Native Access and Kontakt Installation Notes

Installing Native Instruments Software on Linux

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Over the past few years, installing Native Instruments software on Linux via Wine has been at best difficult and at times impossible. I recently installed the latest Native Access software management tool and Kontakt 8. Below are my notes on the process; mostly for my own reference, but maybe they can be useful to someone else as well.

Software Versions

At the time of installation, I am using:

Installation process

Install Wine Staging from WineHQ

The current version of Wine packaged in the Fedora repos lags behind WineHQ and does not work properly for this process.

Add the WineHQ repo:

sudo dnf config-manager addrepo --from-repofile=https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/fedora/44/winehq.repo

Install Wine-Staging:

sudo dnf install winehq-staging

Winetricks is required, and the Fedora packaged version will not install with the WineHQ packaged Wine.

Install Winetricks by downloading the latest release from the releases page on GitHub.

Extract the archive and cd into the extracted folder.

sudo make install to install Winetricks system-wide.

Configure Wine

Install required DLLs:

winetricks wine-mono vcrun2022 powershell corefonts dotnet9

Use winecfg to set the Windows version to 10 and if desired change the desktop integration theme to dark.

Install Native Access

Download Native Access

Use this install script, which solves a few problems outlined on the notes page.

I needed to make a few changes to the script to get it to work properly:

When attempting to authenticate, the login page opens in the default browser. Authentication completes but, by default, it doesn't know how to open the native-access://authorize?code= URL scheme.

I was able to solve it using an older workaround documented on WineHQ AppDB.

Associate the URL Scheme with the .desktop entry.

mv ~/.local/share/applications/wine/Programs/Native\ Access.desktop ~/.local/share/applications/
update-desktop-database ~/.local/share/applications

and associate the URL scheme

xdg-mime default Native\ Access.desktop x-scheme-handler/native-access

Once that's done, when go through the login process, it should redirect back to Native Access and finish the login flow.

Native Access will now launch using the launch-script in $HOME/.local/share/applications/.

Install Kontakt 8

Kontakt 8 will not install directly in Wine. Instead, Kontakt 8 needs to be installed on Windows and files need to be copied from that installation over to Wine as outlined on WineHQ AppDB: Kontakt 8.

From Windows:

Copy the C:\Users\Public\Documents\Native Instruments\installed_products\Kontakt 8.json file

Copy the C:\Program Files\Native Instruments\Kontakt 8 folder.

Copy the C:\Program Files\Common Files\VST3\Kontakt 8.vst3 file if you intend to use the VST3 plugin in a DAW (Ardour, Reaper,...)

On Fedora:

Paste the "Kontakt 8.json" file into the $HOME/.wine/drive_c/users/Public/Documents/Native\ Instruments/installed_products/ folder

Paste the "Kontakt 8" directory in the $HOME/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Native Instruments/ folder

Create a VST3 directory In the $HOME/.wine/drive_c/users/Public/Program\ Files/Common\ Files/ folder. Then paste the "Kontakt 8.vst3" file into the VST3 folder.

Run Native Access launch script in $HOME/.local/share/applications.

In Native Access, you find the "Preferences" menu in the bottom-left corner of the window. Click it.

Click the "File Management" menu. Define the C:\Users\YOURLOGIN\Downloads folder as downloads location.

Close the preferences menu.(it can be necessary to hide and show the Native Access window to refresh the displaying)

Install one of the instruments you will use in Kontakt. For example, I install "The gentleman" (a light piano library). It will be proposed to install Kontakt with the instrument. You choose "yes". Both of Kontakt and the instrument will be installed. They appear in the "Installed" menu of the library when the installations are over.

wine $HOME/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Native\ Instruments/Kontakt\ 8/Kontakt\ 8.exe.

Chose "Run demo", let Kontakt open. Close it.

Re-open Kontakt with wine $HOME/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Native\ Instruments/Kontakt\ 8/Kontakt\ 8.exe .

This time Kontakt will open without asking anything. Your instrument is listed and Kontakt 8 now runs in activated mode.

Yabridge and Reaper

Yabridge bridges the Windows plug-ins in Wine to the DAW running in Linux.

Download the latest devel version of Yabridge from the Automated Builds page.

Extract the yabridge and yabridgectl folders in ~/.local/share.

Link the yabridgectl binary to a folder in your PATH.

ln -s ~/.local/share/yabridgectl/yabridgectl ~/.local/bin/

Add the VST and CLAP paths into yabridge.

yabridgectl add "$HOME/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Common Files/VST3"
yabridgectl add "$HOME/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Common Files/CLAP"

Run sync

yabridgectl sync

Finally download Reaper from Reaper.fm and run the installation script.

On launch, Reaper should sync the new plug-ins and Kontakt 8 along with any of its installed libraries should run.

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