NKS compatible "Spitfire Audio Plugins" no longer shown in "Komplete Kontrol 3.0"

Note that the Spitfire plugins can all be instantiated in KK3 by using the Plugin row and clicking + and selecting them in the VST3 menu that pops up. The knob row will be automatically mapped to their parameters and work just fine that way, but the parameters won't have NKS names and page names. So this is specific to the NKS format, which is why I guessed (with 90% confidence) that the problem was they made a new format parser when they added NKS2 and it rejected the quirks in the Spitfire NKS files. Their rep says that's not it, but there's a good 10% chance the rep doesn't know the actual root cause and was told something else (spend some time in tech companies if you don't think this is possible), so I'm not taking that as dispositive.

I don't know if anyone's mentioned but the u-He plugins have a similar problem. They show up in NKS, but on launching via NKS I get "Can't be loaded Apple Silicon or VST2 to VST3 hasn't been implemented" error dialog, yet PlugInfo confirms they are all Apple Silicon and VST3. The u-he plugins can all be instantiated fine directly in the KK3 plugin row like the Spitfires can, but even though in that case the presets are still visible in the NKS browser, they still put up that error trying to load them into the already instantiated plugin. I will note u-he is probably the single most skilled plugin dev in the world. So if that also broke this is 100% NI having issues that NI has to fix. If it's not the file format parser, then it is the interfacing with the plugin automation API, and to be clear, u-he almost certainly has implemented their end of that API in exemplary fashion and NI needs to figure it out.

I will add that this Apple Silicon Error dialog also appears in the one Spitfire plugin that has NKS visible, the Speculative Memories under SA recordings. This (99% confidence) means NI learned of the false error dialog incompatibility before launch, and manually blocked the Spitfire files from being parsed. They forgot to also do the "SA Recordings" and u-He NKS files when they did that.

I believe you are likely to be right on this. There were problems with Spitfire libraries inside KK a year ago that I raised with NI & Spitfire. Both acknowledged the problems and between the lines I concluded that nothing was going to happen until the new hardware and software were released and even then not too quickly. I wold expect to see some progress in the first half of this year.

Well.. I would say that the new dependence of NKS2 on the S-Mk3 on-device cpu quite possibly has caused a resource shortage... HUMAN resource to tackle what needs attention.

Had NI not gone down this embedded path, adopting a next-gen NKS might be moving faster & more smoothly.

Did NI management want a hardware-dongle like Universal Audio? Perhaps so.

Neither I, the manual, nor Google understand what you mean by "update the NKS resources." Rescan the library didn't work. The presets are all there, the plugins instantiate directly, but they put up the Apple Silicon Error dialog when attempting to load a NKS preset. Has anyone gotten Repro or Zebra to run in Mac KK3 on Apple Silicon?

Above notion seems counter to NI's stated reason for putting a computer inside the MK3. Surely they can flash update the keyboard firmware as required for some years to come?

OK I looked at the files, the Spitfire NKS files are partly XML, and the newer u-he files and lots of others are YAML or something concise. Speculative Memories, which is parsed, is XML: so the KK3 parser still reads XML format NKS. But it don't work.

In theory we could reverse engineer the format changes and write a translator ourselves, but if NI has forcibly filtered Spitfire out of the parsing because it shows the error, then it probably won't accept our manually translated files either. Both companies would then have to update their ends of the equation. And maybe NI wants to wait until Spitfire has done all of its libraries in the new format, and that's what's taking so much time. And again, Spitfire may tell NI to write its own translator and manage their own hardware compatibility.

Of course, Spitfire has a large set of Kontakt libs still under vigorish, so maybe they would negotiate a break in the vig for the NKS work. This is one of those coopetitive situations where there is give and take. Also the 3rd parties are going to want to lean toward open standards rather than a bunch of proprietary tedium.