Waves V12 is here, now with resizable GUIs

[Ploki]

I really like the blurred look. Are there any other developers with similar looking interfaces? Maybe with wooden cheeks?

well on Mac you can open any app in "Low resolution" (non retina) mode, so it looks blurred and fuzzy, so you can update everything to Waves V12 for free

[martinjuenke]

I like V12 on Mac: crystal clear scaling. Wow!
The looks are digital, the sound is analogue.
Better than the other way round...

[pixel85]

I really like the blurred look. Are there any other developers with similar looking interfaces? Maybe with wooden cheeks?

I heard that CD Projekt RED wants to 'conquer' the plugins market. With them, you have huge chances to get a nice, lo-fi blurry GUI.

[Captain]

I went ahead and got Scheps Omni Channel, had no idea that it looks blurry as heck at >100%. All the GUI elements are there as PNG & XML files, and I can easily edit the images and the plugin happily uses the edited versions. I tried doing better scaling with Photoshop, but frustratingly the plugin wants to show all images at 1:1 resolution, meaning that bigger PNG files are just shown bigger, not with more resolution. I spent a while going through the GUI definition XML file to see if there was anything that could be done about it, but no cigar.

I guess in theory I could scale all the PNG files with Photoshop, then edit the XML file to scale all the pixel values by the same amount, and just use the 100% scaling in DAW. But that's quite a lot of work and not guaranteed to work, and really it should be Waves doing this... Well, I might try it anyway if I get another frustration energy boost.

EDIT: Well darn it, I tried it, and it seems to work... almost! I wrote a script that scales all the pixel values in the GUI XML by 2x, then let Photoshop batch process the PNG files with an algorithm suited for upscaling (some AI algo would probably do an even better job, but it already looks a billion times better than Waves' miserable attempt at scaling). The only thing is that all the processor modules (EQ, compressor, etc) have their PNG files and GUI definitions separately from the main plugin, so I also need to process them. I tried that with one of the modules, and it scales correctly, but the controls don't work, so I probably forgot to update some values. But the "master area" is correctly scaled and the controls (master faders, meters, limiter) work perfectly. Anyway, it just blows my mind that some amateur user can pretty much fix in an hour what Waves couldn't do with this major update.

EDIT2: I just realized that on a high def monitor, even the 100% GUI size scales the PNG files by 2x. So the 200% GUI size is actually scaling the originals FOUR times bigger. Combine that with crappy scaling, and no wonder the GUI looks bad. The original images are just incredibly small/lores. So if I scale them by 2x, the 200% GUI size has my "good" 2x scaling on top of Waves' horrible 2x scaling. Not ideal, but might still be good than without. Will continue experimenting, and see if there's any way to show the images at 1:1 resolution...

[simon.a.billington]

I went ahead and got Scheps Omni Channel, had no idea that it looks blurry as heck at >100%. All the GUI elements are there as PNG & XML files, and I can easily edit the images and the plugin happily uses the edited versions. I tried doing better scaling with Photoshop, but frustratingly the plugin wants to show all images at 1:1 resolution, meaning that bigger PNG files are just shown bigger, not with more resolution. I spent a while going through the GUI definition XML file to see if there was anything that could be done about it, but no cigar.

I guess in theory I could scale all the PNG files with Photoshop, then edit the XML file to scale all the pixel values by the same amount, and just use the 100% scaling in DAW. But that's quite a lot of work and not guaranteed to work, and really it should be Waves doing this... Well, I might try it anyway if I get another frustration energy boost.

EDIT: Well darn it, I tried it, and it seems to work... almost! I wrote a script that scales all the pixel values in the GUI XML by 2x, then let Photoshop batch process the PNG files with an algorithm suited for upscaling (some AI algo would probably do an even better job, but it already looks a billion times better than Waves' miserable attempt at scaling). The only thing is that all the processor modules (EQ, compressor, etc) have their PNG files and GUI definitions separately from the main plugin, so I also need to process them. I tried that with one of the modules, and it scales correctly, but the controls don't work, so I probably forgot to update some values. But the "master area" is correctly scaled and the controls (master faders, meters, limiter) work perfectly. Anyway, it just blows my mind that some amateur user can pretty much fix in an hour what Waves couldn't do with this major update.

