My current setup involves a 50 inch 4k TV that is setup directly in front of my Motif XF8 (which doubles as a very overpriced midi controller). When I maximize ensemble or instruments (or the pro version), I expect the UI to increase to the size of the window so I can actually see the text. I dont quite understand music software, it all seems to have this underlying problem; apparently, users are expected to have 20/20 vision plus a telescope to read the text in these music apps, as they all seem to have scaling issues. When I maximize ensemble, shouldnt the vienna instruments panel increase to the size of the frame on the right hand side? Same thing with instruments, when I maximize instruments, 50% of the screen real estate is empty, and the ui is identical in size. Why not scale the size of the UI to fit the window they are in?

Below are screenshots with both maximized. Why isnt the UI scaling to match?

Im not sure I understand... Dynamic scaling is available in most software. The windows 10 scaling is quite frankly, terrible, understandably, because it was only recently just added to windows 10 and has to use "intuitive" guesses to figure out how to scale correctly.

You mentioned that this was not a problem when people were running on 1080p displays, which is also, just not true. The UI in Vienna's software appears to be built around when people were running 800 by 600 displays. I didnt do an actual pixel count, but, I have a dual monitor setup, one is a standard 1680 by 1080 display (22 inches) and the UI comes nowhere close to extending across the entire display on that monitor either.

Instead of discussing legacy reasons for why this problem exists, lets discuss why, in 2018, music software continues to have this problem and more importantly, how we as an industry can make music software more accessible. As a side note, I would venture to guess that the problem stems from the fact that music software developers are busy trying to check the next box on the feature list, and UI scaling isnt high on the list of checkboxes. In point of fact, accessibility options have always been low on the priority list for software across the board and I think this is a shame.

I dont know what programming language vienna software is written in, however, most modern programming environments have UI scaling builtin, if the programmer takes the time to account for it.

I would also argue that if I have to use the operating system to fix a display issue specifically related to one program, or a group of programs that all fall under one category (music editing, photo editing, video editing, web browsers, etc), that industry might have a problem that it should strongly consider looking into.

This is not just a problem with Vienna, this is a problem across the board. East West, Kontakt, and Cubase, all software suites I have in my workflow, have this issue. As music software gets more complicated, more buttons and fiddly bits are crammed into the UI until eventually, the little 5x5 pixel icon is shrunk down even smaller and a tooltip has to be added. I kid you not, some of the fiddly bits in this software contain more than 100 controls in a single paged incidence of UI, which appears to have a screen resoultion of 800x600.

When a person buys a 50 inch TV to use as a display monitor, they arent doing it because they want the UI elements to stay the size they are on a 22 inch monitor. They are doing it because they want things to be bigger... Music software developers dont seem to care about this however, and that is unfortunate.

Well said. No doubt there are solid reasons why it has so far proven too difficult (costly? distracting from other priorities?) for VSL to implement what seems to users like an obviously needed feature.

I like how you expand the issue beyond VSL to the whole industry. I agree that industry-level problems require industry level effort. If the problems are too daunting for individual companies, perhaps they could pool their resources.

This may not be feasible, but somehow it simply has to be accomplished. My guess is it would require extensive rewriting of code, and it becomes a choice to charge update prices for new musical capabilities or for UI scaling. There's probably not the programming capacity for both.

The calculation may be that users would not pay for UI scaling as the primary feature of a new software version. Myself, I would consider UI scaling a feature perhaps equal to or more important than many other potential new features.

Originally Posted by: littlewierdo

Im not sure I understand... Dynamic scaling is available in most software. The windows 10 scaling is quite frankly, terrible, understandably, because it was only recently just added to windows 10 and has to use "intuitive" guesses to figure out how to scale correctly.

You mentioned that this was not a problem when people were running on 1080p displays, which is also, just not true. The UI in Vienna's software appears to be built around when people were running 800 by 600 displays. I didnt do an actual pixel count, but, I have a dual monitor setup, one is a standard 1680 by 1080 display (22 inches) and the UI comes nowhere close to extending across the entire display on that monitor either.

Instead of discussing legacy reasons for why this problem exists, lets discuss why, in 2018, music software continues to have this problem and more importantly, how we as an industry can make music software more accessible. As a side note, I would venture to guess that the problem stems from the fact that music software developers are busy trying to check the next box on the feature list, and UI scaling isnt high on the list of checkboxes. In point of fact, accessibility options have always been low on the priority list for software across the board and I think this is a shame.

I dont know what programming language vienna software is written in, however, most modern programming environments have UI scaling builtin, if the programmer takes the time to account for it.

I would also argue that if I have to use the operating system to fix a display issue specifically related to one program, or a group of programs that all fall under one category (music editing, photo editing, video editing, web browsers, etc), that industry might have a problem that it should strongly consider looking into.

This is not just a problem with Vienna, this is a problem across the board. East West, Kontakt, and Cubase, all software suites I have in my workflow, have this issue. As music software gets more complicated, more buttons and fiddly bits are crammed into the UI until eventually, the little 5x5 pixel icon is shrunk down even smaller and a tooltip has to be added. I kid you not, some of the fiddly bits in this software contain more than 100 controls in a single paged incidence of UI, which appears to have a screen resoultion of 800x600.

When a person buys a 50 inch TV to use as a display monitor, they arent doing it because they want the UI elements to stay the size they are on a 22 inch monitor. They are doing it because they want things to be bigger... Music software developers dont seem to care about this however, and that is unfortunate.

Originally Posted by: bbelius

If I remember correctly, VST 2.x has a lot of restrictions regarding UI and scaling. This adds a lot of additional problems.

That right there represents a huge obstacle for VSL...and the industry. Steinberg's VST3 is not an industry-wide standard. 

There is single app scaling in Windows, or at least the possibility to allow certain apps to scale but not others - although legacy software doesn't do a great job at it (it basically blows up pixels into a sometimes blurry mess!). Nevertheless, it's better than using a magnifying glass. I wrote in the other thread:

"Here's perhaps a better fix: find the Vienna Ensemble.exe (mine in program files > vienna), right click, properties, compatibility tab, select Override high DPI scaling behaviour, and change to System or System Enhanced. Now the application will be blown up by a factor defined by system. I believe this is somewhat new, perhaps a Creator's Update or so. It's less than ideal, obviously, as things won't look as crisp as they would on real scaling; basically we're just doubling pixels here. But for everybody who doesn't have laser-eyes, or wants to use an analog/digital magnifier, it works much better."

Perhaps it's useful to you. 

Note that this thread was from 2015. The suggestion was then, too, that this was being looked into and that this was certainly next in line. I think VI/VIP could really do with an update by now!

Best,

mspape

I think it's safe to say that the new Synchron releases have had an impact on available development time for other Vienna libraries and software. 

I too very much look forward to an updated VI with GUI scaling.