Helpful support from Native Instruments

After being a regular user of Battery 3 for over 10 years, I decided that it was about time I upgraded. I went ahead and purchased Battery 4. Unfortunately I skipped over reading most of the info on the website and completely missed the bit about installation of all current NI products now being online only. I hate online installations and I might have changed my mind about sticking with NI if I had read the blurb earlier. Too late.

So I went ahead and installed the installer "Native Access". It installed ok but didn't work properly, so I contacted support on the NI website. I asked whether an offline installation for Battery was possible. The guy was helpful and supplied me with a link to 2 ISO files. After a bit of downloading, etc., I had the Battery 4 installation files which installed easily and quickly. To authorize Battery I had to run the disfunctional Native Access, which didn't display properly and crashed shortly after launching. After that I launched Battery and it was no longer in demo mode, so Native Access automatic authorizating apparently worked. Sorted.

Now all I need is some drum maps.

Helpful support from Native Instruments is often an oxymoron. Lucky for you.

emwhy
Did they give you an upgrade price on version 4?

 
Yes. 99 Euros or 159 AU$, which I believe is around half the full price.

Jeff Evans
...have quite a lot of Native stuff and for me Native Access has been totally fine for me...

 
On my system the GUI doesn't display properly. It's mostly blank with a few blue shapes and no text.

Helpful support from Native Instruments

 
5 words that I didn't know went together.
 
I also got caught with the NI Access thing when I bought Komplete 11. I'd had other NI things before that were easy enough to install offline and there was a deal on so I bit thinking all would be as I was used to. My DAW pc was not even online at this point and never had been - something that I intended to stick to and had steadfastly avoided buying anything that required being online.  I didn't bother to install it and intended to sell it on as unopened if I could, but then I was finally forced to concede defeat in my bid to remain offline as something else I had bought required a windows update. So I figured that having gone to the trouble of hooking it up, I might as well give the NI thing a go then. Despite me having hooked up the physical HD that I bought assuming it would take the pain out of the installation process, it then proceeded to download everything again even though it recognised that the HD was present and correct. When I say downloaded again, just about every single one crashed repeatedly just before completing the download, thus requiring a restart and even the ones that did complete failed to install properly......so many hours in I gave up and asked for NI help which turned out to be the Suckiest thing since Sucky the Sucker built the town of Sucksville in the county of Sucksboro, North Suckshire, Suckland. BTW at the border of this town is a welcome sign informing the reader that it is twinned with the town of Blowsboro in the county of Blowsville which is in the inhospitable northern region of the country named Blowsland.
 
Anyhoo, no response for days, then the ticket was closed as solved even though they hadn't replied. Tried again, pointing this out and got a response that suggested that whoever sent it hadn't even read the question. Tried again.....same. Asked why it was downloading all this stuff that I already had on the HD anyway, question ignored. Asked again....same. Asked why my questions were being ignored. I'm sure you can guess how that went.
 
Somebody shoot me if I ever express any interest in anything they offer ever again.
 
 

I've had nothing but excellent support from NI. They were very responsive to my request and solved arguable issue in my favor. Top-notch company with top-notch services and instruments!

It seems you have quite other experiences or at least another manner to deal with those installers. For me they are just a pain in the ...
 
I do not have such a fast internet connection, I live in the country side. And I think many towners forget that there are also people living outside of centers (if we are people for them!). Sometimes we have even a broken internet line for several days (storms), so having all depending on the net is not so cool for us!

Kev999

Jeff Evans
...have quite a lot of Native stuff and for me Native Access has been totally fine for me...

 
On my system the GUI doesn't display properly. It's mostly blank with a few blue shapes and no text.

I have the same issue -from what I can gather, the problem on my system is that the graphics card needs to be open GL2.0 or higher compliance. I have an older graphics card that is GL 1. something or other. It was a very high end graphics card for it's time, and I don't feel the need to update NI as bad as I feel the need to not spend more money on hardware. It's just fancier picture graphics, so it's not at all important - but they lose my sale until I have a better need to update what isn't broke.

Rbh

Kev999
On my system the GUI doesn't display properly. It's mostly blank with a few blue shapes and no text.

I have the same issue -from what I can gather, the problem on my system is that the graphics card needs to be open GL2.0 or higher compliance. I have an older graphics card that is GL 1. something or other. It was a very high end graphics card for it's time, and I don't feel the need to update NI as bad as I feel the need to not spend more money on hardware. It's just fancier picture graphics, so it's not at all important - but they lose my sale until I have a better need to update what isn't broke.

 
Apparently OpenGL v2.1 is required and my 2 Matrox cards only support v2.0. Updating the drivers didn't change anything.

marled
I do not have such a fast internet connection, I live in the country side.

Same here.  I still have a couple 30G instruments to download from K11U that I bought months ago.  I have to share a 4Mb x 768Kb internet pipe with the wife, so it's a PITA at times.
 

Limited internet bandwidth & speed isn't necessarily exclusive to quiet countryside. I'm in a busy town on a busy road with noisy traffic and schools nearby. But it's in a rural setting, a long way from any cities, and therefore near the bottom of the government's priory list for technology upgrades. It's been improving lately though.

I'm actually now regretting that I made the purchase. Battery 4 merely seems like a slightly tidied-up version of Battery 3 and it comes with a much smaller library, i.e. under 4GB. I can use the kits from the earlier version, but so what. I haven't really gained much after spending $159.