EDIT2: I just realized that on a high def monitor, even the 100% GUI size scales the PNG files by 2x. So the 200% GUI size is actually scaling the originals FOUR times bigger. Combine that with crappy scaling, and no wonder the GUI looks bad. The original images are just incredibly small/lores. So if I scale them by 2x, the 200% GUI size has my "good" 2x scaling on top of Waves' horrible 2x scaling. Not ideal, but might still be good than without. Will continue experimenting, and see if there's any way to show the images at 1:1 resolution...

They are working on a solution at the moment, as was stated earlier. The thing is they have a hell of a lot of plugins to go through.

Although, have just tried keeping the dimensions of the images the same, but upping the resolution to something around 150dpi??

[Aloysius]

They have a hell of a lot of money to count. i have no sympathy for them.

[Reefius]

So later this year a big announcement when they release V13 with actual high DPI graphics. Don't want blurry interfaces? Pay $240 for WUP once again.

[The Noodlist]

They dropped the ball on this, changes should have been implemented years ago. There's freeware with resizeable GUIs that have been around for years. A mix knob instead of a separate plug-in is also a feature that would be useful.

I can't believe that a once major company doesn't have the foresight to improve and change with the times.

[imrae]

The thing is they have a hell of a lot of plugins to go through.

Batch processing, common framework, automated testing... You keep making this excuse for them like you don't understand that software developers are meant to be good at scaling this kind of work.

[Proteinshake]

So later this year a big announcement when they release V13 with actual high DPI graphics. Don't want blurry interfaces? Pay $240 for WUP once again.

Nah, don't worry. I've heard the guy for the new GUI just quit.

[Captain]

Although, have just tried keeping the dimensions of the images the same, but upping the resolution to something around 150dpi??

As long as we stay inside a computer and don't print anything or otherwise reproduce an image in a physical form, there is no such thing as "dpi". I keep running into this all the time, when someone requests a "300 dpi JPEG" or something, which doesn't mean a thing by itself. The only thing that matters and exists is the pixel dimensions of the image. This is worth a read: https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com ... f-png-file

They are working on a solution at the moment, as was stated earlier. The thing is they have a hell of a lot of plugins to go through.

Sure, I understand. I'm just a little impatient, and slightly irritated that I, an end user who shouldn't need to know or worry about this stuff at all, can spend an hour or two and already get pretty far in fixing what should be the responsibility of this big company with a lot more resources. But yeah, what can we do, other than wait for their fix.

[TheSweetSpot]

The only Waves plugin I feel I absolutely need a bigger UI to improve my workflow is Tune, but $22 to update ONE plugin is really steep IMO....

[Googly Smythe]

Short version:
Latest version 12 seems more cpu friendly, at least on my 4790 system.

Long version:
I bought the RS124 compressor and the Abbey Road Saturator and because of the "get 2 free" thing Waves had going on in December, I got the Abbey Road Chambers and Plates, so all v12. I was previously running v9, except for the Abbey Road Mastering thing, which was version 10.
I'd checked the threads for those last 2 plugins and everyone was complaining about how cpu intensive they are/were. But when I loaded them up, well, I had no problem loading up half a dozen of them.
So I got to thinking (I know, bad habit): maybe some other plugins may have received some cpu attention. My favourite plugin in Waves TG12345, but I can only load about 10 of them before my machine gives up the ghost, I mean, won't even play (this is Win 10, Cubase Pro 10.5, 32 GBytes RAM). So I did the un-thinkable, I upadated the WUP for this one plugin.
With trembling knees I opened up my latest project, replaced 20 Lindell 80 channel strips with the updated TG12345, and behold! It played! Joyful, Joyful!
So, having go over to the Dark Side, I updated the WUP for my REDD plugins. Same result.

Maybe the changes happened in v10 or v11? Don't know.

The End.

[Burillo]

the moment Waves does proper resizable GUIs is the moment they get WUP money from me.

[Synthient Sound]

I finally bought some Waves plugins late last year and they advertised "retina" graphics, except when I put in support tickets for the plugins having horrendous resolution, they said it was only the number readouts that were "retina". I don't end up using the ones I have now, much less buying more when it looks like you are using a 2004 plugin in 2021. In addition, a lot of the GUI designs look very dated.

It is too bad as they do have some interesting plugins.