Maschine 3.0 General Discussion
Comments
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I'll wait for the M+ update to upgrade. Still need real time pitch shift and browse user/computer files in browser in Maschine
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No.
Pro Tools and Cubase got to where they are by being early onto the market, investing heavily in feature development early on (getting ahead of the curve) and then building out secure market segments that are less fickle and could hold a product up through economic downturns because they became the basis for peoples' businesses.
Maschine is almost certainly less of that than Cubase or Pro Tools these days.
This gives companies like Avid and Steinberg the "priviledge" of not having to participate in a race to the bottom simply to exist.
Finale is a great example of this. Because Finale became niched off to a market segment that is very conservative and doesn't see many values in feature upgrades, the product could not sustain development. This put it in a position where they could not actually afford to develop the features needed to make the product competitive.
This also happened to products like Sonar, Acid, Reason, and others. While they still exist, they are now so behind the curve that many people don't find reason to choose them over others.
Arturia produces good products, but they participate in the same "race to the bottom" strategy that many other plug-in developers entertain. They release as MSRP and then they have countless promotional periods throughout the year where the price drops substantially to get people in at extremely low costs. And since those people will not pay higher costs, they are now forced to keep having these promotions just to get them to upgrade. However, Arturia makes money from content, as well, so perhaps they have figured this to be worth the tradeoff.
This also applies to NI, but Arturia's content tends to be predominantly Synth Expansions, which are cheaper than NI Play Series or [Maschine] Expansion drops. This changes the market dynamics.
As I've stated, software becomes high margin after the development costs are raked in, so this is easy to do with software products. This cannot be done with hardware products, where material, production and shipping costs set a baseline that cannot be surpassed without the product becoming a loss for each sale. Also factor in returns, the the fact that every return has to be refurbished and sold at a lower price (eating into margins).
FL Studio got popular by being easy to pirate. That's a majority of its early growth. Image-Line was very passive on enforcement because they were banking on the user base growing and converting to paid users (which most have). This is a strategy that many shareware developers have been employing since the 1980s. It does work.
FL Studio is popular in Hip Hop, but I doubt FL Studio has the level of dominance in that market segment that Pro Tools has in Studio and Postproduction or Cubase has with Composers or Film Scoring professionals. Many Hip Hop producers also use Ableton Live, Bitwig, Cubase, Studio One, Reason and other DAWs. FL's grip on the Hip Hop production market is much looser than Live's grip on the EDM production market, currently.
Onto NI's "Pricing Strategy," literally nothing you wrote makes sense.
- Maschine+ was hilariously overpriced when it was released. Everyone knew it. Most reviewers outright stated it. The product launched half a year after the MPC One with a weaksauce CPU and worse connectivity… but for almost twice the price.
- It also launched when Laptops were slimming down… Right when we were getting 7nm Ryzen Laptops that could deliver 5x the performance of a Maschine+ with ease while running off of 60W USB-C PD in Silent Mode with a Maschine MK3 attached to it… and the Maschine+ isn't really amazingly better for portability compared to that setup.
- That's not even mentioning the Apple M1 machines that came later that year.
- It also launched when Laptops were slimming down… Right when we were getting 7nm Ryzen Laptops that could deliver 5x the performance of a Maschine+ with ease while running off of 60W USB-C PD in Silent Mode with a Maschine MK3 attached to it… and the Maschine+ isn't really amazingly better for portability compared to that setup.
- Maschine+ was hilariously overpriced on release. A price drop was inevitable. They would barely move any units at $1,299-1,399. Sorry, but no. Maschine+'s pricing helped sell tons of MPC One units.
- High Price is fine if a product deserves it. No one is asking NI to drop the price of the S-Series Keyboards. Those Keyboards in in line with competitors on the market - like the Arturia KeyLab, Novation SL-series, etc.
- The issue with the Maschine+ is that the pricing is way out of line. It was effectively an MPC One with MPC Live II pricing. That was the problem.
- If a product deserves the price, it will justify that price through sales. Clearly, the M+ was not selling, otherwise they would have kept the high price. Why give away your margins when you don't have to?
