Download problems

Three different downloads

There are three kinds of download in the Nolvra range, and they fail differently: the product installer from the Hub, SURGE's sound bank on first launch, and RAW's de-reverb model. Knowing which one you are looking at is most of the diagnosis.

The Hub download stalls or fails

Symptom: a product sits in Downloading and does not advance, or reports a failure.

Cause: most often a network that inspects or throttles large binary downloads — corporate, campus and some ISP-level filters — or a full disk.

Fix: retry from the Hub. If it fails at the same point every time, check free disk space first, then try a different network. A phone hotspot is a fast way to tell the two apart.

SURGE opens without its bank

Symptom: SURGE opens onto a message with RETRY DOWNLOAD and OPEN HUB rather than a populated browser.

Cause: the first-launch bank download did not finish. SURGE writes to a partial file and only moves it into place once it verifies, so an interrupted download leaves nothing usable — but also nothing corrupt.

Fix: press RETRY DOWNLOAD. The retry starts cleanly; the partial file is not reused. If it keeps failing, the network causes above apply.

RAW's model will not download

Symptom: the DOWNLOAD MODEL button runs and then offers RETRY DOWNLOAD.

Cause: the same network and disk causes, or a checksum mismatch. RAW verifies the model file after downloading it and rejects a file that does not match — a truncated or altered download fails at that point rather than being used and producing bad audio later.

Fix: retry. A rejected file is not reused, so retrying is always safe. Check disk space if it fails at a consistent point.

Reading the progress figures honestly

RAW's download readouts are measured, not estimated: the percentage is bytes actually written to disk, and the remaining-time figure is derived from a smoothed measurement of real transfer speed.

This matters for diagnosis. If the speed reads zero and stays there, the connection has genuinely stopped — the plugin is not stuck, the transfer is. Nothing here advances a progress bar on a timer to look busy.

Where the files go

RAW's model is cached in ~/Library/Application Support/Nolvra/RAW/models/. Nolvra's other support data lives alongside it under ~/Library/Application Support/Nolvra/.

Both first-launch downloads are one-time. Once the file is in place and verified, the product works with no network at all.

"Nothing downloads, but everything else works"

If authorisation succeeds and only new downloads fail, that is a fault on our side rather than yours — a signing failure on the download address, for example. What you have on disk keeps working; only new downloads are affected.

That state alarms our end automatically, so it is generally being worked on before you write. If it persists for more than a few hours, tell us anyway.

What to send us

The product, what the progress showed when it stopped, your macOS version, and whether you are on a corporate or campus network. Do not send your license key.