Installing with the Nolvra Hub

The Hub is the shortest path from purchase to a plugin in your DAW — sign in, install, rescan.

What the Hub does

The Nolvra Hub is a free desktop app for macOS and Windows that holds your account, your licenses, your downloads and your installs in one place. It is the easiest way to get a Nolvra plugin onto a machine, and it is where device management lives.

Installing a product

Download and open the Hub

Get it from the Hub page on nolvra.com, in the build for your platform. The macOS version needs macOS 14 or later and runs natively on both Apple Silicon and Intel Macs.

Sign in

The Hub signs you in with a one-time code sent to your email — there are no passwords. Use the same email address you bought with; that is what your licenses are tied to.

Find the product under My Products

Everything your account owns appears there, with its current state: available to install, installed, or an update waiting.

Install

Hit Install. The Hub downloads the product, runs the installer and puts each format in the right folder.

Rescan in your DAW

Your DAW caches its plugin list. Rescan — in most hosts that is a button in the plugin manager, and in some it just means restarting — and the plugin appears like any other.

The Nolvra Hub sign-in card: an EMAIL field reading you@example.com, a SEND LOGIN CODE button, and a line beneath it reading "We'll email you a six-digit code. No password needed."

Two product cards under My Products — NOLVRA SURGE marked OWNED · INSTALLED with an OPEN button, and NOLVRA PLUNGE marked OWNED with an INSTALL button.

Where plugins are installed on macOS

VST3~/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/VST3
Audio Unit~/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/Components
StandaloneApplications, where a product ships one

Installing without an admin password

Nolvra's macOS installers put plugins in your home Library rather than the system-wide one. That means no admin password, and it means a plugin installed for you is not installed for another user account on the same Mac.

If you have an older copy of a Nolvra plugin in the system-wide /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins, your DAW may load that one instead. The Hub sees both locations and reports what it finds.

On Windows

The Hub runs on Windows and the steps above are the same steps. What differs is the format and the folder: Windows has VST3 and no AU, and installers place the VST3 in the standard system VST3 folder rather than a per-user Library. The article on installing on Windows covers the platform end to end.

Updates

The Hub shows an update when a newer version of something you own is published, and installs it in place. Nothing is downloaded silently — an update happens when you click it.

The Hub does not need to stay open

Open it when you want to install, update, or manage licenses. It does not need to run in the background for your plugins to work.

RELIC is the one exception worth knowing: because it is the free product, it checks for a signed-in Hub session rather than a license key. You still do not need the Hub running, but you do need to have signed in on that machine.

First launch downloads

Two products fetch something on first use rather than shipping it in the installer: SURGE downloads its sound bank, and RAW downloads its de-reverb model when you press DOWNLOAD MODEL. Both are one-time, both are verified after download, and both are cached locally afterwards. See the article on first-launch downloads for detail.

Still stuck?

Nothing here matching? Write to a person.

support@nolvra.com