Please make all UIs scalable

I'm a long-time NI user. I started with Kontakt version 1.5 on CD, and have now been a Komplete user for a long time. I also use a Maschine+ for noodling around on the couch, and as a controller for my main setup which is Cubase on Windows.

The one thing that really annoys me with NI software, is how cramped the UI is, and how it can't ever be expanded or resized. I remember it was a major improvement when Kontakt got the ability to expand from, like 1024 pixels wide to 1280 pixels wide or something, and that apparently took a very long time to do ... and since then, nothing.

Similarly, the Komplete Kontrol UI has about three lines of instruments available, unless I roll up the kind and flavor selector boxes. But what if I want to browse both kind/selector and actual instrument patches at the same time?

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/6034896/uploads/editor/du/jvwq8py5bswb.png

That's not to mention that, because I'm a long-time user, smaller text is becoming harder to read, and there's no way to increase the font size. NI instruments also don't pay attention to system font size or accessibility settings.

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nightjar

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/8484#Comment_8484

So to solve this...

Does NI currently have a sizable team diligently working to emulate vast quantities of old bit-mapped resources in a scalable form?

OR...

Does NI currently have a sizable team diligently working to "re-image" old products in a totally new form that does NOT try to emulate any old looks.

OR...??

And if you know, but aren't allowed to tell us.. why not? What could be so super secret that needs to be kept from the competition? Would it honestly matter if they knew?

More information would be very much appreciated.

Michael R B

I too have officially requested support for this (they couldn't help - surprise!). Here's the thing though. I don't think that asking nicely is going to help. NI have ignored this issue for years, and likely they can continue to ignore it for several more. It's not costing them anything to ignore it.

I believe we need to do two things:

a) Complain as loudly as possible to NI management. If you can't email them or pester them via social media, then send them a letter:

NATIVE INSTRUMENTS NORTH AMERICA, INC.

6725 Sunset Boulevard

5th Floor

Los Angeles, CA 90028

NATIVE INSTRUMENTS GMBH

Schlesische Straße 29-30

10997 Berlin,

Germany

The CEO is a guy called Constantin Koehncke, who is apparently based in the LA office,

b) Stop buying NI products until they descope some silly feature request and solve this. All they have to do is support UI scaling in VSTs and "problem solved"; this is not an especially hard thing for them to do. I've almost certainly spent thousands on NI products over the last few years, and had been intending to buy more. I'd bet that I'm far from the only person on this topic who has spent a lot of money on NI tools.

But, I'm done - this is ridiculous - why should any of us have to put up with 4" wide Kontakt windows (see attached, below)? Yes, I like Kontakt - it's an excellent sampler. But Halion is at least as good, and at least I can read the damned thing!

4 inch wide window - really.jpg

Let's stop moaning about this in the NI forums and start putting real pressure on them...

zzz00m

"why should any of us have to put up with 4" wide Kontakt windows (see attached, below)?"

I support the effort to convince NI to make their UI's scalable.

But this 4" perspective is rather subjective. Depends on the resolution of your monitor... I realize that you and a lot of other folks are using much larger and higher resolutions these days, making this a critical issue!

For me on a 24" 1080p monitor, the Kontakt window is over 12" wide. But still want that window to scale to nearly full screen at times, like many other plugins can do now.

SH-1

Does it strike anyone else as odd that this is by far the most active topic on this board and yet it is not visible anywhere in the section "Komplete General"?

Only when you search for "scaling" or "user interface" will you find this thread.

I realize that there are possibly more relevant discussions than this one, but at the end of the day i would still expect it to show up on the "Komplete General" front page when somebody makes a post here (like it used to do).

I work at an audio software company too and also moderate our online community. So I understand the stress, TRUST ME I do, but there is no way I would ever suppress a discussion like this no matter how uncomfortable it is for me and or the devs.

In fact, if it reached this level of popularity I would talk to the developers and management to form some sort of statement, and then keep engaged in the discussion so it doesn't look like we are trying to sweep this one under the rug.

Jon Watte

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/18893#Comment_18893

"All they have to do is support UI scaling in VSTs and "problem solved"; this is not an especially hard thing for them to do."

It is absolutely, 100%, actually hard for them to do well.

My assumption is that the way they built their UI is all about pixel layout, and just stretching the pixels would make the products look jagged and blurry. And, to Native Instruments, it's more important that screen shots in marketing materials and on websites look good, than that the product is actually easy to use once you've paid for it.

