of it from the system and reinstalling, so it's next to useless.
I've installed Kontakt Player, but I don't see a way to import/open a library, because it wants to launch Native Access which doesn't quite work.
With Kontakt 6 I could somehow add a library, but it just lit up with errors in "Library" tab saying "Library content could not be found".
It's extremely frustrating considering that like 99% of sample libraries are Kontakt format only.

EDIT: So I was finally able to load a couple of instruments in Kontakt individually, bypassing the whole library content error. My new issue is that my monitors are 4K and Kontakt's UI is absolutely microscopic and basically unreadable. I don't suppose there's a cure for that?
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Re: Current state of Kontakt, Kontakt Player and Native Access?

Post by glowrak guy »

Kontakt runs best in Reaper, with sigle-core settings in both the daw and the plugin. Uniformity in config settings
breeds success. A used 24" monitor would be good, perhaps the same brand as the 4K., and if space is an issue,
a wall-mounted sturdy adjustable arm could be useful.

Also, DecentSampler with Pianobook sounds (most are Kontakt, EXS24 format, with a great number converted for DecentSampler linux format) is worth a couple hours installing/downloading, picking your 'keepers'. I love 'The Lamp', the mbira, some guitars/plucked instruments, and some of the pianos, and many of the malleted instruments.
Cheers
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Re: Current state of Kontakt, Kontakt Player and Native Access?

Post by glowrak guy »

With Native Access, if a download 'fails', it actually didn't. It's in .wine/drive_c/users/your-username/Downloads.
You'll have to mount the .iso file, (see below) extract and run the installer. Then restart Native Access, and it will find your
newly installed plugins, and authorize them.

For Reaper, you'll want wine-staging 6.4 or older, as it's preferences text is missing in 6.5 and newer.
Other daws may be fine with newer wine-stagings...

Launch Native Access like this:

wine /home/you/.wine/drive_c/"Program Files/Native Instruments/Native Access/Native Access.exe"

(note the quotes used to 'capture' paths that include spaces!
and that it's all on one command-line) )

As Native Access re-downloads Phasis or others, :dog: it may stop before completion
with some error. :dog: :dog: The download itself is fine :hihi: so look for
the product's .iso file in

/home/you/.wine/drive_c/Users/your-username/Downloads/Phasis.iso

As root or sudo, make a folder in which to mount the iso image,
I chose to create /mnt/ni

issue this command to mount the .iso file:

sudo mount -t udf /home/you/.wine/drive_c/users/your-username/Downloads/Phasis.iso -o unhide /mnt/ni

(the above is all on one command line, not two separate commands,
as will be the example below))

Now browse to that folder, /mnt/ni and find the installer.exe,
and run the installer with command:

wine path-to-name-of.exe

For an installer with spaces in it's title, look at this example,
again, noting the path contains spaces requires surrounding " quotes " :

sudo mount -t udf /home/your-username/.wine/drive_c/users/your-username/Downloads/"Reaktor Spark R2.2.iso" -o unhide /mnt/ni

Older Kontakt versions might install without using an .iso, K5 did, I think K6 used an iso.
Some of the newer codebase releases may install without an iso, like Massive X.
It gets konfusing remembering NI's ever-shifting sands :wink:
Cheers
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Re: Current state of Kontakt, Kontakt Player and Native Access?

Post by tavasti »

glowrak guy wrote: Sun Aug 01, 2021 8:32 pm With Native Access, if a download 'fails', it actually didn't. It's in .wine/drive_c/users/your-username/Downloads.
You'll have to mount the .iso file, (see below) extract and run the installer. Then restart Native Access, and it will find your
newly installed plugins, and authorize them.
With your instuctions, I got that iso mounted and installer running ok, but in running Native Access second time, I just get black window. Some winetricks / dll overrides needed?

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Re: Current state of Kontakt, Kontakt Player and Native Access?

Post by Toejam76 »

Maybe related, I had a black window with the STL Emissary amp. It was gone by installing gdiplus with winetricks (set to native/builtin) in winecfg. Otherwise I use wine-staging and yabridge with Reaper and Kontakt 6 runs fine beside being pretty heavy on the cpu with some libs.
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Re: Current state of Kontakt, Kontakt Player and Native Access?

Post by tavasti »

Toejam76 wrote: Thu Nov 04, 2021 3:51 am Maybe related, I had a black window with the STL Emissary amp. It was gone by installing gdiplus with winetricks (set to native/builtin) in winecfg. Otherwise I use wine-staging and yabridge with Reaper and Kontakt 6 runs fine beside being pretty heavy on the cpu with some libs.
Thanks for the tip. Unfortunately that did not solve, still having black window.

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Re: Current state of Kontakt, Kontakt Player and Native Access?

Post by glowrak guy »

Hi, I just launched Native Access (in latest AVLinux with wine-staging 6.20)
and as is oft the case, it tried to find a newer version, which it did,
and as sometimes occurs, the update failed. I then went to my .wine/drive_c/users/me/downloads folder,
moved and extracted the newly arrived (failed) version, and ran it again. It failed again, this time
saying it could not find the existing version in order to update it.

