KK working with most 3rd party NKS only in Rosetta for me

spicemix

Came back because somehow everything borked. Didn't find anything on this on a search.

I'm on Mac M1 Ultra 14.5 with KK 2.9.6 and 3.2.1, using only VST3 plugins, and things used to work in both KKs but something broke at some point and now I only get Kontakt 7 and Jester's NKS opening plugins properly, but other NKS from 3rd parties are only working in Rosetta mode.

These VST3's are all M1-native plugins according to PlugInfo. I can instantiate them directly into KK but not via an NKS patch load, I get the VST2/3 transition or Apple Silicon dialog thing. But I don't get that dialog in Rosetta mode and everything works as it did in Rosetta. This is true both standalone KK and plugin KK.

I have rescanned plugs and libs and didn't do anything too odd to my system. I get a full plugin re-scan in KK3 every time I open it, which took years as I have 2000 paid plugins and so I deleted all VST3s other than the instruments I use in KK and I am relying on Logic AU plugins for the mixing outside of KK. A fine mess all around.

I don't want to reinstall 2000 plugins by hand and constantly search for a bad one that is ruining everything if that's what's happening. I may have NKS that still point to plugins I removed if that's an issue (if that's an issue NI should fix it). I don't know if there's some kind of corruption that I could purge. Rolling back to 2.9.6 didn't fix this issue but Rosetta did. That is odd but maybe there's a bad plugin, or bad NKS, for M1 wrecking the works. But that doesn't explain why Jester NKS makes Omnisphere etc still work native but other 3rd party NKS like u-He/UVI/Arturia don't work other than in Rosetta. It was all working a few weeks ago. Sonoma 14.5 did this?

Oh and kudos to Jester for making NKS that work regardless.

Kymeia

u-He/UVI/Arturia all work fine on Mx without Rosetta but have different requirements for plugin migration to work

For anything u-he the routine as per their site is you must install the latest versions while in native mode, then do a complete on demand plugin and NKS rescan. Also you ever do a plugin scan while in Rosetta mode you need to do it again when you switch back to native, their plugins seem able to detect which mode they are in and swap between modes but only when the plugin scan happens. This only applies to their official NKS products, the older non NKS ones do still need Rosetta (eg Bazille, ACE etc)

For Arturia you must make sure the NKS are being installed in their software centre. This may require deselecting silent installs in options to ensure third party content is selected

UVI plugins though should all migrate as they are one of the few devs that implemented it early on and unlike many, did the job properly. So they should be working fine in native - most don’t have official NKS of course

JesterMgee

Trust me when I say the reason things work from my end is because I have invested a LOT of time to not only find out why things do/don't work but also how to fix most issues with VST2/3 migration. It was easily 12 months of work reading hex code to find out how to make older VST2 content update and work with VST3 which doesn't work in every instance but luckily for things like Omnisphere it was possible to update older VST2 content to VST3.

UVI is fully migratable so projects you had should still work, however there may be an issue at play which isn't the plugin, likely it is KK being the problem.

While some plugins can migrate to VST3 I do not believe KK can migrate to VST3 from the VST2 version so old projects created using KK VST2 may not work with KK VST3 and would have to be updated by hand. That will involve loading in Rosetta, Noting down what plugin is loaded in an instance of KK and if possible, export the plugin state (using the plugins preset save/export feature) then loading the VST3 version of KK and the VST3 plugin version.

Then of course all your NKS libraries need to be VST3 compatible for any plugins that do not do auto migration (which is like 90% of plugins out there). This is where you will find for my libraries at least there are now VST3 versions of the libraries where possible either updated or completely re-processed from scratch so as to work with VST3, most have been tested on both PC and Mac.

