Seriously, can't we make Kontakt bigger?

Hi Jeremy,

if the beta is stable and it allows going back to the latest non-beta version fairly easily (meaning without having to uninstall everything that is NI in my system drive), then definitely sign me up.

Sure, I don't know the code. But I know pretty much every other software company has been working on making their GUIs HiDPI compatible for many years, since around 2016 or 2017, and no matter how hard the code is, neither you nor anybody else is going to make me believe that the NI software engineers have been working on this since those years and still couldn't finish this gigantic task.

To me it seems more like a case of "We're one of the big players in this arena, and many other companies that are also big players use our engine, so we don't have to worry about this for now". And then one day, maybe a year ago, they said "Well, I guess we have to get off our butts now and start working on HiDPI or people are gonna stop buying our products."

Sorry, but I don't buy it. I'm not complaining about this in 2018, even 2019. I'm complaining about this in 2023.

And besides, if you have to make your line of products HiDPI, why start with Guitar Rig, a product that is not that hard to use in 4K monitors as of version 5, instead of starting with the two that need it the most, Kontakt and Komplete Kontrol, especially the latter? Why give K7 a half HiDPI half legacy GUI, but at least a usable combination, and not make it THE program to manage the NI keyboards, instead of something like KK that is tiny and blurry?

OK, so that makes sense, in theory they would have to update lots of graphical UI assets (which I offered them to do for free when it comes to those that just need a basic enlargement and can be ran in a batch, but got no response).

But so far I've said plenty about an easy way to make their GUIs more tolerable for HiDPI monitors, but before I finish with this, I want to show what I'm talking about, and maybe someone from NI or a user with some coding knowledge can say if this is possible or not.

I think I mentioned in Windows there's a simple method to make older programs scale up to a tolerable size, even if they look a bit fuzzy, but at least they're enough to read without causing headaches. (This is how I'm able to still use Adobe Encore, which last version was CS6 in 2012, so there's absolutely no HiDPI code in it, and it launches in real 5K, so you need binoculars to see the menus.)

This is an example of that. I recently had to buy a new UPS, and the control panel for it was created with some custom old code or something, but as it is, it looks tiny:

So you can go into the program properties in Windows, and set it this way:

And this is the result:

You can see the difference between both here:

So this is basically a simple enlargement of 50%, or if you prefer, 150% of the original size.

Obviously I asked myself if I did this to KK and Kontakt in Windows, if it would have the same result. Unfortunately, no. It seems to be backwards.

I'm just going to show KK, since it's basically the same thing. So, this is KK as installed, without any extra settings in Windows:

Now, if I do the same thing I did with the UPS program above, what I get is this:

So the thing that basically enlarges older apps to make them more visible, in this case makes KK even smaller.

Now, I don't have internal knowledge of the code they used for KK and K7, so there may be a logical reason for this.

But, the point of spending all the time I spent installing a very barebones installation of KK and K7 in my Windows machine, and then take all these screenshots and label them, is that hopefully someone at NI or a user with more knowledge of these programs under the hood, might be able to say "Oh, it's just a simple scaling, no redesign of the tons of graphical elements, interactive items like knobs, buttons, drop down lists, etc. Just a simple scaling up, that's doable."

And if that's the case, NI can easily do that, and I will be happily spared a lot of migraines because I want to use their awesome software at a size that I can see without making the rest of the OS huge if I set it to 1920x1080.

And trust me, if this is possible, there will be a lot of people really happy, and whoever makes Excedrin Migraine will lose a s**tload of money in sales.

Hahahah, well, I think at this point they owe us a HiDPI version for free, at least for those who bought Komplete or the individual products since 2018.

But I'm happy if they find a way to do what I suggested above until they finish the real HiDPI versions.