Larger Interface

Any hope for a larger interface for Kontakt itself? Bigger buttons and fonts?

Even if it was just 25% bigger it'd be great!

 

Yep, long overdue. I really don't get it why small or one-man VST manufacturers like Valhalla or TAL can do it easily but for a big company like NI a larger GUI seems to be a major problem.

 

The problem is that the user interfaces of the most NI products is not designed to be resizeable. The windows and all the widgets inside use fixed sizes and are small like they are to be usable with lower screen resolutions too.

 

It's not as if an upsized Kontakt interface itself wouldn't be able to support the small sized product interfaces within it though. As for developers they could then update their products as they pleased with programming to alternate to a larger interface if Kontakt's interface is larger, or let the user select.

 

It is really not an easy thing to do when the codebase is close to 20 years old.


We already have possibility to use larger interfaces (from old 633x350 we can now go to 1000x750), but how many old libraries did you see were updated to go to this larger interface? I didn't see any...

 

I can see how this issue gets swept under the rug, people not using higher resolution monitors might not have it, people using different DAWs might not have it, so my guess is that developers aren't at all feeling the mini sized Kontakt pains many people are.

I trialed Cubase recently and Cubase resized the Kontakt GUI to be reasonably sized, while my main DAW Studio One does not do so, and leaves it at near microscopic levels. Cubase is responding to Windows Scaling settings as far as I can tell.

Cubase though has other severe GUI problems for me, which make me hesitate to think of switching, its GUI flips out when I load certain plugins.

Anyway here're two screen cap examples of what Kontakt looks like on my 43" 3840x2160 monitor, in Windows 10. One cap from Cubase one from Studio One.

Everything normally looks fine because Windows 225% scaling settings affect it BUT the GUIs in Studio One aren't affected at this time by Windows Scaling. So extra small GUIs like Kontakt are an issue. Cubase on the other hand is reasonable resized.

If Kontakt could just have a 'resize' option, for itself not even its libraries, it'd be great.

 

'Just'. As I said, it's not 'just' when you have a very old codebase that was created in times where HiDPI did not even exist.

 

Furthermore, which DAW plugin is resizeable? I don't know even one.

Maybe, windows with fixed sizes are required in DAW plugins because the concept of VST and other plugin format doesn't intend to have resizeable windows.

 

Valhalla plugins are resizeable, u-he as well, Pianoteq, Falcon... It's not that they don't exist.

Nope, it's possible to do it in VST2, it's a bit hacky but already mentioned plugins do it just fine. VST3 natively supports resizing interfaces.

 

Why does the moderator fight the users and give NI a pass like this? We are asking for readable, functional GUI from Kontakt, or we'll abandon it. I use Kontakt *as little as possible* because I'm in my 50s and my eyes can't read the damn thing. How can this possibly be good news for a software manufacturer? The software business is always evolve or die. Resizing GUI is becoming the norm, not the exception and NI has no reason but arrogance to not make accessibility a premium. As to old libraries, old versions of Kontakt will always be there. This is a long overdue change.

 

The moderator know a bit about old codebases and how some things are not at all simple to shoehorn into them and gives you a realistic picture of the situation. HiDPI support and improved UI will take time, but also rest assured that NI is very well aware of the need for this (as you can see with their latest plugins like Massive X, Mod Pack, Crush Pack, all of those have scalable GUIs).

 

Come on Native Instruments!
2020 is coming and the Kontakt GUI is like 90s. We need bigger Knobs, Sliders, Text, Menus etc. Everything in Kontakt etc. is too small.
Your Interface on a 4K Screen have the size of two cigarette packet. Thats unuseable. And... 8K monitors are coming.

I saw the proposal "we can now go to 1000x750"
Changing only to support obsolete "HD ready" screen resolution? Then your plugin use less than 50% of Full HD. Incredible.

HD ready: 1280 x 720 (these type of VGA monitors are long time technical obsolete)
Full HD: 1920 x 1080 (old standard for musicians, Wide is the coming standard)
4K: 3840 x 2160 (typical for prof. musicians and the next step)

Today Full HD is the absolute minimum to support.

I am a programer since nearly 30 years and i understand that changing the GUI run up the bill. But do nothing or too less costs you customer.
I don't know your code base, but there schould be resize plugins available they resize everything automatic. If not, CPP allows to resize with two single codelines. The only thing you have to do is to include larger image sizes with higher screen resolution and include larger fonts. Those plugins give your library creators all time to change their old grfx, because all old librarys can be used at the same time with higher resolution, but the LoRes grfx is less beautiful.
I have NI Komplete 11. Next year i will buy an Ultra wide curved 4k monitor.
At this point NI Komplete will be unuseable for me.
In between Arturia is going to be my favorite. And: Behringer think about to come out with an own Synth Suite.

Komplete have phantastic emulations, synths, etc. that i want to upgrade to Komplete 12 Collectors Ed.
But i will only do this, when the Komplete GUI is useable on 4K. That means Full HD is minimum.
This year NI lost my money for the update for 299 and my upgrade to C.Ed. for 599. And next year? Possible me.

Das Ganze hätte ich lieber auf Deutsch geschrieben (Ihr seid ja ein Berliner Unternehmen), bin mir aber nicht sicher ob das gegen die Foren-Regeln verstößt.

