I'm in the middle of a composition project with a tight deadline. Around half the time when I open a session, my NI instruments are unable to load due to the notorious and apparently unsolved bug in Native Access causing it to hang on 'Loading Products' (and presumably failing to authorise the libraries in Kontakt 7). Almost always if I put my computer to sleep, authorisation is lost and I have to restart my computer, then repeatedly open / uninstall / reinstall new / former versions of Native Access and NTK Daemon until for no apparent reason it just starts working again.
Hunting through threads in the forums, there is no clear reason why this is happening or how to solve it. I just found one thread where a member of NI staff confirmed it is down to a problem their end, but this was in February 2024 and it's now June.
Why in the name of all things sane does Native Access need 24/7 access to the internet and NI servers to function at all? Steinberg recently dropped their dongle in favour of online authorisation of their software, but it only requires a connection once a month to authorise, and leaves you in peace between these times. Considering scores of customers like me are on the verge of vowing never to buy another NI product again as a result of this endless hassle (and sometimes actual financial losses when projects are corrupted and deadlines can't be met), would it not be more sensible to rethink the whole authorisation model and introduce something similar to Steinberg?
