Kontakt / HiDPI... again

So... Cubase has just released V11 and have extended the HiDPI support, which actually improves things to the point that I can now enable it and it has fixed 90% of the products that had non-resizeable GUI's from my collection. There is one hugely noticable exception to that list and that is Kontakt. I've seen NI comments from over 2 years ago acknowledging this issue and that it was 'being worked on'. With the update from Cubase I can no longer justify not taking advantage of my 4k monitors and so will be working in HiDPI in Cubase. I have a very strong investment in NI equipment and software and the roadmap for Kontakt (as a priority) and other NI products to support the HiDPI GUI should really be put out there in the publc domain. This would allow customers to evaluate whether a very short term pain is acceptable or whether it is time to look to move my ecosystem away from NI.

I know this HiDPI elephant has been sitting in the room for a long time, but it's getting a bit squashed and smelly in here now and I think we should be able to expect some kind of official roadmap statement with estimated timeframes.

 

Kontakt team never divulged any official roadmaps, I doubt that's suddenly going to change.

 

Not divulging roadmaps is their prerogative, I don't necessarily agree with it, however; this is not a new issue, I would say that all mainstream high value players in this industry (I'm not talking small developers or non-active developments) have now embraced 4k monitors and HiDPI, which lets face it can no longer be considered new tech. A huge amount of intellectual asset for NI is tied into the Kontakt ecosystem and it's not a stretch to expect this to maintain currency. I'd just like to know whether NI are taking this seriously. We are not talking about a £19.99 piece of software, I have a multi thousand pound investment in the NI ecosystem and I'd like to know when they are planning to support current technology with one of their keystone products. It seems a reasonable ask to me.

 

They are. But there's a tremendous amount of technical debt in Kontakt codebase, so it's not going very fast, for all sorts of reasons.

As it stands, I would still suggest to use a non-HiDPI monitor for Kontakt instances, if you don't want blurry hell.

 

I use my 4k 32 inch BENQ at 1440p to not go blind

 

They're not giving any indication that they're taking it seriously except for all your damage limitation posts on the forums here.

 

It's obviously worth adding a post on here noting that NI have now updated the Kontakt product to at least be able to handle the "Allow window to be resized" option within Cubase to work correctly. We haven't got to that hazy nirvana of a HiDpi resizeable interface but at least it is a step on the way there which makes the product usable again in Cubase.

 

They did it!

Since the latest update there is no scrambled GUI mess when using Kontakt, Komplete Kontrol and Maschine in HiDpi mode inside of a DAW.
Tested in Reaper and it works now, and I assume it will be the same in Cubase/S1 and other DAW's that have a 'HiDpi mode' option for plugins.

Thank you N.I!

 

Can I ask how you have things set up in Reaper?

I'm on windows 10 using a 4k monitor and I have windows scaling set to 120%. I've set Kontakt to be hidpi when floating but it ends up being a huge and pretty blurry when floating and small and difficult to read when not floating.

 

Yeah you're in an awkward place scaling-wise. I'm assuming you've got a pretty massive monitor with that scaling setting? I'm on Win10 with a 27" 4k monitor and 200% scaling, which essentially looks like a super crisp 1080p - I'm not concerned with extra screen real estate as I have multiple monitors, I just want that sweet sweet retina level PPI.

When I use the standard 'HiDPI' setting in Reaper for Kontakt/Komplete Kontrol/Maschine then they look fine, normal size but a tiny but blurrier because they're being artificially 'upscaled'. Totally usable though. Up until this point these plugins would not play nice with any DAW's 'HiDPI mode' at all, the GUI would become a scrambled mess and they'd be unusable, so I see this is a big win.

I'm guessing the issue at your end is that you're running 4k with a pretty low scaling setting - so if I turn off HiDPI on these plugins I get an absolutely tiny GUI (half size) and if I turn it on I get normal size GUI with a little bit of blurriness but it's subtle. Whereas your choices are between having HiDPI off and it being just a little bit t too small and fiddly, or having HiDPI on, and having the plugin massively blown up in size - which would make the blurry upscaling SUPER obvious.

Tricky.

I think in Cubase 11 instead of having a 'HiDPI' mode for these old plugins, they've actually made them resizable - I guess this is why.

 

Thanks for your detailed reply. Yeah I'm using an ultrawide screen 5120 by 1440..... I moved away from Cubase a year ago cos of the Hi DPI issues.....

To be honest the larger but blurry is better than nothing Can't get the HiDPI trick to work with guitar rig 6 though for some reason

 

Agreed. Shame about Guitar Rig, I don't really use that.

I'm just pleased I can finally ditch the one 1080p monitor that I need to keep in my setup, purely for these three plugins, and move to all 4K if I like!

 

I'm having a similar problem. Running kontakt on my surface pro, which is HiDPI, in Ableton. It scales fine, and ends up a usable size on the screen, but certain elements don't scale. For example, the part of the interface that allows drag/drop of samples stays at the original size. If I turn off scaling in ableton, the interface pops down to it's default tiny size and everything lines up, but with scaling enabled, I have to remember where the sample slots where on the tiny interface and try and drop samples there. Not the end of the world, but a pain in the butt.

So two questions: Anyone know if that's a kontakt issue or an ableton issue? (my suspicion is the former, but I'm happy to stand corrected) and does anyone know if NI are ever going to move their plugs to vst3? I'm kind of suprised that they haven't yet, but maybe it's a because of creaking code or similar?

 

They are. But this won't help fix this issue.

 

Ah. Interesting. I thought vst3 natively handled hiDPI scaling? Maybe I was misinformed.

However, I have now fixed the issue, for anyone else who is having a similar problem. It turns out that turning off scaling in live, then turning it back on and reloading the program seems to have ironed out whatever kink was causing the issue in the first place. Fantastic. If in doubt, turn it off and on again. Computing 101.

 

Nope, it just has an API for plugin window resizing, where VST2 only had hacks that worked in some hosts and not others.