Native Instruments Komplete Kontrol/Maschine now Apple Silicon Native (barely)

[Eight4aWish]

I am very pleased they finally released something we could play with. Recreating nksf presets for those vst3s which don’t auto migrate is not a big job. Retagging them however is time consuming. If NI published documentation on the nksf file format and had allowed a few more people access to the beta then I am guessing we would all be up and running by now. Steinberg ditching vst means the switch to vst3 is irreversible. Clap is presumably a better format but will struggle to gain traction (and has a ridiculous name). I do wonder if there is some memory leakage in the first release version of KK because I have had to slow down the scripts I use to make presets on my M1 Mac.

[spacepluk]

fwiw it’s working great with all my stuff from u-he, arturia and spitfire…

In Rosetta mode or not? With VST and VST3 installed or just VST3?

Running native in both Logic and Live + KK's AudioUnit. All my plugins have all the formats installed.

[Urs]

What is more amazing is NI have built into KK and Maschine a framework for non NI plugins to also migrate from VST2 based NKS to VST3 based NKS and many plugins can already do this. Those that I have tested that can do this already include plugins from:

There is no NKS SDK based on VST3 yet. You can surely load presets into VST3 versions, and maybe controller assignments even work, but VST3 versions can not be "NKS ready" with all the added functionality in the plug-in.

Unless of course such an SDK was seeded to some folks, but not to us.

[EvilDragon]

It wasn't, there's still no NKS SDK for VST3 AFAIK. :/

But what aMUSEd says here about VST2 to VST3 migration built into KK/MAS is true. However the plugin has to support that, to my knowledge.

[Urs]

It wasn't, there's still no NKS SDK for VST3 AFAIK. :/

But what aMUSEd says here about VST2 to VST3 migration built into KK/MAS is true. However the plugin has to support that, to my knowledge.

Yeah, it's an undocumented API, or was, when we dealt with VST3 last. We hope to support it next year.

[EvilDragon]

It's the moduleinfo.json/IPluginCompatibility interface introduced in VST3 SDK version 3.7.5.

https://steinbergmedia.github.io/vst3_d ... 3.7.5.html

[Urs]

Yes, where 3.7.5 is the key information - supporting VST3 is little bit like supporting Apple: Every year there's yet another change that needs to be developed for.

(Which is why we're switching to a different system where we can update plug-in compatibility independent of the state of our own codebase. So we can react to these pesky changes faster.)

[teilo]

Those of us who have been watching this knew full well that a native native KK / Machine 2 would have no VST2 support. Native Instruments and Izotope both decided not to risk lawsuits from Steinberg (that would probably never come) and not release VST2 support in any of the AS-native versions of their software. I'm grateful that Arturia was more reasonable.

[onnomusic]

Just ran into the same problem with my U-he products amongst others not working which is a shame of course.
To me Its crazy that a big company like NI gets it so wrong every time when it comes to backwards compatibility.
How hard can it be to have these presets automatically point to the vst 3 plugins when you decide to ditch vst2.

Is there a discussion on the NI message board already where I can chime in?

[aMUSEd]

NI have implemented it their end but it also needs support in the plugin and understandably that may take time - especially since it sounds like NI could have communicated this better with some of their NKS partners

[Urs]

it sounds like NI could have communicated this better with some of their NKS partners

Or better yet, any communication at all.

[aMUSEd]

it sounds like NI could have communicated this better with some of their NKS partners

Or better yet, any communication at all.

Yeah I’m not happy about that

[magog]

Well, I'm glad I read this thread before updating! The new Komplete Kontrol update looks perfectly benign in Native Access. There's nothing that says "hey beware - if you install this update, many of your instruments will be unavailable until the third party developers get on board".

I think I just hit the "Update All" button two days ago and got the update just before this one. So I narrowly (and accidentally) avoided a huge amount of pain.

I think that's the most annoying thing about this. Breaking updates will happen from time to time - I get it. But please be transparent with your users.

[aMUSEd]

It just depends on what you care about. Personally I'm much happier having the ability to control plugins like Plasmonic and the new Korg synths using Komplete Kontrol and load other VST3 plugins than worry too much about a bunch of NKS presets from older plugins. The instruments actually still load perfectly fine apart from a few that haven't yet made it to ARM native, and I can still control those too, so this is really more of a problem if you are bothered about having a massive library of third party NKS presets. I can live without most of those for a few months, eventually I expect to get back access to most of those presets and any I really need can easily be resaved using the VST3 version as NKS anyway - but in the meantime I have what is now a fast streamlined setup with hardware access to and control over the latest plugins.

[kidslow]

Good summary of the trade-offs.