This is what the market is rewarding them for doing, because humans aren't rational, and we'd rather buy the current NI products, and find out later that they don't scale the UI, than do research and put our money/rewards elsewhere. (By "we" I mean the union of all paying users, e g, "the market.") Accessibility and usability is a known failing where the pricing signals of the market just don't track our societal needs, and while this is a failing of a market system, all the other systems have been even worse :-/ The only way to guarantee that this gets solved, is if large, important markets enforced the accessibility laws they already have on the books, against software makers/ISVs, and if that doesn't work, strengthen the protection of accessibility in law.

Call your Congress/Bundestag/Parliament representative, I guess?

zzz00m

"My assumption is that the way they built their UI is all about pixel layout, and just stretching the pixels would make the products look jagged and blurry."

A good example of this is when Waves recently introduced their version of scalable UI's. In a similar predicament, they made the pixel layout available in several zoom levels. They look fuzzy when enlarged, so that solution is a compromise. Some are better than others, but it's better than nothing, I suppose...

Plugins that are originally laid out with pixel bitmaps, need to be re-written to use scalable vector graphics. No blurriness or jaggies with that method, but it's a substantial development effort. That would also require an entire re-do of the plugin graphics.

SH-1

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/19157#Comment_19157

It is absolutely way way way better than nothing, that's for sure.

Michael R B

The Americans with Disabilities Act has slowly had its reach extended by US courts, and it’s now generally expected that all websites and software* at least make basic attempts to enable usability for people with disabilities, such as poor eyesight. An unscalable tiny window doesn’t remotely come close to meeting the W3C WCAG requirements for usability (https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/Understanding/intro#understanding-the-four-principles-of-accessibility) for example. (* The exception is for privately held companies with under 15 employees. I don’t believe NI qualifies.)

Has anyone thought about finding a lawyer (presumably on a contingent fee basis) to take a case against NI for violating ADA? They are well-funded and would therefore likely make an excellent target for litigation.

soundyg

As someone who just bought Komplete and is trying to navigate the crazy amounts of instruments, it's really difficult to do so with such a tiny window size.

Kaiwan_NI

Hey just wanna reassure you all that we heard you loud and clear. Maybe our message is lost somewhere in this thread but I can confirm that scalable UI is something we're working on for Kontakt and other products.

timerickson

HiDPI and "Retina" have been commercially available for a decade now. Literally a decade: https://www.macrumors.com/2022/06/11/retina-macbook-pro-10th-anniversary/

An absolute joke that NI can be a literal decade behind on something like this. Case in point why I haven't bought a Komplete update in many years. Y'all keep selling us more Kontakt libraries but don't actually invest in engineering talent to update Kontakt itself.

themachinelt

Im not gonna buy or update my komplete ultimate edition till NI gonna introduce scaling to their plugins, especially Absynth, Massive, Super 8, FM and other reaktor and kontakt instruments.

TrevWah

I'll admit it openly. I fell victim to flashy Youtube advertising and bought Komplete Ultimate in June 22. Only to find out that I dropped $1300 for a butt load of outdated GUI's and non user-friendly plugins that I cant even see because the GUI is non-resizeable windows. I was searching for an answer to this resizability issue and came upon this forum only to find out I cant use half the plug-ins I bought because I cant see them. I want my money back for those plugins. I'm VERY upset at the moment and WILL NOT buy another NI product again until their software is modernized. NO one should have to change their monitor resolution or adapt any settings to adjust for NI old programming. I'm not a software engineer but, HONESTLY, how hard is it to make a window resizable? Xfer records did it with all their plugins along with most other popular plugins on the market.

It was super rude of "Matt the NI Administrator" to say "try the demo version before you buy it." Is he trying to disuade us from buying NI products? We all know demo version suck anyway.

TrevWah

Seems like NI could retain a lot more customers and even gain some new ones if they just updated their plugins to 2022 modern standards. Isn't that the company's primary objective? To provide high quality audio software? At least thats what their flashy in-your-face advertising comes across as.

Jon Watte

For what it's worth: To use the plugins, you can reduce the resolution of your screen, which will make the pixels bigger. It's quite a pain to work that way, but it is possible.

Or you can add a second display, and make that one have big pixels, and move all the NI stuff onto that window.

If you really want to use the NI plugins, you can use them. It's just ... not a very pleasant experience.

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