Questions about transferring or reinstalling Komplete and other VIs on a new external Samsung T7 4TB

[joelfriedman]

HI all,
Happy Holidays! I have all my sample libraries on 2 Samsung T5 1 TB externals and I'm pretty much out of room on both. In addition I upgraded my NI Komplete from 11 Standard to 14 Ultimate (1/2 price plus a $50 voucher for the upgrade from NI's possible sinking ship!). I don't even have room to install the new parts of that. I just picked up a 4 TB T7 wanting to install and reorganize my libraries. It's been a l-o-n-g time since I've done this and I want to ask before doing.

FYI: This is on my iMacPro 2017 3.2 GHz, OS 13.6, 32GB RAM. DP 11.3.

I do have other libraries on these drives - Sibelius Sounds, OrangeTree, a bunch of 8Dio, some SoundIron, Spitfire Chamber Strings, etc. Surprisingly there are almost 2 TB of items on those 2 TB drives. It's also an opportunity to (possibly) reorganize the library, since I have them spread across 2 drives (e.g. 8Dio on both due to the chronology of their purchase and lack of space on each drive).

My thought was I wanted to transfer all of the older, existing libraries onto the new drive 1st, and then use Native Access to add the new NI libraries.

1st, I need to reformat the drive beforehand, yes?
2nd, what is the proper way to transfer to the new drive? Something tells me I shouldn't simply copy the folders over to the new drive. Would that work? I know I can and will need to point Kontakt to the new library locations, but I'm not sure it'll work for all.
Is there either need or an advantage to trying to go to the various vendors and do fresh installs? Seems like a LOT of work.

Anyway, I'd appreciate any advice. Thanks!

[mikehalloran]

Something tells me I shouldn't simply copy the folders over to the new drive. …

"Something" is wrong.

Of course, you can simply copy them over. The trick is to let your DAW know where they are after you have done so. With most, you navigate to the new location in the Player the first time you load. With others, it's a bit more difficult.

Komplete is easy— open Native Access after copying and navigate to the new location by clicking on the three dots to the far right. It's tricky with the first library only figuring out what Folder to select but, once you get the hang of it, you can re-link them all in a few minutes. This is much, much faster than having NA re-download them all and install them into the new location.

With IK Multimedia, it might be easier to let the IK Product Manager do a complete re-install. Version 1.10.0 released a few weeks ago finally gets this right after many years of problems. In addition, the $25 fee for downloading your libraries again after 180 days is a thing of the past—turns out, getting rid of that solved made most issues disappear..

Some other license downloaders/installers behave like NA while others are more difficult. None are impossible.

[joelfriedman]

Thanks, as always Mike. I'll wipe and reformat the drive and then start the process. Good to hear about IK Multimedia. Let's see how it goes!

Best,

Joel

[HCMarkus]

I did the "Sneaker Net" copy thing with all my Kontakt samples. Worked perfectly. I did the same with my Omnisphere and Stylus samples without issue. As Mike said, the key is letting your newly installed VI engines know where their samples are stored.

[joelfriedman]

Great, got it. Thank you both for your replies.