Why no mouse wheel inside Kontakt instruments?

ProfessorChaos

I just can't understand this. So many great instruments inside Kontakt, like the guitars, Lores, and now Fables, another amazing hybrid instrument with beautiful pads. NI has hit a home run with all these hybrid instruments, Ashlight, Arkhis, Lores and so many more.

But besides the fact that looking at their GUIs is always eye straining because they may be larger than your typical old fashioned Kontakt instrument, but even if you zoom the whole Kontakt GUI, the text is blurry as hell. Same for the guitars and others.

But even worse, you have a ton of presets in a list, but you can't use the mouse wheel, at least not in macOS. Wouldn't surprise me if you can in Windows, because macOS always gets the second class citizen treatment from all software developers, but in Kontakt under macOS, you can't. Of course it works if you want to scroll between instruments, if you loaded more than one, but anything inside the instrument, nothing.

So you want to listen to all the presets in a library like Fables, and you are forced to scroll by clicking and dragging a tiny scroll bar:

And it doesn't even scroll in a smooth way, or at least progressively as you move it. It works like a page up/down kind of thing, at one point it goes to the next page.

Native Instruments, do you think this is right, in almost 2024? Come on!!

Paule

No it isn't a second class treatment.

IMHO Mac produced too many OS in short time.

So the issue is in your OS system?

Kymeia

I don’t think this is a Mac vs Win thing, afaik many Kontakt libraries lack mouse wheel support, not sure why, but I guess it may be related to NI expecting more people to interact with them using controllers than mouse wheel (in my case that is certainly true)

ProfessorChaos

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/103938#Comment_103938

Sure, the problem is in macOS, an OS vastly superior to Windows.

Apple releases a new major version of macOS every year, Microsoft does about the same. You think that because they don’t increase the number at the end it’s not a major OS revision?

ProfessorChaos

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/104000#Comment_104000

How do you scroll the list of presets inside Kontakt instruments when using Kontakt?

Besides, it would be really annoying to have to move my hand to a controller rather than just scrolling the wheel.

saarang007

It's the same treatment on Windows OS, so it's not only MacOS thing.

Everyone doesn't have / prefer controllers and most of us still use mouse wheel (which is very convenient) to scroll through a long 'list'.

So I would like to request NI team...please add mouse scroll wheel support for Kontakt presets in the upcoming updates. It would be a 'good-to-have' for many of us. Third-party libraries / GUIs like Karanyi sounds, Decent Sampler, Spitfire have this basic functionality then why not Kontakt?

Mark Oxley

Mouse wheel scrolls through presets just fine for me.

Kontakt 7.8.1

Windows 11 Home 23H2

ProfessorChaos

It seems weird that both of you have Windows, and yet one of you has the same problem and the other doesn't. Mark, maybe you have a special mouse with one of those drivers that can do more than just the plain driver?

Either way, it's outrageous that we don't have this simple ability. How long have we had the mouse wheel? 30 years at least? Everything scrolls using the mouse wheel, why can't we scroll that way inside instruments in Kontakt? We can scroll inside Kontakt when we have more than one instrument loaded, but the moment the pointer is inside the instrument GUI, all wheel scrolling is gone. Why?

Besides, the scrolling inside some instruments is totally confusing, like the Sunburst guitar. There are two columns of presets, and you grab the scroll bar, move down and the presets that were at the top on the second column start showing at the bottom of the first column. It's an awful system. But even worse without the mouse wheel to scroll.

I don't get how one of the main companies in the industry stays behind so much in the visual aspect of their software. There have been some advances in the last year, but every time I load any Kontakt instrument, new or old, I know it's going to strain my eyes because of the blurry text. I bet the original sizes of these PNGs that make the different parts of the GUI must be tiny, so no wonder why it all looks bad when scaled up. I mean, I'm glad they finally gave us a GUI we can zoom, but it still sucks if you don't allow the companies that use Kontakt as their engine to use a larger version of their GUI.

Mark Oxley

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/150072#Comment_150072

All I can tell you is my mouse is an inexpensive wired Steel Series brand that is on default configuration. I haven't changed anything related to the scroll wheel. I would suggest looking at the mouse settings inside windows.