Reaktor instruments for maschine plus stand alone

Manbehindthemachine

Hello Maschine plus users ,

I'm developping Reaktor synthesizers for one year to be used on Maschine plus stand alone with low CPU consumption.

I presented the first one at synthfest 2024 in France.

The main features of these reaktor instruments are easy to use with a low amount of controls ,low CPU consumption and a new gauges style of parameter display that alows a better overview of the parameter state.

They are cross platform compatible , that means they can be used on maschine plus stand alone , with maschine Daw , with komplete kontrol keyboards

and as a regular plugin in any daw that supports the Reaktor vst due to their Graphical interfaces .

I would be curious to know if the Maschine Plus community might be interested in this type of instrument .

Man Behind The machines

keilyn3d

Sound great, I´m interested.

ozon

While I admire and commend your efforts and dedication, I fail to see the advantages over existing offerings.

Maschine+ already offers several great sounding synths engines:

• Bass Synth (internal)
• Drum Synth (internal)
• Poly Synth (internal)
• FM8 (VST)
• Massive (VST)
• Monark (Reaktor VST)
• Prism (Reaktor VST)

Additionally, owners of the full Reaktor license can download and adapt custom ensembles from the Reaktor User Library to work on the M+. Which unfortunately and admittedly is often not easy.

What would be the benefits (or unique selling points) of your instruments?

Manbehindthemachine

I will try to explain that

Manbehindthemachine

I totaly agree with you on the fact that NI synth avaliable on the Maschine plus are okay but they are not well adapted (in my opinion) for a full heavy standalone production or live performance use :

To many parameters

No clear visual feedback of the knob values

No easy way to control the synth parameters inside Maschine Plus (Monark cutoff for exemple) with an external USB MIDI Controller .

This results from my personal experience as a Maschine plus user of course.

The fact is that Maschine plus is quite limited in terms of CPU power .

I play an entier live with the Maschine plus in standalone mode (no computer) with a lot of synth plugins running in realtime because i control them with an external USB MIDI controller.

Monark for exemple, a monophonic synth, is eating 20 % of CPU for one instance loaded in a Sound.

My Reaktor User synths have a monophonic and a polyphonic version which consume  respectively 6% and 10% of the CPU power   .

On FM8 and Massive , the parameter layout is not adapted to be used on maschine plus in standalone  (16 pages of parameters)

Eatch parameters has a different numerical ratio for exemple :

                               Min    Half    Max
Cutoff (0 to 100) : 0        50      100

Reso   (0 to 10)    : 0        5        10

Volume (0 to 60) : 0        30      60

I redesigned the parameter display with gauges instead of numerical values to have a clear visual value feedback ( from empty gauge to full gauge ) like below :

Finaly , in a live performance situation , those synths are midi mapable directly to any external USB MIDI Controller connected to the Maschine Plus in Standalone mode .

No need to :
1) Open my project in Maschine 2 on the computer
2) Map the parameters
3) Save the project on the Maschine plus SD card
4) Re-open the project on the Maschine plus in standalone mode

I Can directly do it on the Maschine plus in standalone mode :
1)Choose the parameter I want to control ( ex : cutoff)
2) Assign it to the control change i want (ex : CC 20)

It's been a long time since we've had a major update to Maschine Plus and
those features will never be added via an update ( I think ) but in my workflow I need them.

I know that this is very specific to my use of Maschine Plus, of course, but I find it interesting to see if there are other users who would need these type of features on the Standalone Maschine Plus.

I hope I have managed to explain in an understandable way the advantages offered by these Reaktor instruments.

Greatings

Man Behind the Maschines

PK The DJ

I personally would love to see some addons for the Maschine Plus.

IMO that's where it's lacking when compared to MPCs, as Akai regularly release plug-ins that run on the standalone units and on the desktop sofware.

There's been nothing like that for the Maschine Plus.

Manbehindthemachine

Completely agree.

I am not familiar with the MPC workflow but with version 3 of the firmware which was recently released, AKAI takes a significant lead compared to the Maschine Plus with interesting fractures like the stem separation for exemple.

By the way Maschine Plus is not limited to 8 instrument and has stil more RAM and a slightly better cpu (Not 100% sure about the specs)

At the end what matters is the workflow that you're the confortable with . 😄

KrisG

Akai uses a very cheap rockchip arm cpu. The atom chip in the Maschine is a bit better than the rockchip. The huge difference here is the RAM. 2GB vs 4GB. Also thats the reason MPC uses now diskstreaming samples to save memory.

In the end it all depends on how the software is being optimized for the fixed hardware. Remember the old iphones with low spec hardware? Android had higher spec hardware but still sluggish interface.

ozon

@Manbehindthemachine thank you for the detailed explanation of features, use cases and target audience for your instruments.

In my workflow I prefer to use the Synth engines I know, especially Monark as a portable replacement for my Voyager.

To be able to assign MIDI CC on the fly is great indeed, especially for live performance with various controllers. But it is not a feature I need. However, I welcome any improvements in MIDI handling in the M+ and still hope for NI to wake up and do a proper MIDI implementation.

@tetsuneko @djadidai and a few other M+ users might be interested for live performance applications.

tetsuneko

Sounds interesting! I would certainly be down to testing these when they are released.

How did you manage to get the graphical bars for the parameters to show up in the M+ UI? This is something I havent seen before, and if these bar graphs update in real time, would actually be very useful for me in my own Reaktor ports. I have been looking for a way to display compressor gain reduction amount somehow, but the numerical parameters do not update in M+ standalone reliably..

I also notice you are using a Komplete keyboard. Have you managed to suss out how to control the lightguides of KK keyboards in M+? This is also something I'm very interested in

PK The DJ

I found a video from Synthfest:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmX6BBJ8E5A

HugoClubs

This man is doing Native Instruments job.

Great stuff!!!

Manbehindthemachine

@tetsuneko , for the bars i use the list module insted of a regular knob.

Unfortunatly it can't be used to display a vu meter or the gain reduction that you're talking about (as far as i know).

I only have a kontrol a49 so i'm not used to the lighgided kontrol s49.

I'm finalizing some tests on m'y latest reaktor creation in order to share a (limited)beta version to have some feedback on my work.

Manbehindthemachine

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/177061#Comment_177061

That was a very cool event . I was surprised by people's interest in the Maschine Plus in a show mainly dedicated to hardware machines .

Manbehindthemachine

https://youtu.be/lfM4Phs5SH8?si=Y5VWNkMd_UPWCanv

el-bo

Great stuff! Really interested to see these out in the wild.