It displayed a download link in an error box, to get the apparently 'full' version
of the newest Native Access installer:

https://www.native-instruments.com/en/s ... ve-access/

I ran this version installer, and it worked to install it.
When I ran Native Access from a terminal, all was well, and my apps displayed OK and all
showed as registered, and Kontakt is still in working order...after dancing on eggshells :wink:
---------------------------------------------------------------------
There have been wine issues as of late, but on the yabridge website, there is a section
showing how to roll back wine to a known working version, which might help.

The only over-rides I have are mfc42.dll and mfc42u.dll ...probably there for some
obscure older plugin, as it was once advised to install both 64 and 32 bit versions.

Hope this helps!
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Re: Current state of Kontakt, Kontakt Player and Native Access?

Post by tavasti »

glowrak guy wrote: Fri Nov 05, 2021 1:45 am Hi, I just launched Native Access (in latest AVLinux with wine-staging 6.20)
and as is oft the case, it tried to find a newer version, which it did,
and as sometimes occurs, the update failed. I then went to my .wine/drive_c/users/me/downloads folder,
moved and extracted the newly arrived (failed) version, and ran it again. It failed again, this time
saying it could not find the existing version in order to update it.

It displayed a download link in an error box, to get the apparently 'full' version
of the newest Native Access installer:

https://www.native-instruments.com/en/s ... ve-access/
Same version I have installed, and does not work. wine-6.20 (Staging)

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Re: Current state of Kontakt, Kontakt Player and Native Access?

Post by tavasti »

Created new wineprefix, and got Native Access 1.14.1 running, installed Kontakt player and looks like working. Most likely my old wineprefix has something which causes trouble. Wine emulates windows perfectly, even need for re-installing everything every now and then :-)

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Re: Current state of Kontakt, Kontakt Player and Native Access?

Post by leumas »

Hi,
I struggle to install Native Access. Tried downgrade wine (and wine-staging) but neither of these work and when I want to launch it, there is this message.
Anyone can help?
Attachments
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Re: Current state of Kontakt, Kontakt Player and Native Access?

Post by tseaver »

@leumas
I struggle to install Native Access. Tried downgrade wine (and wine-staging) but neither of these work and when I want to launch it, there is this message.
Anyone can help?
I'm just guessing here, based on the traceback in the image you posted. The error message seems to indicate that the path is invalid, which might be a sign of a bug (using the JS equivalent of 'mkdir' vs 'mkdir -p') in the installer. You might help it along by pre-creating the prefix, e.g.:
$ mkdir -p "$WINEPREFIX/drive_c/users/samuel/AppData/Roaming/Native Access"
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Re: Current state of Kontakt, Kontakt Player and Native Access?

Post by tavasti »

And some of the windows programs may need

Code: Select all

cd $WINEPREFIX

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Re: Current state of Kontakt, Kontakt Player and Native Access?

Post by JMB238 »

Hello all,

I'm also unable to run Native Access.exe after downloading. Have any of you experienced an error where a tiny dialogue box appears on-screen that says "Windows System Tray," and then the installation program fails to load?

I'm on Ubuntu 20.04 and have been using Wine to run a lot of the newer plugins without a problem, but this is the first obstacle I'm running into. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Edit to mention I'm using Wine 7.0, so it's the most up to date version, and I've installed Wine Staging to run yabridge for windows plugins. It may be a Wine issue, but not sure.
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Re: Current state of Kontakt, Kontakt Player and Native Access?

Post by k410 »

[Deleted to declutter the thread. This was just some things I tried that did not work.]
Last edited by k410 on Sun Aug 28, 2022 10:37 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Current state of Kontakt, Kontakt Player and Native Access?

Post by k410 »

JMB238 wrote: Fri Aug 19, 2022 9:15 pm Hello all,

I'm also unable to run Native Access.exe after downloading. Have any of you experienced an error where a tiny dialogue box appears on-screen that says "Windows System Tray," and then the installation program fails to load?

I'm on Ubuntu 20.04 and have been using Wine to run a lot of the newer plugins without a problem, but this is the first obstacle I'm running into. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Edit to mention I'm using Wine 7.0, so it's the most up to date version, and I've installed Wine Staging to run yabridge for windows plugins. It may be a Wine issue, but not sure.
Following a tip in the README.md on the github/yabridge page, I have successfully installed and used Native Access 1.14.1 through winehq-staging 7.12.

Get the Native Access installer from NI's legacy installers page:
https://support.native-instruments.com/ ... ng-Systems

On the wineprefix to be used for Native Instruments, use winecfg to set the Windows version to Windows 10.

Optional: Another thing I did with winecfg was to add a drive S: that points to a separate Samples partition I had set up.
I have a folder named "Kontakt" in that partition.
In Native Access's preferences, I set the Content Location to S:\Kontakt (leaving all the other paths at their C drive defaults).

Hoping this helps!
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