Retina/HDPI screen optimised DAWs and Plugins (and/or those with resizable GUIs)

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Oh dear. This is all sounding even more tragic than I suspected.

Thanks for checking these plugins. WeW

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lnikj wrote:Oh dear. This is all sounding even more tragic than I suspected.

Thanks for checking these plugins. WeW
Pleasure. Yeah, the state of Retina/HiDPI optimized plug-ins is a tragic story.

Thankfully U-he have a long history of being first to Mac, so I'm delighted to see them lead the charge with HiDPI optimized synths and effects. Not only do their synths sound great - they look sharp too.

Also, it's worth pointing out that Artemiy at Sinevibes was one of the very first audio developers to get their plug-ins optimized for the retina display. Huge shout out to him for a wonderful job well done.

We just need the rest of the audio developers to play catch-up. I won't hold my breath.

:shrug:

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Melda are all vector resizable.

D16 LuSH has 2 size options, bitmap.

Inneardisplay (no loger available to purchase) switched to vector resizable but then strangely dropped that when they joined Glitchmachines, which are available to purchase
Amazon: why not use an alternative

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Following great input from C.Bennett list now reorganised.

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Thanks to all who have contributed thus far. Please keep the coming!

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Madrona Labs Aalto (Vector elements are hires but the bitmap assets are lowres.)
Clarification for people who want to know how things work: there are no bitmap assets in Aalto or Kaivo. The dials in both plugins are all able to animate the signals going through the DSP graph, like a little oscilloscope per dial, per voice. This drawing is all done in software, and when I scaled it up with the rest of the UI to hi-res, it got very slow. So the dial animations are intentionally limited in resolution. At some point I'll probably rewrite the display in OpenGL and speed won't be an issue any more.

You can resize both of these plugins by dragging the lower right corner.
Randy Jones
Madrona Labs

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madronalabs wrote:
Madrona Labs Aalto (Vector elements are hires but the bitmap assets are lowres.)
Clarification for people who want to know how things work: there are no bitmap assets in Aalto or Kaivo. The dials in both plugins are all able to animate the signals going through the DSP graph, like a little oscilloscope per dial, per voice. This drawing is all done in software, and when I scaled it up with the rest of the UI to hi-res, it got very slow. So the dial animations are intentionally limited in resolution. At some point I'll probably rewrite the display in OpenGL and speed won't be an issue any more.

You can resize both of these plugins by dragging the lower right corner.
Many thanks for this Randy. I've updated the listing to reflect this information.

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Hi Randy. Thanks for the explanation of why some of the interface looks lowres on a retina display. I just assumed they were bitmaps. Shame it's still lowres though.

On another note - and big news.

It looks like Native Instruments have dipped their toe in the HiDPI game with their first retina optimized plugin - their new effect, NI Replika.

Looks fantastic. I hope this is a sign to come from NI. Love their stuff.

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It's worth noting that U-he Satin is confirmed as fully HiDPI ready - but not enabled by default.

The plug-in ships with a special "HD UI Images.zip" file in the Extras folder of the download. Follow the instructions, replace the folders and the plug-in will launch with the HiDPI assets. Looks fantastic on a retina display. Thanks Urs and team.

PS. lnikj. I'm not sure it makes sense to include plug-ins with different GUI sizes in this thread as they're not HiDPI/retina optimized. There's no difference in quality between a small non-retina GUI and a larger non-retina GUI. Thanks!

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Plugin Alliance have most of their plugins with support for retina (you can check in their changelog) for a while now, some looks extremely pretty and crisp (VSC-2 is good example), others updated but not as nice. Think they don't support hidpi on windows yet though.

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Thanks for the further info guys.

I have changed the thread title as people tend to send me info on both Retina/HDPI and resizable; both sets of information are useful to people and I think it is easier to keep it all here.

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I was pleased to see the latest build of Pro Q 2 supporting retina, but I could only get that to work on OS X. It claims high DPI support in Windows. I tried in Win 7 using Cantabile and it just showed up as a tiny plugin like usual, has anybody been able to get win High-DPI Pro Q 2 going well?
Matt

Pi is exactly three

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For those of us who don't have Retina displays yet...

It appears that UI scaling for Retina is switched on/off globally at application/DAW level (the "Open in Low Resolution" checkbox, and a flag in the app's Info.plist which tells the OS it supports HiDPI).

So what happens by default to non-Retina-aware plug-ins running in a Retina enabled DAW? Do they look tiny, or grainy? Are people having to switch the entire apps back to low resolution just to make the plug-ins big enough to be usable?
This account is dormant, I am no longer employed by FXpansion / ROLI.

Find me on LinkedIn or elsewhere if you need to get in touch.

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On OS X a non retina window uses as much real estate as would be expected but looks grainy.

On Windows a high dpi host application like Cantabile opens up plugin windows that look tiny.

The Windows solution in my opinion is pretty unsatisfactory in terms of usability and may well hold back high dpi daw adoption because it's so poor for backwards compatibility.

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OK, but usually the OS switches between retina and non retina windows on a per application basis. How is a DAW able to determine whether or not a plug-in supports HiDPI and give it the appropriate kind of window?
This account is dormant, I am no longer employed by FXpansion / ROLI.

Find me on LinkedIn or elsewhere if you need to get in touch.

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