Maschine Jam would be even better if...

IWabbit

I think we all know how great Maschine Jam is... just not on it's own. I tweeted NI today with hopes that a firmware could unlock its full potential. Work with an iPad. Work with the Microfreak, MPC or a Roland piece of gear. Or simply by itself. Not sure how that last part would work! I am so close to selling it but holding out hope that A. NI does something. B. Someone in the community already has found a trick up their sleeve. As of April 2022, I've not found it. I've searched YouTube, Google and the back alleys and nothing. Yesterday, I was able to plug only the Jam into the Mac and could midi map to Koala. That right there says I am not crazy in my ask. It feels like there are horses under the Jam hood that need to be released!

Matt_NI

Maschine Jam is discontinued which means a firmware update is quite unlikely.

It might be that someone has some hacks to make this work on iPad or with the gear your mentioned.

Maybe @D-One has some secrets to share?

D-One

There will never be a firmware to unlock it, at least not an official one, there's no such precedent... If they ever did that to very old gear, say MAS Mk1's and such maybe there was a chance. IMO there should be laws forcing companies to open up legacy abandoned hardware, imagine how much e-waste and planned obsolescence this would prevent; but I digress...

There are some indie 3rd party devs working on a solution that will eventually enable using NI controllers with iPads or anything else that accepts MIDI, called Rebellion.

As I understand it it's gonna basically require a microcontroller, a dongle if you will with the alternative firmware/driver installed serving as a bridge between the controllers and whatever you want. In a nutshell, the microcontroller will do what a computer does, no idea when this will actually be a reality tho, it's still in alpha.