When will you update the GUI on Machine and Komplete control without requiring binoculars!

I have just one question.

I guess we all are on 4K size monitor resolutions but your GUI is made for HD, it's not just a scaling thing its a font size too!

I'm even willing to pay for this!

As it is now, it is not possible to use your products without binoculars, the font size are tooooooo smal.

Make it a product for 2024/2025 not for 2010.

Regards

Nacka67

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Vocalpoint

"I guess we all are on 4K size monitor resolutions but your GUI is made for HD, it's not just a scaling thing its a font size too!"

Here is what the world is really using - vs what you think they are using:

The bulk of us are #1. (true standard HD or a dimensional variant of it)

Standard 4K (3840 × 2160) is not even listed. Nuff said

mykejb

That's global browser stats from participating sites though, not music industry specific?

I have three systems I use for music production and only one has a monitor size listed above and that's a two 2560/1440 system. The others are higher.

Sunborn

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/40249/when-will-you-update-the-gui-on-machine-and-komplete-control-without-requiring-binoculars

You have a very wrong impression.

Nope! Not all of us are on 4K monitors, neither we plan to be, not anytime soon at least.

In fact, most of professional musicians i know (and believe me, i know a lot) are fine with their 1920x1080 or 2560x1440 HD resolutions. Not to mention many others who are working on laptops.

Important notes: Too high resolution is hard for the eyes. Maybe not for a teen or a younger musician but definitely for a bit older one. Also, very large screens aren't viable due to the position of the studio monitors. You need to be close to them, not to have them 10 meters away, right?

Also, consider that most of music application developers haven't updating their plugins to support such resolutions. It is not just Native Instruments, but many, especially the "smaller" ones (who by the way, might have excellent algorithms which are far more important for music creation and audio fidelity, than large screens and high resolutions).

Scaling' isn't an option. In most cases it make things worst. Many plugins looks really miserable at 4K.

It is better to have a dual screen of 1920x1080 or 2560x1440 rather than a huge monster. And it is easier on the eyes, though other factors are important too (for example, a high refresh rate or reduced brightness).

Vocalpoint

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/198904#Comment_198904

Statcounter is about as legit as it gets.

And sure - individual users may vary wildly. But that is their choice - and usually one that provokes threads like this one when someone goes all "4K" and then is shocked when they discover about 3% of the software they use will actually look right on that excessive resolution - instead of - you know - following the standard.

The bottom line is - any developer building anything in the world (music specific or otherwise) that will be displayed on a monitor - will wisely stick to the most common resolution possible.

And as you can see - that remains Standard HD (1920x1080) here in 2024/2025

If/when (or ever) 4K approaches the percentages that Standard HD has now (25%) - then and only then will the standard change and vendors might start thinking differently.

Can't see this happening for years tho. There is zero need.

Like Sunborn - I routinely work in several commercial studios here in town and only one that I know of has fancy 4K action going - but they do lots of video production too.

The rest - get work done day in and day out - in regular HD.

mykejb

Statcounter is legit for browsers, I wouldn't argue that. Does it represent everyone? Nope, stats rarely do. It's a bit like NI saying "we base these decisions on telemetry" then wonder why people don't like the decisions when they turn off the "send usage data". Plus "home users" are probably more likely to have better/higher res screens than commercial studios, purely because they don't have to justify the cost. Except possibly to a partner!!

Having said that, would I use 4K for music use? Nope, but because the scaling is still rubbish and you need a magnifying glass as the OP said at the start and not because there's a problem with the screen itself. For development/graphics it's great, but music software needs to catch up.

Nacka67

I'm sorry I'm living in Sweden, and here we use 4K and not old HD, but then again we are a high tec country. ;-)

Build it with vector graphic then, then you can scale things up without any problem.

Many plugin company's has adapted to this scaling thing where even the font size are follow the upscaling GUI? Waves, Slate, Plugin Alliance and many more…..

The newly updated graphic for Machine for example is a joke, call that for a big update in 2024?

Vocalpoint

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/199061#Comment_199061

Doesn't matter where you live - 4K is still not a thing.

I think you are missing the real point here - this "work" has zero value for the developers or the companies that pay the bills. No company is going to invest major $$$$ and spend years - re-writing all their interfaces (in vector no less) from scratch - just to satisfy the 0.0156% of world wide users with a fancy monitor.

Now - I am not disagreeing with you at all when it comes to brand new products. Plugin companies should use the latest UI design and be totally scalable. But whether they do that (or want to do that) - is not up to you or I.

