NI have a responsibility to provide a clean uninstall

Avasopht · 2022-10-07T21:25:06+00:00

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I've had to spend a considerable amount of time manually uninstalling each and every NI product from this machine after buying a new machine that will be music only.

I cannot for the life of me think of any valid reason for making uninstallation so painful.

Worst of all, the vast majority of them are sound packs that don't even need to be in the system registry ... and NI discontinued the tool they did offer in the past.

This is extremely inconsiderate of people's time, as it basically means we must spend an hour or so uninstalling each individual installation (most of which are just audio and patches).

I'm sure there are plenty of threads about this, but I don't think this can ever be addressed enough.

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Native Access 2

Feature Request

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Vocalpoint

Robocopy would take of any size drive in no time (Windows). Much shorter than reinstalling everything. I haven't actually "reinstalled" (or uninstalled) an NI product for years.

Once the content is on a drive (and known to be working) - even if I am rebuilding a new PC WITH new empty drives - it's lightyears easier to just robocopy everything to the new drive and then do Locate via Native Access.

Do the same thing with Spectrasonics, Toontrack and a bunch of other heavy hitters in the "size" department.

Vocalpoint

Hmm. I see every single NI product I have ever installed (155 as of this writing) within Start->Settings->Apps and Features on Windows 10 Pro 22H2 (not sure how this looks on Mac OS).

Just select any one of them and click Uninstall. Works perfectly.

I realize this is not as "one touch" as having a convenient button right within Native Access 2 but what am I missing here?

All comments

Vocalpoint

Robocopy would take of any size drive in no time (Windows). Much shorter than reinstalling everything. I haven't actually "reinstalled" (or uninstalled) an NI product for years.

Do the same thing with Spectrasonics, Toontrack and a bunch of other heavy hitters in the "size" department.

Simchris

Sadly, most software companies do not have an uninstall all option. Not unique to NA. Also remember you do not need to uninstall on old machine to install on new machine. Luckily most stuff is one click uninstall from windows apps menu.

richardsun

Bug report: When I uninstall a product manually from Native Access 3.01 on Mac. Native Access reports that the product is still installed, but needs to be repaired.

Feature request for Native Access on Mac: Native Access should have an uninstall feature for each product.

janpeeters

Dear Native Instruments,

can you please provide a uninstall function in Native Access. With your library of productions and those included in Komplete 14 becoming so large it's every now and them necesarry to uninstall some libraries.

There are enough software developers that provide uninstallation. Arturia does it and Softube too. And there are more.

I would be very grateful if this could be implemented. It's not difficult.

Thanks, Jan

Michael Scheurer

Please please please add an uninstall option to Native Access!

Vocalpoint

Hmm. I see every single NI product I have ever installed (155 as of this writing) within Start->Settings->Apps and Features on Windows 10 Pro 22H2 (not sure how this looks on Mac OS).

Just select any one of them and click Uninstall. Works perfectly.

I realize this is not as "one touch" as having a convenient button right within Native Access 2 but what am I missing here?

ZDPhoenix

Music software has been allowed to be over a decade behind that of game and art programs for practically it's tenure. Native Instruments may have the most comprehensive collection on the market, but that comes at the cost of also being the most painful to deal with when something doesn't work right. It's discouraging.

Avasopht

I uninstalled all music applications from this machine so that I could have one purely for music and another purely for development (and maybe some gaming as it's got an RTX GPU).

The problem with NI's uninstallation is that I had to go in and manually uninstall every single sound pack (IIRC I also had to use CCleaner as some uninstalls were failing).

The mind boggles why they would actively decide to make it costly for users to uninstall 100+ sounds and plugins and just not provide a method to uninstall it.

For the programmers, it's trivial to add the functionality, so this has to be a ruthless upper-management decision to purposefully inconvenience users.

And I say this not as a frustrated user, but as someone who also works in this industry.

These are red flags to me. It says a lot about what to expect from them in the future when I am making a purchase decision, because if they can choose to inconvenience users like this then I have to assume more things like this will happen in the future that will drive users crazy.

LostInFoundation

@Michael Scheurer I second this request …plus I raise with a “choice at the end of an installation if we want to keep the iso of the installation on our computer instead of being automatically deleted”. Or to give us back the possibility to download the installation file from NI site.

But they won’ like this one, cause it would make users less dependent from NA…

Kubrak

It was possible in Service Center predecessor of NA, in past. My guess is, that NI has removed it not to fill up the discs of users who do not understand things.

Anyway, one may 'catch' the installation files and copy it before NA will remove it. I do it for big libraries (15+ GB).

dre

this is TRULY a joke. I follow the delete farcical instructions and native access says it needs repairing. I don't need Kontakt 5, 6 & 7 FFS! Support are a joke too, 4 days to reply to a message. I suppose, once they have your money there's no incentive to act expeditiously (or at all).

Avasopht

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/82889#Comment_82889

The problem is that I have 225 products, and it's a tedious task even with their registry removal tool.

It's not the end of the world, I have been able to manually remove them, but it is a huge red flag.

---

A little context: I just got a new external SSD and had assigned all folders except for the Content Location (for some reason), causing them to install to my much smaller internal drive. Copying the files would have taken an eternity, so I had to just delete the files and start again.

Avasopht

Oh yeah! .. Robocopy ..., I must be really tired today - should've known better.

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