Question from a blind Maschine MK3 newbie, any way to import custom samples using the controller?

robin24 · 2023-05-09T13:37:59+00:00

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Greetings,

I'm a fully blind music enthusiast and DJ, with a huge interest in taking a dive into the world of music production.

When I hard a couple days ago that NI Maschine had recently become accessible, I was immediately super excited, and I'd love to take this opportunity to thank everyone involved in making this happen.

So I now have a Maschine MK3 set up and ready to go, I've followed the tutorial from the Maschine accessibility video to get a good first understanding of how everything works, and I'm really, really enjoying this a lot so far.

Sadly, however, I’ve just ran into a bit of a show stopping issue with the software, which has prompted me to reach out.

Since I’d like to use this to produce remixes or incorporate various sound samples into my own projects, I tried to figure out how to import my own .wav files into the DAW.

Unfortunately, however, it currently seems as though this can only be accomplished using drag & drop with the mouse, which for me as a blind screenreader user is impossible to do, especially given that the main Maschine window itself is not currently screenreader accessible.

Chances are that there is an accessible way of doing this, however as of this time I haven’t been able to figure it out despite many attempts.

I have, for instance, selected an empty group, then instantiated the audio and sampler plugins to see if any of the screen buttons would turn into an import button, tested both with and without the Shift modifier being pressed.

I’ve also made sure to look around the Sampler, or the screen button options which become available when pressing the File button to see if an import function would reveal itself.

Finally, I’ve also consulted the Maschine manual as well as various videos on YouTube describing how to import sounds into Maschine, but in all cases the method being described is to drag a file from Finder into a sound slot that should be visible in the Maschine window, with seemingly no way of bringing up a standard file open dialog by only using the Maschine hardware controller.

With all of this being said though, I was wondering if anyone here might know a way of accomplishing this using either the Maschine MK3 controller, or some keyboard shortcut that might be available within the Maschine software?

Any help with this would be super greatly appreciated, thanks!

Robin

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Accepted answers

Jeremy_NI

Hey @robin24 You contacted my colleagues and they got back with this "workaround"

think one way to do this without using a mouse would be to place the sample in the directory where the software looks on your computer.

~/Documents/Native Instruments/Maschine 2/Samples

Once your WAV sample is in there, you should then be able to use the Maschine hardware or software to access it.

Filter by USER content and check in the One-Shot area of the browser

One of the devs also suggested this, if you are on Mac:

Add samples to ~/Documents/Native Instruments/Maschine 2/Samples
With Maschine not running, in terminal set the following: defaults write "com.native-instruments.Maschine 2" AutoRescanUserContent -int 1

Hopefully this helps.

All comments

D-One

Hello. I am sorry to say that no, it's not possible thru the Hardware, adding custom content is only possible from the software.

There are other options besides direct drag and drop, like using the "Files" tab to navigate the file system and add a folder that contains the samples to the user library, then all the content should show up in the user Browser but as far as I can tell the voice assistant does not provide any audible guide to achieve this.

robin24

Hey @D-One,

Thanks for confirming that this can't be done using the software, I already suspected that this may be the case but as I'm totally new to this I was hoping that I may have overlooked something.

Very sadly, the Files tab you mentioned does appear to be completely inaccessible at this time, both using the NI Accessibility Helper as well as the VoiceOver screenreader that comes installed with macOS.

This does seem like a pretty major bug to me, as importing custom samples, vocals, harmonics etc is crucial functionality for most musicians, especially those looking to create remixes etc.

Given the potentially show stopping nature for many users, could you kindly pass this along to the responsible developer teams at NI for further action?

Thanks!

Robin

Jeremy_NI

Hey @robin24 You contacted my colleagues and they got back with this "workaround"

think one way to do this without using a mouse would be to place the sample in the directory where the software looks on your computer.

~/Documents/Native Instruments/Maschine 2/Samples

Once your WAV sample is in there, you should then be able to use the Maschine hardware or software to access it.

Filter by USER content and check in the One-Shot area of the browser

One of the devs also suggested this, if you are on Mac:

Add samples to ~/Documents/Native Instruments/Maschine 2/Samples
With Maschine not running, in terminal set the following: defaults write "com.native-instruments.Maschine 2" AutoRescanUserContent -int 1

Hopefully this helps.

robin24

Hey @Jeremy_NI

Thanks so much for getting back to me and posting the solution here as well!

I'm happy to confirm that this workaround does the trick perfectly, running the defaults write command in Terminal is indeed a requirement as that setting appears to be turned off by default.

Really happy that this has been resolved, many thanks!

Robin

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