Some do it very well (Toontrack comes to mind) and others do not bother (Maschine for example). It all boils down to intent, budget, feasibility and ROI. And keeping existing users happy.

How would the Maschine crowd feel - if NI told them to wait another year and a half - for v3 - just to give it a new scalable interface?

All I saw when rumors of Maschine v3 started appearing - were people screaming non-stop about getting this thing out the door and into users hands.

So they finally do that and users complain about the UI now? Like wow.

Nacka67

Let's put it this way Vocalpoint , I don't se it the way you do.

Regards

Nacka67

Vocalpoint

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/199133#Comment_199133

Totally fair.

I see it the way the rest of the world sees it. Standard HD just works.

Nacka67

It's interesting and surprising that Kontakt 8 can scale up the graphical interface without any problems and works fantastically well, but Machine can't do that?

Vocalpoint

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/211046#Comment_211046

That's because K8 is a new UI.

One look at Maschine 3 tells me that they simply used the v2 framework and updated some bits and pieces.

It is most definitely not a new/rewritten UI.

PoorFellow

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/199061#Comment_199061

I guess we all are on 4K size monitor resolutions but your GUI is made for HD

I'm sorry I'm living in Sweden, and here we use 4K and not old HD, but then again we are a high tec country. ;-)

I completely understand your request for an update to behavior of GUIs and how they scale. It's actually a rather old discussion here and something that a few users complains about once in a while.

However I do not think that your statements that I have quoted above is accurate. Surely a lot of computer users in 'high tech countries' have switched to 4K monitors, but while we do see that some music 'professionals' do use 4K then my personal impression is that is is not as many as you make it to be.

I recently myself upgraded my monitor to hopefully get a better experience using my music apps and plugins but I consciously and carefully avoided 4K. Both there is a (huge ?) price difference but also a power use difference and then also there is a scaling issue. In my opinion then there is not much use in switching from HD 1920 x 1080 pixels to 4K 3840 x 2160 pixels other than things suddenly becomes very tiny on your monitor because of all of the scaling issue with all sorts of apps that does not scale GUI text that nice , so I recently switched to a not-curved UWQHD (Ultra-Wide Quad HD , aspect ratio 21 : 9) 3440x1440 instead , which gives me a somewhat greater resolution at a cheap price and a sufficiently wider format for my use.

P.S.

I am not sufficiently well versed in all of this but I found a comment here over at Reddit where they linked to this Google Docs with among other ppi .

PK The DJ

Agreed. The problem is that people are attracted to the bigger numbers i.e. 4K is "better" than 2K, and 2K is "better" than 1K - but if the screen is the same size, then everything is tiny…..unless they use scaling in the OS to compensate.

They then end up with things being shown at the same size as a lower resolution screen anyway, but lots of GUI issues.

Vocalpoint

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/211112#Comment_211112

The whole discussion is nothing more than a justification exercise to somehow make someone's new monitor purchase mean something.

"4K" has been around since 2011-12 and even with a 15+ year head start - the software UI world simply does not care.

For me - the true yardstick is seeing someone in my professional circle actually using it. And for the half dozen studios that regularly I visit - even here in 2025 - I am aware of only one place using a 4K monitor (and resolution) but this is only in their video edit suite.

For everyone else - general audio wise - it's good ole 1920x1080 and usually a pair of monitors.

Maciej Repetowski

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/211128#Comment_211128

Hmm, so all of you guys with 1080p displays, do you not want HiDPI compatibility at all? Judging by the fact how fiercely you defend this?

Now, I know that Windows looks good on lo-res monitor and I respect that. But we’ve had HiDPI displays on Mac for more than a decade now and going back from HiDPI to lo-res is an eyesore.

4K used with non-fractional scaling (screen looks like 1080p) is super sharp, much sharper than native 1080p. No one wants to run 27” or 32” 4K at full resolution, as it is nearly impossible to read anything.

And a word about those resolution statistics you always present - is this western countries or is it worldwide? Because if it’s worldwide, that that includes China, India, Africa, South America and other developing areas, which is going to skew the results towards cheaper 1080p monitors.

In UK, it’s difficult to find monitors with resolution lower than 2k in retail shops, except for gaming monitors with high refresh rate, where you can still buy 1080p ones - but those are not cheap. I know offices still use 1080p monitors, Dell is selling them B2B, but consumers? Not really.

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