Hi all,
I’m dealing with a persistent issue where Komplete Kontrol (and its associated NI plugins) won’t load or get recognized as VST3 inside Ableton Live on my Mac.
I’ve gone through every fix I could find in the NI knowledge base, the Ableton help docs, and multiple community threads, and none of it has resolved the problem.
Posting the full list here so I’m not told to “just rescan” or “just reinstall” — I’ve done both, repeatedly.
Setup: Mac, Ableton Live 12, Komplete Kontrol (latest via Native Access).
Everything I’ve tried so far:
• Verified the actual .vst3 files exist in Macintosh HD > Library > Audio > Plug-Ins > VST3, confirming they weren’t missing or misplaced.
• Went into Ableton’s Preferences > Plug-Ins and did a full forced rescan by holding Option/Alt and clicking “Rescan.”
• Toggled “Use VST3 Plug-In System Folders” off, then back on, followed by another rescan and restart, per the common Ableton fix for stuck/incomplete scans.
• Checked the “Use VST3 Plug-In Custom Folder” setting to make sure it wasn’t pointing somewhere that conflicted with the system folder.
• Reinstalled Komplete Kontrol entirely through Native Access (Library > Installed > three-dot menu > Reinstall), quitting Ableton and all audio software first as instructed.
• Rolled back and tried installing a previous version of Komplete Kontrol instead of the latest release, in case it was a regression.
• Deleted the Komplete Kontrol database folder at ~/Library/Application Support/Native Instruments/Komplete Kontrol to force a full database rebuild, then relaunched and let it regenerate — took a while, no change.
• Dug into Ableton’s plugin-scan logs (PluginScanner.txt / PluginScanDb.txt in the Live Preferences folder) to see if the plugin was being flagged as skipped or failed during scan — didn’t find anything conclusive pointing to a fix.
• Confirmed NIHardwareAgent and NIHostIntegrationAgent are both present and enabled as macOS login items, since a missing agent is a known cause of NI plugins/hardware not being recognized.
• Restarted both Ableton and the whole machine multiple times between each of the above steps, in case it was a stale cache/session issue rather than a config problem.
None of it has worked. Komplete Kontrol still fails to load as a VST3 in Ableton, or Ableton simply doesn’t list it after a rescan. At this point I’m fairly confident it’s not a “reinstall and rescan” situation, since that’s the first three things I tried.
Has anyone actually solved this at a deeper level — something involving corrupted plugin cache files outside the obvious database folder, a permissions issue, a conflict with another VST3 host process, or something NI support hasn’t documented publicly? Genuinely stuck and would appreciate anyone who’s been through this exact wall.
Thanks in advance.
