Studio One Plugins Appearing Too Small? Here’s How To Fix It

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Are you losing your mind trying to figure out why your Studio One plugins appear too small?

Welcome to the club! You wouldn’t believe how common this is and how often it affects producers and musicians. 

I know how annoying it can be to have such a hard time seeing the settings on your favorite plugins. Not to mention that the effort can hurt your eyes after a while. 

But don’t worry, you’ve come to the right place for answers. 

Below, I’ll show you a trick to get your plugins back to regular size in no time, keep reading to learn how it works!

Studio One and Window Resizing

Before moving forward, I want to clear something up. As opposed to other DAWs out there, Studio One does not yet have an actual function to resize plugin windows. 

Several users have requested this feature for years. But so far, PreSonus has unfortunately done nothing about it. 

That being said, you know how we love coming up with workarounds here at Tech Detective. I’ll show you a trick I discovered not too long ago that can help you make your plugin windows larger. 

The Million-Dollar Trick

The best way to fix Studio One plugins appearing too small is to adjust your display’s scaling. This will increase the size of the DAWs interface, making everything look bigger and closer to you .

But wait! Before you do that, you need to make some changes within Studio One’s file settings. 

If you don’t, changing your screen’s scaling will do nothing to make your plugin windows bigger. 

Here’s what you have to do:

For PC:

  1. Go to Studio One’s folder (normally the route is <This PC > Local Disk (C:)>Program Files>PreSonus>Studio One
Where to find Studio One.exe
  1. Right-click on “Studio One.exe” and click on “Properties”
  1. In the new window, click on “Change high DPI settings”
Process to change high DPI settings
  1. Check the “Override high DPI scaling behavior” and under “Scaling performed by:”, select “System (Enhanced)” from the dropdown menu. Once you have done that, hit “OK”. 
This will allow your plugin window size to change with your display settings
  1. After you’re returned to the window below, please make sure to click on “Apply” to save the changes. 
If you don’t hit “Apply”, nothing will change

Making Your Plugins Bigger

Once you’ve completed the previous steps, you’re ready to go directly to Studio One and experiment with plugin sizes. 

Loading your project might take a while, so in the meantime, why not check out our piece on the best stock plugins within Studio One?

Pretty interesting, huh?

Now that your project has loaded, here’s what you have to do:

  1. Launch Studio One and load your favorite plugin onto a track
FabFilter Pro-Q
Here, you can see my FabFilter Pro-Q3 plugin is a little small
  1. Go to your Desktop and right-click somewhere free of icons. Then, select “Display Settings”
Process to change display settings on Windows 10
Keeping an uncluttered Desktop is always advised
  1. Find the “Scale and layout” option, click on it, and select 150%
Change scale and layout on Windows 10
By default, your screen size should already be set to 100%
  1. Go back to Studio One and check the plugin you had open. If everything worked as expected, it should now look a lot larger
Plugin Studio One
Notice how the FabFilter Pro-Q3 plugin is now much bigger and visible

I know, changing your display’s scaling every time you want to adjust your favorite plugin’s settings is not ideal. But sadly, it’s our only option until PreSonus decides to address this issue.

The TV Alternative

If you’re not convinced with the method I just showed you, you can always try connecting your PC to your TV via HDMI cable. 

I’ve seen a lot of professional studio owners do this. Depending on how far your TV is from your workstation, this may or may not be an acceptable solution. For medium-sized rooms, you’ll get the best results from TVs that are 43” or larger. 

Conclusion

Having your Studio One plugins appear too small can be very annoying and bad for your eyesight. Especially when you need to make precise setting changes. 

Luckily, as I hope you’ve learned in this short piece, although there’s no official way to resize your plugin windows, there are a couple of simple workarounds you can try. 

I’m sure you’ll soon be creating hit songs again. 

Thank you for sticking with me all the way to the end. If you found this article helpful, you’ll be glad to know that we upload new content every week. Please be sure to check out all our other incredible resources below to become a Tech Detective yourself!

Best of luck to you.