External drive - licensing

oor · 2025-04-23T18:50:34+00:00

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I have a shared (Win + Mac) external (SSD) drive with lots of paid and licensed NI content on it. It has been working fine all the time at home with Win. But now I am at the cottage with a Mac, and Native access shows a yellow exclamation point on all my libraries. It wants me to repair (implicitly downloading), but that is impossible as I am on an expensive and slow internet connection. Everything is on the ext ssd, 100s of gigs.

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PoorFellow

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/44659/external-drive-licensing

Storing Libraries on an External Drive for both Mac and Windows

We do not recommend storing your libraries and content on an external drive to be used by both a Mac and Windows computer. It may cause performance issues.

If using Native Instruments software on a Mac and Windows computer, we recommend using separate external drives specifically for each OS.

For best results, your external drive should be formatted the same as your operating system's native format. These are : Windows ; NTFS , Mac OS X 10.12 and earlier ;HFS+ (Mac OS Extended) . macOS 10.13 and later ; Apple File System (APFS)

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Vocalpoint

I am guessing this drive (being used in Windows) is most likely formatted to NTFS - which I believe a Mac can (partially) read - but cannot write to.

If you are intent on working with these two different systems - you will need to consider adding another external and formatting it for specific use with a Mac.

PoorFellow

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/44659/external-drive-licensing

Storing Libraries on an External Drive for both Mac and Windows

We do not recommend storing your libraries and content on an external drive to be used by both a Mac and Windows computer. It may cause performance issues.

If using Native Instruments software on a Mac and Windows computer, we recommend using separate external drives specifically for each OS.

Jojo123

and to add, if you're running Logic you definitely dont want to be using ExFat

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