KVR Audio

Igro · Post by **Igro** » Fri Oct 21, 2016 10:56 pm

Hi! So i just upgraded to FHD Laptop and all the plugins are way too small now. Is there a way to fix this? Thank you.

P.S: Studio One's plugins are perfectly big, it is just third-party plugins that don't want to be resized.

thecontrolcentre · Post by **thecontrolcentre** » Fri Oct 21, 2016 11:46 pm

Changing your screen resolution will do it. Many plugins are still not resizable.

VitaminD · Post by **VitaminD** » Fri Oct 21, 2016 11:55 pm

I've mentioned it a few times over the years.. but it still seems there would be a market for some kind of wrapper that would take a VSTi and both magnify the GUI as well as remap the coordinates (mouse actions) to the larger scaled UI size. It wouldn't be Retina display pretty, but at least it would make some of these tiny gui windows a lot more functional.

chk071 · Post by **chk071** » Sat Oct 22, 2016 12:03 am

The curse of laptop screens. Small size, big resolutions.

EnGee · Post by **EnGee** » Sat Oct 22, 2016 3:44 am

Igro wrote:Hi! So i just upgraded to FHD Laptop and all the plugins are way too small now. Is there a way to fix this? Thank you.

P.S: Studio One's plugins are perfectly big, it is just third-party plugins that don't want to be resized.

I have one for about 2 years now and I know what you mean

Changing the resolution to a lower one is not a solution as it is not clear as the native one. So, what I did is installing only the plugins that I can see perfectly, like u-he synths, Predator ... etc. I did uninstall all that I can't see like Korg KLC, although I did use the magnifier in windows, but it's not as good as in OS X.

Igro · Post by **Igro** » Sat Oct 22, 2016 9:22 am

To be honest, it's beyond my mind. I was so happy buying a new laptop with full hd screen and now this. The only vsti I've got that can be resized is RP Punch. Haven't tried Massive, Synthmaster and Reaktor yet. But d16 Drumazon, Blue 2, and most of the effects are small. I think this issue must be a top priority for developers.

ZeePok · Post by **ZeePok** » Sat Oct 22, 2016 10:18 am

VitaminD wrote:I've mentioned it a few times over the years.. but it still seems there would be a market for some kind of wrapper that would take a VSTi and both magnify the GUI as well as remap the coordinates (mouse actions) to the larger scaled UI size. It wouldn't be Retina display pretty, but at least it would make some of these tiny gui windows a lot more functional.

That would be a great utility indeed .

The Windows magnifier is no good at all. It distorts the picture and makes text labels and readouts nearly onreadable .

I wonder if there are third party Windows utilities that enlarge (part of) the screen? Never really looked for them, though.

aciddose · Post by **aciddose** » Sat Oct 22, 2016 11:13 am

The problem is that using the available hardware acceleration interfaces (absolutely required for speed vs. cost reasons) it is almost impossible to ensure that the zoomed image is a pixel-perfect multiple of the original. (2x, 3x, 4x, ...)

This is also a lot more difficult to read in most cases than a high quality interpolation such as lanczos (windowed sinc) or cubic.

Cubic can be done with shaders (direct3d, opengl) and is very commonplace. Lanczos is a bit difficult. Even then you're still stuck with the difficulty of producing accurate results and forced to suffer through all sorts of trade-offs.

Ultimately up-sampling any image will include a combination of aliasing and blur. You really need to start out with a higher resolution image (upgraded plug-ins with resizable GUI) in order to get reasonable results.

The problem with higher resolution GUIs is that the processing power required to handle them is magnified proportionate to the increase in resolution. Double the size of the image, quadruple the processing cost and memory/bandwidth.

In terms of text readability and other quality factors regarding GUIs, high resolution is absolutely awesome. Unfortunately dealing with it requires application of hardware acceleration and often a complete redesign of GUI software and components.

The Xhip alpha currently implements a re-sizable GUI and I've been working to incorporate varied sizes for fonts and bitmap resources with all the extra memory and processing requirements that go with them. I find it very usable on 2k and 4k screens.

(Example Xhip 2x zoom using cubic for the background. Note the text and other elements are rendered natively at the higher resolution. It requires more development effort but the background will also be rendered natively in the future as the result of the zoom is unacceptable especially regarding text readability.)
http://imgur.com/a/e2Odn

Igro · Post by **Igro** » Sat Oct 22, 2016 11:48 am

Thank you for clarification, aciddose.

Jace-BeOS · Post by **Jace-BeOS** » Sat Oct 22, 2016 12:19 pm

I don't understand why just enlarging the pixels can't be done without filtering. I hate when game and DOS emulators do filtering. Some let you turn it off and just use the double or triple size without filtering. Why isn't that a universal technique/option?

.jon · Post by **.jon** » Sat Oct 22, 2016 12:25 pm

Jace-BeOS wrote:I don't understand why just enlarging the pixels can't be done without filtering. I hate when game and DOS emulators do filtering. Some let you turn it off and just use the double or triple size without filtering. Why isn't that a universal technique/option?

Pixels cannot be enlarged because they don't have "size" property in the first place.

No_Use · Post by **No_Use** » Sat Oct 22, 2016 12:34 pm

How about vector GUI's ?

mystran · Post by **mystran** » Sat Oct 22, 2016 12:43 pm

aciddose wrote:The problem is that using the available hardware acceleration interfaces (absolutely required for speed vs. cost reasons) it is almost impossible to ensure that the zoomed image is a pixel-perfect multiple of the original. (2x, 3x, 4x, ...)

If you're taking about pixel-doubling then this is complete non-sense. You just disable texture filtering and draw a quad and the hardware will do it for you. With legacy Direct3D9 you need to make sure your pixel-to-texel mapping is correct (since the API specifies pixel and texel centers differently, so you usually need half-texel offsets), but with any other API it's really hard to get it wrong.

Whether the blocky pixel-doubling or blurry filtering (eg. cubic or whatever) looks better is another question and depends on both the source image and subjective preference, but from the technical point of view there's absolutely nothing complicated about any of it, accelerated or not.

DJ Warmonger · Post by **DJ Warmonger** » Sat Oct 22, 2016 12:57 pm

I still would like devs to take into consideration the existence of 5K monitors and more to come. Just provide different-size GUI options which hit 2000 pixels wide at least.

Personally I'm not going to get 4K monitor or greater any time soon just beause plugins would get shrinked. Planning to get ultrapanoramic 3440x1440 monitor, though, as they come with large screen which maintains pixel size.

VariKusBrainZ · Post by **VariKusBrainZ** » Sat Oct 22, 2016 1:03 pm

VitaminD wrote:I've mentioned it a few times over the years.. but it still seems there would be a market for some kind of wrapper that would take a VSTi and both magnify the GUI as well as remap the coordinates (mouse actions) to the larger scaled UI size. It wouldn't be Retina display pretty, but at least it would make some of these tiny gui windows a lot more functional.

FL Studio has this option, you can enlarge plugin GUIs, they're zoomed pixels so blocky and ugly

High DPI Laptop: vst plugins GUIs are too small.