- Lol, what? Perhaps NI needs to simply realize when a product is past its due date and sunste it, instead of keeping it on hte market indefinitely as practical abandonware. Again, NI can easily create a Maschine Drum Machine plug-in as well as beef up the samplers in Komplete Kontrol. They don't need to waste resources generated by the Maschine development team to patch up a product that has lost mindshare and is unlikely to deliver any gains to justify it due to the market having turned to alternatives - and people generally don't come back after they've left.
If you think people are going to stop using the Drum Samplers in Live, Bitwig, Cubase, Logic and other DAWs to use Battery, then I dunno what to tell you. This simply won't happen.
Battery has been nothing but a reservoir for NI Expansion Content for the better part of the last decade…
The update is $29. The fact that there are people complaining about that is crazy.
I've been phasing NI out over the past year and now very little I produce uses their products. As I've stated before, Bitwig Studio is basically Maschine 3.0 for me, due to how well the controllers work there. Beyond that, I use Cubase and simply don't use (on all but one machine, I don't even install) NI's products.
5 - Maschine+ was hilariously overpriced when it was released. Everyone knew it. Most reviewers outright stated it. The product launched half a year after the MPC One with a weaksauce CPU and worse connectivity… but for almost twice the price.
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Good points, I believe the comparison with Cubase or Avid isn't fair, was to the same environment at all. Comparison with Arturia is more fair because they arrived in an already saturated market. Note that I almost paid nothing since I bought Pigments 1.0 to arrive to V5. The temporary 50% rebate is common to software, that's not a problem for me, considering they also apply the rebates to upgrades, and that wasn't a problem for mùeller with NI Komplete as well. It's true that FL is also another story, but I find their strategy way more customer friendly and it looks like it pays off in the long term, including with people who used to use their software without paying it.
The problem for me is when failing to determine the right price then permanently having to lower the price. Korg and Roland have also occasionally fallen into that on some of their secondary products.
Again, I also agree that the $29 upgrade is not the main problem here, though I (wrongly) started this discussion with it. The problem is the failed pricing strategy for NI's products, leading to lower sales than expected, strong and permanent rebates, less budget and hence resources for the development; early discontinuations, and users like me, who then getting pissed-off having to even pay even a cheap software upgrade after having paid premium pricing initially for a product (M+) that has needed a lot and long awaited of refinements to become usable. Will probably get this upgrade but will not rush and the M+ firmware update before that.
I'm not saying it's easy for NI and they fail anyway, it's way less easy as they could never establish themselves in the market and so each product launch, especially hardware is a big risk taking for them as considering the slim lineup, it'd better be a future flagship, kinda a "no right for mistakes" for them.
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OMG how many more times are you going to repost this "I bought something expensive so I want free stuff" nonsense? 🤣
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Arturia didn't really arrive in a saturated market. Korg is the only other company with a comparable bundle to V Collection, and there are stark differences in what the two offer. There are discrete emulations floating around, but there are very few companies that offer a bundle comparable to theirs. This is why V Collection has become so popular.
A lot of the big competitors to Arturia V are Sampled Instruments (e.g. IKM Syntronik and UVI Vintage Vault) which have clear limitations (not to mention, massive RAM and Disk Utilization). Companies like Softube and UAD have good emulations, but they don't have anything comparable to V Collection - as a complete product (and before the race to the bottom started, they were also very expensive). Cherry Audio does exist, but people [almost] uniformly regard them as a tier below Arturia.
Market Saturation does not matter if you actually have an innovative product that delivers a better solution. What will happen in that case: the weaker products have their users sieved off of them by disruptors - leaving only fanboys/true believers behind. The market is cannibalistic. Studio One probably took more users off of Cakewalk Sonar than any other DAW in the early days of its existence.
FX Collection DID arrive into a saturated market, but the selling point of FX Collection - beyond the quality of the FX - is the fact that they tie into the Arturia ecosystem AND Arturia constantly has insane discounts for people who own both previous FX Collection bundles as well as other Arturia Products. We have to keep in mind that Arturia has Keyboard Controllers that integrate with their software - much like Native Instruments. So, there is now a strong ecosystem tie-in that encourages users to buy more Arturia products - particularly if they use Arturia hardware.
Pigments also arrived into a saturated market, but by then the Arturia ecosystem was well-established, which shields the product from those market effects. Pigments is more of a revenue generator on the content side than through sales of the instrument itself.
