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3rd-Party VST GUI Not Visible When Using Maschine 3 as a Plugin in Ableton Live

dharmaeater

When I load Maschine 3 as a plugin in Ableton (Plugin Mode) and then load a third-party VST inside Maschine, the plugin's GUI does not appear. For example, if I load Serum within Maschine and click to open the Serum interface, a popup window opens, but it is completely blank. The window title bar displays the plugin name and the pin icon, but the actual plugin GUI is missing.

The plugin appears to load successfully, but the editor window remains empty. Resizing the window does not resolve the issue.

Setup:

Windows 10 PC
Ableton Live 12
Maschine 3.5 loaded as a VST within Ableton Live
Various Third-party plugins tested (e.g., Serum, Omnisphere, ShaperBox, etc)

Has anyone else encountered this issue or found a workaround?

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Comments

PoorFellow

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/51038/3rd-party-vst-gui-not-visible-when-using-maschine-3-as-a-plugin-in-ableton-live

I have tried to load Maschine 3 plugin as a VST3 in the Ableton Live 12 DAW and then in turn open plugins inside the Maschine 3 plugin, and I can confirm that that produce only problems. Such as a plugin only showing as a tiny square not greater than the close cross in top right of a Window , or plugins all scaling completely wrong beyond recovery.

I don't know if the Mascine 3 plugin is not supposed to be used that way. But we can try asking @Jeremy_NI what is the NI stance on this. If he does not respond then please ask N.I. Support .

JesterMgee

There use to be an issue with Komplete Kontrol v2 with the same problem when loading some VST plugins. Omnisphere 2 was always fine but many (such as Korg, Cherry Audio, GForce) would appear as a grey screen with no GUI.

From the discussions on the Beta with devs from years back it was determined something with Live not reporting to the plugin window correctly the actual resolution of the application or something like that, basically the issue was something NI had to workaround.

Never tried Maschine and not sure if KK V3 still has the same problem but it was only in Ableton and only on Windows I think, other DAWs like Cubase were fine.

Kymeia

This may indeed be a Windows thing as these plugins are loading properly for me in Maschine on Mac (Sequoia)

Jeremy_NI

@dharmaeater Are you using a High DPI monitor? Have you tried to disable auto scaling in Ableton? https://help.ableton.com/hc/en-us/articles/209775985-High-DPI-monitor-support

If that didn't help, can you share screenshots of the issue? What graphic card are you using? What kind of monitor and what are your Windows display settings?

Same questions for you @PoorFellow if you are experiencing the same.

PoorFellow

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/263878#Comment_263878

Are you using a High DPI monitor? Have you tried to disable auto scaling in Ableton?

My monitor , used in connection with this , is a rather cheap AOC Q3279VWF which I think is not High DPI (Product page and product Leaflet . ) using a resolution of 2560X1440 .

I have tried turning off both auto-scaling and turning off HDPI support in Ableton Live (then auto-scaling is not available) and result is exactly the same.

For testing I have used a third party app/VST3 plugin that is freely available to download so that all can test if they want , used was Cherry Audio Surrealistic MG-1 Plus VST3 .

Other plugins may not scale as badly as the C.A. Surrealistic MG-1 Plus being used here but all of the few plugins that I tested shows clear problems displaying inside the Maschine 3 plugin in Ableton Live 12 .

What graphic card are you using? What kind of monitor and what are your Windows display settings?

Platform : Windows 11 , version 25H2

Graphics card : NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Ti (driver version GF Game Ready 6.10.47 released 2026-05-26)

What kind of monitor : AOC Q3279VWF (I have other monitors not used here)(other desktops not active)

Windows display settings? : Scale % 175 , also tested with scale set at % 125 with exactly same result !

screenshots

In Maschine 3 plugin in Ableton Live 12

In Maschine 3 standalone app :

PoorFellow

@Jeremy_NI ,

I can inform that the problem does not appear when trying the same inside Cubase 14 which appear to display more or less fine like this :

Reason 13 also have problems though not to the same degree :

P.S.

Reason 14 Beta behaves a lot better :

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