I'm at my wits end with how unstable / long Maschine takes to load

Joseph CR Vourteque

If anyone can give me any insight that would be great.

I love the Maschine interface and all but the back-end of the program needs a lot of help. I have been working on a live project that I want to use Maschine as the main piece of gear for but at this point I might throw in the towel and go another route.

To start - I have a FAST laptop, and on top of that I have literally the fastest SSD you can buy with my software loaded onto it, going INTO a thunderbolt port. So speed is not an issue.

Yet when I try to load up a Maschine project that isn't one made by NI or one entirely composed of NI plugins, it takes FOREVER to load. On top of taking forever, I get CPU spikes that make little to no sense, and since NI doesn't provide any way to see plugin load, I can't see what's causing it.

This is unacceptable. This is fine as a fun little toy but this isn't something I can use professionally. NI can do better than this. I've bent over backwards at this point to make it work but I may just go with an MPC unless NI can get their act together.

So this is my hail Mary, anyone out there got a suggestion?

I'm running a Windows 11 PC, 16GB ram, SSD hard drive, SSD 2gb/sec transfer rate external and an i7 2.90ghz processor. So sorry it's not the computer.

awol9000

I've found the more plugins installed the longer the load time. I recently got rid of all the Izotope VSTs and 10 other ones and my load time is half what it used to be.

LostInFoundation

Of course more plugins to scan take more time. But the OP here is talking also about projects loading, not only the time Maschine needs to open. Since the OP already have another thread with the plugins scanning problem, I think this time he is not talking about this. In any case he would be right, since even this problem hasn’t been fixed. There are workarounds, but workarounds are workarounds and not how a well made program should work.

@awol9000 if you don’t need those plugins, it’s good for you to uninstall them. But be aware that you can also skip the plugins scan at the start (specially if you are sure you didn’t add any new). It’s enough to push Esc when this procedure is being accomplished or to move to another place ScanPluginsApp_x64.exe from C:\Program Files\Common Files\Native Instruments\Maschine 2 to avoid the plugins scanning at start. When you’ll need it again, you put it back

JesterMgee

Yet when I try to load up a Maschine project that isn't one made by NI or one entirely composed of NI plugins, it takes FOREVER to load.

Can you define "Forever" as a number?

What are the plugins (and more important, libraries) loaded into the project?

2.9Ghz is ok, not what I would call blazing fast in this day, but also knowing it is a laptop it's "2.9Ghz" at the best of times, likely throttled much lower. FWIW my old Windows 10 machine with a Gen4 i7 runs stock at 3.6Ghz but is overclocked to 4.4Ghz and I still find that machine slow compared to my current Ryzen 7900X which has a lower clock speed but MUCH faster RAM/FSB.

Even the fastest SSD can be bottlenecked by your RAM/CPU speed so if you are loading up multi-GB Kontakt libraries there may be load delays no matter how fast the SSD.

Have you done all the usual suggested laptop optimizations such as enabling "full power mode" and disabling things in the BIOS such as CPU speed stepping etc? Laptops usually come with a default power profile for longer battery life so if you have not disabled all that your CPU can cycle up/down as load is demanded and that can lead to audio spikes out of nowhere.

Also, do you have a MK3 maschine and using it's on-board audio, what are your audio preferences? If not, what audio interface/settings do you have set?

Joseph CR Vourteque

So it can take over a minute to load a project, which when I'm doing a live set is not really an option. In my few practice sets it's one of the biggest sources of feedback I've gotten is the 1 - 3 minute load time between songs (I mean 3 minutes is a long unto itself).

That said it occurred to me that if I an open TWO instances of Maschine and switch between the two this MAY be a solution? I mean it might not but I can't seem to find an easy, fool proof way to open up two iterations of Maschine outside of it just randomly happening sometimes.

Joseph CR Vourteque

Okay so here's a weird twist.

On a whim I opened REAPER and loaded multiple instances of Maschine WITH my tracks loaded and REAPER somehow seems to... make it all run more efficiently? I can literally just switch from track to track without loosing CPU power. I mean, I know REAPER is one of the tightest and best programmed DAWs out there but that's impressive. Anyway I'm not counting this as a golden ticket yet, I need to do more work on it, but for now I think this MAY be at least half a solution.

I'd love if I could just do it in standalone but... eh, maybe not.

6xes

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/12571/im-at-my-wits-end-with-how-unstable-long-maschine-takes-to-load

once inside Maschine(stand alone), my suggestion would be to check the drivers selected in preferences

your best driver is usually the one that has the least latency for the same block size across the drivers

audio sample rates also need to be matched to the Windows audio sample rate

also as you dont make mention of using a audio interface theres no knowing what you have installed driver wise

this is where i would be looking first