FL Studio's strategy was consumer friendly only insofar as illegitimate users were allowed to use the software unimpeded for years. They are far more aggressive with this, now, but that is less of an issue as it has utilized the previous decades very well to grow a huge market for itself.
I think NI made a mistake by not simply always allowing anyone ot purchase the Maschine software standalone (without having to buy a controller). That should have been the situation since Maschine 2 launched.
—As to your point about NI's product pricing. It doesn't make sense largely because you refuse to acknowledge their business model and priorities.Their pricing is designed to make Komplete Bundles look better - period.They don't expect anyone that isn't a sucker to pay $199 for Battery. What they expect is that most people will see $199 and decide that they'd rather just pay the price of a Komplete Standard Bundle and get the other stuff bundled, as Battery alone isn't worth that price (but the bundle is often justifiable, even at a [significantly] higher cost). It's a numbers and psychological game that they play with users… It's why most people obtain NI's software via bundling.Most new users are buying bundles.They are playing the same game everyone else plays. Arturia, IK Multimedia, Softube, UAD, Waves - endless numbers of companies - do this, as well. The bundle price looks irresistable when juxtaposed against the MSRPs of its included components.
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He's actually being very civil in discussing his point of view. No need to attempt to troll him.
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Repetition is OK as long as it's civil? 😲
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I can understand you and me personally but many other Artists are happy or to be precise I am doing everything in Maschine for a 5 years and it's more than capable for everything but again I understand because I came from CUBASE, and probably every other DAW, best Controllers and yet Maschine MK3 as all in one device was Amazing. M+ Standalone is even better but it is not working properly with the new 3.0 Software, Today it crshed. It happened in the stage after I didn't have Undo and now my Track is sounds like this.
It was uplifting melodies and now it's a mess. I don't know why I connect to a Computer, I guess it's because of USB cable which I have to connect I plug and unplug because USB Memory stick is not working like every other Device work...so I didn't want to plug & unplug because I don't want to Demage Connectors and it was behaving like something is not working properly. Constantly resetting Scale in keyboard and Chords. And in general I am more productive in Standalone Mode because I used to and I don't have crashes so I would like Stability First.
Without Hardware I don't see any point, honestly.
We all make mistakes so I'm that manner I accepted this Update but I didn't bought Maschine for a 🐭 & ⌨️
I am sure that we all have to be more active in Requests and be honest and think about request because on the Promotion Page even NI wrote how it's what users asked for... and we should be polite and respectful for Brand and each other.
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Believe me, there are Artist who are doing well with "old" version, Maschine 2. I care about STABILITY the most and specifically with Hardware -Software. I don't care about 🐭 &🎹 .
I do everything in Maschine only for 5 years and for me it's what I needed after years of almost every DAW and best Controllers.
It's everything that you can read on the front page of Cubase 14.
Fastest Workflow and with some basic but important mixing rules which majority can't accept because it's hard to believe that it is actually that simple so it's easy to make it more complicated.
Standalone Mode is the best way and it is actually The main link of the entire ecosystem.
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I.dont understand what you mean?
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Sorry which part? I am serious and I like constructive discussion and as a Cubase user what I can do with Maschine Plus Standalone Mode is Amazing quality and much simpler and faster let's say Automation/Modulation. With two Lock States I morphing between Multiparameters from literally everything I see.
If it's possible look some of my YT recordings. It's bad sound but enough for the information.
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Ok i understand now.. I do the same on the MPC X in standalone and record into Cubase and then add more instruments and mix.. BTW I like Trippy Taka - space beat nice work!
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Any update on new release also 2025
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Say, is anyone else here having issues with maschien 3.0? On my new mac mini M4, if I mess around in a single pattern for long enough, all the note data disappears with no way to undo 🙈
Using latest macOS version, Maschine+ in controller mode. Same setup works perfectly in Maschine 2
I'm rolling back to Maschine 2 for now.. waiting for hotfix update..
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Have not stumbled upon this yet. Could you try to "mess around" and take note of the last step you did before the issue happens? If not reported and reproducible it might never get fixed :S
BTW you dont need to roll back, you can have both v2 and v3 installed just fine but v3 projects will not load in V2.
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