Why do KONTAKT Libraries use less than the advertised disk space?

KONTAKT uses a proprietary file compression format called NCW. For example, the uncompressed file size of the KONTAKT Factory library is 43 GB. Once converted to the NCW format, the library size is 23.26 GB.

These sample files are uncompressed into your computer's RAM when the library instrument is loaded in KONTAKT. As soon as you close the library, the sample files will be deleted from RAM again.

Thanks to this technology, the KONTAKT libraries are smaller than their earlier equivalents, yet contain more instruments and samples. This results in a faster installation process and smaller file sizes while allowing for a much larger collection of sounds. 

On the product pages, you may notice an uncompressed file size amount that is much higher than the size of your actual library. This is referring to the uncompressed library size, which does not match your actual library file size.

Since our KOMPLETE bundles include many KONTAKT libraries, the same applies to them.