No, I never mentioned MX. My patches are written for Massive and Kontakt.chk071 wrote: Fri Mar 13, 2020 12:13 pm Just so that I understand it: You can use Massive on your 4k display, but you can't see Massive X?
That surprises me, because, MX's GUI is bigger, and, AFAIK, Massive 1's GUI isn't resizable? Maybe I don't understand you correctnly.
For those reading this wondering why not just switch to MX, it's not the work of converting about 100 patches in our active setlist (plus another ~200 inactive setlist patches). I wrote 'em once; rewriting would be tedious but not impossible.
It's a combination of not being able to get the sounds quite the same which, after a decade of playing them, would make them seem foreign, and a paranoia borne of long experience that when I change a major VST that there are weird compatibility things that take a few months to straighten out. Even if it is 99% perfect, since we perform about 45 songs in a gig, after one gig there's about an even chance something going south, and if it causes problem with a song loading then that's probably catastrophic as most of our songs involve prominent piano or organ. (Even though I use Pianoteq or VB4 for that, that resizes perfectly, I often load Kontakt or Massive too since many/most patches have subtle "extras" that make it sound great - things like horn stabs, or subtle synth pads). When one patch fails to load it can bring down a song, and that derails the entire band. A bad experience can cause us to lose a contract. And when things go bad live, the error dialog that Kontakt throws is almost unreadable.
For a typical example (that happened), think "Back in the USSR". A casual listen says the only keys part is tack piano, which I cover on Pianoteq. But if Kontakt fails to find the jet sound that opens the piece it opens an impossible-to-see locator window that stops the rest of the patch from loading. We could get by without the opening jet with at worst a hiccup as the band realizes at different times to come in, but without the tack piano the song sounds awful. And in poor lighting it was really, really hard to close the modal dialog box from Kontakt to let me play on with the main sounds that worked fine.
I could switch to a lower-performing laptop, or push the laptop into a lower resolution that makes it difficult to see upcoming patches in my host. It seems that's the tail wagging the dog though...limiting what I see live just so I can use Kontakt and Massive, when most of my songs use Pianoteq or VB4 that have no such issues.
So for now, when I need horn stabs, or a synth fill, or a recognizable synth solo line, or a triggered background FX, I use my old Kontakt or Massive patches, even though I can no longer really modify them because I can't really see them, and freeze my directory structure since moving anything would require me to interact with Massive or Kontakt.
Really, for me, the uproar about NI trying to discontinue old programs isn't nearly as frustrating as not being able to use their current programs.
