A composer who works in Cubase had bought Native Instruments’ Komplete collection and felt overwhelmed by how many libraries Kontakt was showing him, so we switched off the ones he didn’t need in Kontakt’s own library options.
Komplete is an amazing collection of sounds, with something for almost any genre of music, from acoustic instrument sample libraries and sound design tools to recreations of vintage electronic instruments and modern soft synths. The amount of content can be a lot to take in, though. My client was a composer who was only really interested in the orchestral and real acoustic sounds in the collection, and he was feeling overwhelmed by everything else.
We had a discussion about what might be appropriate for him. Rather than uninstalling anything, I suggested an easy way to cut down what he was seeing, which was to switch off the libraries he didn’t want from inside Kontakt:
- In Kontakt, go to File and then Options.
- In the Options window, open the Libraries tab.
- Untick the box for each library you don’t want Kontakt to show.
He wasn’t interested in using the Abbey Road Drummers or the Session Guitarist and Session Bassist instruments, so we unticked those. He didn’t want the soft synths either, such as Reaktor, Absynth and Battery.
On the orchestral side, I showed him that the Symphony Series would suit him and his type of work. He had both the Symphony Series and the Symphony Essentials series active. The Essentials are stripped-down versions of the same instruments, not demos, and he only needed the full ones, Symphony Series Woodwind, Strings and so on. So we disabled the Essentials as well.
Unticking a library in Kontakt’s Libraries tab doesn’t uninstall it, so it can be turned back on in the future if it’s needed.
It’s only a small feature of Komplete, but my client found it very helpful to have far fewer Kontakt libraries in front of him.
If Komplete has filled Kontakt with instruments you’ll never use, the Libraries tab in Kontakt’s options lets you trim the list down to the ones you work with.
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