SMBigSkin

SynthMaster is a soft-synth VST instrument. It's a great synth, but the the screen size is a bit small for my liking. Rather than creating a new skin by hand, I wrote a script to resize an existing skin. (Which probably didn't save me any time.) SMBigSkin is a non-destructive resize: a new skin is created at the desired size, which you can then select from inside the VST by right clicking and selecting Change Global Skin.

INSTALL

Make sure your SynthMaster skins folder is read and writable. On Windows you might find this folder atC:\Program Files\KV331 Audio\SynthMaster\Resources\Skins and on OSX at /Library/Application Support/KV331 Audio/SynthMaster/Resources/Skins.

There are some skins in there with unhelpful names (such as New Skin ###). You may wish to rename these folder to something more appropriate, such as the name of the skin itself. The skin name is in the first line of interface.xml in the folder, e.g.: <InterfaceDefinition name="Default Skin-Blue"/>.

Download the SMBigSkin.js and package.json files into a folder. If you have git, you can do this with git clone https://github.com/scriptorum/SMBigSkin.git.

This script requires NodeJS, so install it if needed. This should also install the command npm.

The script also requires Graphics Magick. You can install it manually, with homebrew (brew install graphicsmagick). (On Mac, you could also use MacPorts: port install GraphicsMagick). Make sure the application is added to your PATH so you can run it from the command line.

Now you can tell NPM to install the package dependencies (npm install). This will scan package.json for the dependencies, and install them into a new node_modules subfolder.

You probably will need to open up write access to the Skins folder for the script to create the new skin in it. On Windows, navigate to the Resources folder, right click on Skins, select Properties, and add write permissions. On Mac, you can do this on command line: sudo chmod -R 777 Skins.

CONFIGURE AND RUN

Configure your settings in the SMBigSkin.js script.

• (Mandatory) Set skinsFolder to the location of your SynthMaster skins.
• Set skin to the name of the folder containing the skin you want to resize. (e.g., "Default Skin").
• Set magnification to your desired scaling amount. (e.g., 1.2 is 120%, or 20% bigger). The enlargement process tends to make images a little blurry, but that's graphics for ya. If you're having a lot of seam issues, a different magnification could help. You can set magnification to less than 1.0 if for some reason you wanted to shrink the skin, but anything below .8 will probably make the keyscaler unusable.
• (Optional) Set fontAdjust to 0 if you want text labels to scale evenly with the everything else. Otherwise supply a percentage adjustment. -0.10, for instance, will set text labels to 10% less magnification than you specified above. Why use this? You might use a positive fontAdjust if you find the text labels are still too small, or a negative if you find the arpeggiator text is a bit cramped.
• (Optional) It's likely you'll have some alignment issues due to rounding errors. This shows up as visible seams, from the blocking areas bleeding through. There's no great fix for this, but you can minimize the seams by recoloring them. This is simple to do by setting colorToRemove to the seam color, and replacementColor to a color that blends better. You can set these to null if you don't want this color replacement to occur. Otherwise supply a string with a color name (e.g., "blue") or an HTML color value (e.g., "#FF8500").

And now you can run the script (./SMBigSkin.js or npm start). After it says COMPLETE, the new folder should magically appear in your SynthMaster skins skinsFolder and is ready to test. If you want to enlarge a different skin or create different sizes, just reconfigure and rerun. You can throw any of these generated skin folders into the trash if you don't want them showing up in your SynthMaster Global Skins list any more. Careful not to trash your originals, particularly the Default skin!

Alternately, you can set the parameters via command line, which will override the configured settings. However, you must still ensure skinsFolder is set properly. The arguments are [<skin> [<magnification> [<fontAdjust> [<colorToRemove> <replacementColor>]]]]. You should probably put the skin name in quotes or make sure to escape any spaces. For example, npm start "Default Skin" 1.2.

NOTES

• Only tested on SynthMaster 2.8 on Mac. It may not work on earlier versions. Or on PC. Or really, you know, at all. Caveat Emptor, No Guarantees, Use At Your Own Risk, Etc.
• You may need to reboot your DAW to see skin changes.
• There are some skins this might not work on; if your DAW crashes, you win!