No you can't use your worst programmers for the installer

spicemix

No one buys the installer, it's not something you can market as an advantage, it's more or less a nuisance project you just have as enabling background technology, it's something you can break junior engineers on before they introduce crashes into the sessions of high-profile clients on deadline…

Nope. All of the above is wrong. You need your best programmers on the installer.

The worst thing that's likely to happen in Kontakt and the rest of the product line is the customer is set back 5 minutes as they reboot after a crash.

The worst thing that can happen with the installer is the customer is set back 5 MONTHS as the installer deletes their files that basically no one in music thinks to back up.

Which didn't entirely happen to me just now but not far.

Somehow, with the new Native Access and Kontakt 8 I just paid you a couple bills for, it thought the library "Noir" was "Noire," "Solo" was "Cinematic Studio Solo Strings," and "Ostinato" was "Ostinato Woodwinds." The sort of mistake I'd expect from an intern who couldn't get an actually paying job. But this mistake was burned into software code. By people hopefully making more money than nearly anyone making music itself.

The result was that Kontakt 8 couldn't find these libraries, though Native Access thought they were OK. OK so I clicked "Reinstall" on Native Access. Too little disk space (because you haven't realized that you could just download-only-if-necessary and decompress and checksum and swap-replace individual files into place one by one rather than downloading an entire archive and decompressing it but whatever). So I click uninstall and empty the trash and start installing.

Oh but wait. Now it can't find the libraries it thought these were! Oh. My. Gawd. I deleted not the libraries I thought I was reinstalling…it deleted the libraries it was mistaking them for! And since in Kontakt it's normal to save your custom user presets right there in those giant, hard-to-backup sample libary folders so you see them in the browser…I deleted all my custom presets that took hours to build as well.

Well done.

OK the people you have on the installer are not up to this task. You have talent problems across the board apparently but you can't delete user data. That's the prime directive with this computer thing. Preserve user data. First and foremost. Above all else.

Just find the problem and fix it. With better people.