Why does Komplete Kontrol Plugin Scanning take so long ?

@trusampler

"I think the point is we shouldn’t have to deselect any plugins. The program should be implemented in a way that once a successful plugin scan is made, it doesn’t need to scan them again upon a restart"

Bang on. But KK was not designed with that in mind. It's primary (and only) MO is to fire up "scanapp.exe" each and every single run whether you have installed nothing new or 100 new plugins. It is incapable of a working with a delta checkpoint or has any ability to know/remember/read or load a prior scan config.

Now I can see why NI wants to subject us to this pain - so they have their bases covered. They do not want to be blamed for KK missing ANY weird plugin you just introduced - so they scan everything, everytime whether you like it or not.

Deselection is the only saving grace I could find. I WAS one of the users about 18 months ago that had to sit there for 2 mins while this thing ground away doing whatever it was doing. But as soon as I built out the new DAW and took complete control of what KK was allowed to use and see - things changed dramatically.

Yes it is a complete pain to do - but as long as I maintain a 5 sec startup - that is good by me.

VP

Wow…with all those misrepresentations and inferences of what I said you're missing the boat if you're not working for one of the major news organizations. Nice spin though.

First I keep the ones I'm most likely to need in Kontakt in Native Access, but that's not the only reason why others aren't there. I have a ton of 8DIO, Spitfire, Soundpaint and other libraries all of which aren't NKS licensed but may be NKS compatible. That's not a question of having everything used for creative output within Kontakt or KK because that sort of stuff happens as it does for most people in the DAW where all my tools come together and I'm rarely slowed down there.

In terms of a full scan that's only happened to me when I update. It does a slightly more complicated scan of just a couple of items the first time I start it fresh after a reboot or coming out of a long sleep period that takes maybe 5 seconds rather than just 2, so I'd suggest you may have something not working correctly in terms of your setup. The way you personally work isn't the key factor for how everyone works so insisting your requirements are what's good for everyone is just naive. This very well might be a bug in NI's design, but it's not affecting me and a whole lot of other people. It's just as likely you've got something strange going on in the way you have things setup, but it doesn't appear you're too open to that possibility.

Well I am on KK 2.9.6 for foreseeable so there is no fix for me.

But I am very happy with a 5 sec standalone scan time and the practically instant action when I drag KK into a Studio One session.

Cannot complain at all. And I really won’t be going back to the old days of 1200 plugins either. That is simply insane from a workflow angle.

VP

To reaffirm the topic in argument (because you are describing a completely different topic which is why I said I think you are confusing the topic), deselecting the plugins in the list of plugins within KK does not remove them from the scan, it simply removes the entry from the plugin list. This does not affect the scanning at all so you could deselect everything and still find KK scans for a long time. At least, for years this was always the case, given very little ever changed in KK V2 I wouldn't think this was ever changed either.

To remove theory from fact, here is how the scanning works from what I can determine

Originally, NI made things simple, the registry simply had a flag that set if it was a "first time scan" which would then scan each plugin and gather the plugins details, name, PLID, version, manufacturer which requires the plugin to be loaded to interrogate it, hence why some plugins will trigger registration or license notices during the scan, they are loaded in the background. Once completed this would simply switch this flag to say the scan is complete and next run KK would simply scan the plugins to check they exist which is a quick scan and what should be expected.

At some stage this was one thing that did changed back in v2.x where this flag does not appear any longer in registry (think it was simply called "firstTime" and instead as far as I can tell, KK uses the plugin.data file in AppData (which holds serialized data of all plugins scanned) to check against the plugins scanned and if anything has changed. I have no actual idea how it determines to do a full scan but it will scan based on detected changes so if the plugin paths have files that change, it may require another scan.

In past cases I have seen this issue occur if people add non-VST paths or paths that contain additional files like the root for C:\Program Files or the 32bit folder path. Sometimes plugins that are running in demo or unlicensed, not legit, free/dodgy plugins can cause changes and trigger scans.

It has always been a tried method to simply move all your plugins out of the VST2 (and now VST3) folders and start with first the official NI plugins and check things go smooth. My suggestion is to remove all paths from KK except for the VST3 path, test by adding 10 odd plugins back at a time and if everything tests out fine, add the VST2 path and again, add in plugins slowly and retest. It is a cumbersome problem but having had this issue myself in the past, and finding it was an outdated demo I never removed, it works. I can also say, when I thought disabling plugins was a faster way to test, it did nothing to help.

I also know some actual producers out there who have way more than even 1000+ plugins, like seemingly every plugin ever released, and apparently things work fine for them so it's not a case of "too many plugins" and it doesnt affect everyone, there are some simple workarounds, I always found just pressing ESC while the scanning splash screen is displayed to just be the quickest fix

could very well be. I mean, I have VST2 and 3 paths and I don’t get 5 second starts, more like 30 second but I know why, some subscription based plugins like Roland are the cause. I also did have long scans at some stage, think it was an outdated Eventide plugin.