I am using finale 2007 and just got the 2.5 update a couple days ago. I installed it and everything had been working PERFECTLY up until this morning. I went to load the sounds into kontakt for a new score I was starting and it came up with an error message that said, [b]";There was an error trying to acquire a license for this patch. Your hardware has changed. Please use the service center to re-activate.";[/b] I have tried getting all the updates for kontakt as I was instructed by the NI service call center, and I have tried uninstalling and reinstalling everything short of finale. I honestly dont know what happened cuz it was working fine last night. I even tried opening an existing document that already had the sounds loaded and notes written and when I press play, it will start to try to do something, then stop and not work. Then when I open kontakt in finale the instruments are still there, but the keyboard is not highlighted with any notes and does not play any back. The odd thing is that if I open kontakt independently, and run it on its own, it will work fine. I can load all the sounds and here them when I click on the keyboard. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

- S. Tarrel

Try this. Restart your machine, then launch the NI Service Center application. Click the ";Main Menu"; button the go to the section labeled ";Product Overview."; Check what it says for Virtual Drumline 2.5 in the ";Activation Status"; tab. If it says ";not activated"; (in red), go back to the ";main menu"; then select ";Online Activation Assistant";. For now, if there are any other products that appear there, just make sure that VDL 2.5 has a check mark, then click the ";next"; button to activate. You may need to contact Native Instruments support again to ensure they're getting you through the entire problem, but hopefully this is just a little wrinkle that will be easily solved with the Service Center program.

Thanks for the tips Jim. I went through everything you suggested, but I still cant get it to work. I have no idea what the problem is. I guess I will have to call NI service center again come monday and hopefully get it figured out. If you have any other ideas in the meantime I would appreciate it. Thanks.
- Sam

Sam - a couple more questions for you to look into:

1 - Have you moved your VDL library files around at all, or made any duplicates of them? It's possible that KP2 might be confused on the direct path to the library files. By default, they're placed in Program Files>Tapspace>Virtual Drumline 2.5. In KP2, you may want to recheck that the ";library path"; is correct. Do this by clicking the ";info"; button in the VDL 2.5 section of KP2.

2 - What version of KP2 are you using? You can check by clicking the Kontakt Player 2 logo in the upper-left corner of the KP2 window. The KP2 version number should appear i the upper left corner of the ";about"; screen that you see. The VDL 2.5 DVD shipped with Kontakt Player 2 version 2.2.2.001, however NI recently released a 2.2.3 update, so you might try grabbing that using the ";Update Manager"; section of the NI Service Center application.

Hey. So I checked on the library paths and made sure I had all the correct updates and versions of the programs, and they all checked out. For those of you out there who might be having a similar problem though, the one thing I didn't think about checking was if I still had finale opening in rosetta from before 2.5 came out, and sure enough I did. I took it off rosetta and everything started working just fine! Thanks a lot Jim for all your help.
- Sam