It's all a bit of a pain but with some careful planning, patience and a chunk of time you can get things updated. for mac users it's not like you really have a choice unless you want to run things in Rosetta mode forever, tho Apple will likely drop support for that like they drop support for pretty much everything eventually.

spicemix

Thanks Kymeia and all things I've already covered which is why I ask. My NKS is apparently hosed and I will need to either find where exactly it's getting hung up (no crashes on scans now that I have eliminated all but a relative few VST3s) or how to purge the database and cause a complete rebuild without manually re-installing everything from a fresh OS.

Thanks for your work on this Jester, I am not trying to migrate old projects from VST2, I simply have some kind of corrupted system that doesn't bother Rosetta mode but doesn't work with most 3rd party VST3 NKS even though they were working fine a month ago in M1 native. Your NKS is impressively resistant to whatever is corrupting my setup.

I should add I have everything updated to their latest versions. Also again I have tried rolling back to 2.9.6 and same issue appears.

JesterMgee

Yeah, firstly I don't use mac for this stuff and I certainly don't run the latest versions of everything either. KK V3 is useless for NKS using the methods I have, everything is 10x harder and more clunky to even try and make NKS. I actually use KK v2.9.4 not even 6 because it works but I developed my own tools and scripts to edit and check the CRC values in the NKS files to make sure things work which I then cross check on macOS so a lot of fussing around and time to make things work properly.

spicemix

Did more process of elimination style analysis and rebuilds and such and this is a tough problem. If something is corrupted, it isn't superficial to my system. This is a difficult matrix to get robust, and really defensive programming is everything here, the happy path isn't enough, scolding some 3rd party who steps out of line isn't a solution, everything has to be foolproofed. I suppose I will just use Kontakt and the few 3rd parties that work until an update. It seems they are having enough problems getting the mk3 keyboards working that it's chaos over there.

Anyway, anyone else having this issue, can find this thread at least, sorry I wasn't able to figure out what was wrong, I tried many things such as removing all plugins, all NKS, all prefs and XMLs, rebuilding things, everything short of total reinstall which simply isn't worth it to me. I'm not thinking this is a 3rd party anymore, how could it survive such a purge and rebuild. Closed source so I can't look for suspect checkins or do fine rolling back.

spicemix

Haha the one thing I didn't purge was Komplete Kontrol itself. I had figured rolling back to an earlier version would have done enough of that but apparently no. Native Access didn't offer an uninstall, instead just a list of folders I needed to manually delete, so I did all of those, reinstalled, and voila everything is back working.

So I was correct that the database is what got corrupted, there is no visible control to rebuild that, I had to brute force uninstall in order to get back running. No blue ribbon. But anyway, that is the solution if you find yourself in this mess.

spicemix

For some useful feedback, this episode revealed…

• ScanApp3 crashes, a lot, but there's no way of finding out what it crashed on
• Even though ScanApp3 crashes on some plugins, they still are present and work. Then why a validation scan? Why not just an NKS scan?
• Removing the VST3 plugin does not remove it from the NKS browser. It doesn't work of course, but it's still there. Shouldn't you, at least on a re-scan pass, nix NKS that doesn't have a working plugin? Not delete but hide, in case we re-install the plugin
• The settings window has plenty of scrollbars but can't be resized much. This is bad GUI from 90's Windows. If a window has scrollbars, we should be able to resize the window to make use of today's big screens
• There isn't much use for the plugins table anyway? We don't get a progressive readout when we re-scan. Show us what crashed, let us incrementally re-scan the selection, and re-scan the plugin and its NKS in one go
• Make an uninstaller for Native Access with the ability to wipe preferences to a clean install so I don't have to directory dive doing it by hand

KK is a terrific opportunity for the NI ecosystem with terrific hardware but the software simply never got finished. Thanks for providing a roadmap a while back but it was certainly unimaginative. The first thing we always want is bugs to be fixed, total robust software. Then we want promises fulfilled.

Maybe the better talent will have more time for KK after Maschine 3/Kontakt 8 are done. I would have deleted this if it wasn't great when it does work.