How To Delete A Kontakt Library (on Windows)

I've just wasted half an hour of my life trying to work out how to make an unwanted Kontakt library disappear from the library tab of Kontakt's browser pane and from Native Access.

Why? Well a few weeks ago I upgraded from Kontakt Player to the full version of Kontakt. Player comes with the Factory Library Selection library which contains a subset of the instruments of the full Kontakt Factory Library that I now have. So I no longer need the Factory Selection library and wanted to remove it.

I loaded up Native Access and searched for the uninstall button. Guess what? No such button. OK, could I delete the library from Kontakt? Nope. I can hide it, but not delete it. Great.

Anyway after a bit of Googling I found how to do it on Windows ... manually delete the library and hack the registry! Yeah, really! Mac users have to search out and delete something called a plist, apparently.

And where on the Native Instruments website did I find this gem of information? I didn't - it was on the Spitfire Audio site!

I've followed Spitfire's instructions and it all worked with Kontakt 6.5.0 and Native Access 1.13.2 on Windows 10 version 1909. I've expanded on their instructions for Windows below.

If you're using a Mac I'm afraid I can't help - I don't have one. But you can read Spitfire's advice.

Warning: We're going to edit the Windows registry - this can be hazardous to your Windows installation. You might want to create a system restore point before going on.

  1. Start Native Access. Go to the Installed products page and check your library is listed. Click on the library's name to display its information on the right. Choose the Installation Path tab in the panel and make a note of the path where the library is installed. You'll need this later.

  2. Close Native Access and close Kontakt if it's open.

  3. Right click the Windows Start Menu button and click on Command Prompt (Admin). You may need to provide your admin password at this point.

  4. Enter regedit and press Enter. This will start the Windows registry editor.

  5. In the left hand pane navigate through the tree to open the HKEY_CURRENT_USER > Software > Native Instruments folder. Within this folder you should see a sub-folder named after the library you want to delete. Highlight that folder and press Delete to, yep, delete it.

  6. Now navigate to the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE > Software > Native Instruments folder and delete the libray's sub-folder in the same way.

  7. You can now close the Registry Editor.

  8. Open Windows Explorer and navigate to the library's installation folder that you noted earlier. Delete that folder.

  9. Close Explorer if you want.

  10. Re-open Native Access and go to the Installed products page again. Check that the library has gone from the list. Now open the Not installed page - the library will probably appear there now because it's still registered to you and available for re-installation if you ever need it in the future.

  11. Start Kontakt, either stand-alone or as a plugin in your DAW, and check that the library is gone.

  12. We're done, so you can close Native Access.

I think this information also applies to deleting any other library from Native Access - just skip the Kontakt specific steps above.

And what if you want to delete a library that appears in Kontakt's Files tab? Easy, just delete the folder from your hard disk and re-start Kontakt.

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