 

It's NI's custom framework done 20+ years ago. It doesn't comply to everything out there, it's their own thing. That's why it's not two codelines to update, or a plugin, otherwise they'd have done it long ago

And obviously, you know that just making Kontakt support HiDPI won't automagically fix how thousands of 3rd party libraries look on it? They would have to be upscaled, and that WILL look bad, no other way around it. Maybe a few larger 3rd party developers would update their libraries, but I wouldn't count on that happening. So again you don't get much with just Kontakt going HiDPI.

I think personally people shouldn't rush into this 4K (and ESPECIALLY not 8K) thing before all their software properly supports those things. Most software still struggles with proper 2K support, let alone 4K. Just don't rush things, there's no need for that!

I'm at 2x1920x1200 and everything looks great over here.

 

Ok. I understand.
With a codebase everything is hard coded and not scaleable in any way there is only one way.
Freezing the actual Kontakt version to support the other librarys and create a second App that is resizeable.
Hard coded Zoom like Arturia, is acceptable. But a resize function is really, really urgent.

To explain:
Between the Monitors and me are the desk with a mixer, keyboard and a midi-keyboard. Overall 80cm distance. From this distance, NI is often unuseable. Many elements are so small that i can not target the 3-pixel ultra small Controls. e.g. scroller, volume pointer, up/down arrows etc. This interrupts creativity.

I use up to 3 Monitors (32" + 34" stacked, and sometimes additional a 19") plus 10.5" iPad.
That is why i want to change to WQHD like C49RG94SSU. But i think with this Monitor i have to leave NI. Or is there another option?
Is there anything in development to change the App-size?

From my view as software developer i think upscaling only one step (e.g. 1000x750) is not enough. Users have many different software. They see the possibilitys of other software every day and they see the restrictions in NI software.

 

Maybe it's time for NI to stop churning out new flashy stuff and, frankly, work on improving existing products. Some of the products they discontinued were actually very good. FM8 is possibly the best FM synth out there even though it hasn't been updated for years. Even if the code base is old, I think it'd be worth reworking, or writing the GUI from scratch whilst using the same synthesis engine.

I still don't understand though, surely there must be a quick and dirty way to scale a GUI—Bitwig can do it, see screenshot below. The image at the back is FM8 hosted inside Bitwig, and the one at the front is FM8 hosted in Reaper. Obviously it doesn't look nice and crisp but it's better than nothing:

 

Yeah that's a quick and dirty way of doing it, using OS scaling features (because Bitwig can host the plugin in a separate process, rather than within DAW's own process space, which allows for this trick), but you will always get blurriness, since all it's doing is upscaling raster images. This is not something that should be done in an update really, because it's not going to achieve anything to solve the underlying issue.

 

Are the newer NI plugins resizeable?

 

Yes, Mod Pack, Crush Pack and Massive X all are.

 

Based on this information, Massive X is the only NI product that might appeal to me right now. I came within an inch of buying K12 on the Thanksgiving deal today but eventually skipped it.

 

I feel like this is part of the issue, to be honest even comes off a little condescending. It's 2020 and 4k is quite ubiquitous at this point, we're far beyond rushing into 4k. I do realize that fixing a 20 year old codebase isn't simple, but having worked on quite a few big and legacy projects it's always a question of "do we want to" and not really "is it possible".

The biggest problem of this is that even at 1440p the UI in Kontakt is so small that it's barely readable. I don't even have glasses and can read pretty small text, but I just hate using Kontakt because everything is always so small. Even if there was a way to 2x the UI with just interpolations and blurry images it would be thousand times better for accessibility. Not to mention that I might want to use a keyboard that's half a meter away from the PC, at that point looking at anything in Kontakt is just pointless.

I'm surprised there isn't a bigger number of people with eyesight issues complaining here, especially since accessibility is a huge topic basically anywhere outside of the music industry.

One more point for the "20 year old codebase, hard to change" ... I'd say the counterargument to this that the #1 sampler in the world that literally everyone uses surely has enough money to fix its technical problems. Just looking at some Kontakt 6 article:

So is this update a game changer for existing Kontakt users? Does K6 look any different — bigger fonts, cosmetic changes, or a new colour scheme? Well, no. Visually, K5 and K6 are completely identical — the differences, though not numerous, lie under the hood.
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It's even funny for me to read this. It's like when a new version of a major DAW is released and has a ton of features that nobody really wants, but doesn't solve any of the problems people struggle with daily. I bet if NI introduced proper UI scaling as a major version upgrade for Kontakt basically everyone would upgrade.

One last point - Kontakt is audio software. It's not a complicated GUI like Photoshop or a major DAW. Ignoring the render canvas for the actual instrument it seems that there's barely any UI, most of which is just an instrument browser and some menus. Personally I could do away without 90% of the UI, even if it meant I'd have just a single canvas onto which I drag&drop the .nki files. I dunno how NI evaluates how people use their products, but having watched a bunch of people using Kontakt I have yet to see someone clicko n the "Database" or "Expert" tabs, use the Quick Load, the Instrument Navigator, or any of these fancy menus. IMO what we're all talking about really is being able to resize the instrument render canvas itself.