Massive X: Status/Future (v2022)?

Lucas Howden

Dear NI team,

now that Massive X has received a usable browser in May 2022 (long awaited, much appreciated, and usable, but nothing too fancy in my eyes, however, concerning, say, presets ranking, and especially 3rd party and user presets handling), and the plugin itself has turned 3 years old just the next month, what are Native Instruments' plans on further MX updates and upgrades? I still like to quote the manual's WELCOME section: "MASSIVE X will grow, adapt, and evolve with regular updates both inspired by, and to inspire its users." The new preset browser doesn't mean the glorious symphonic finale of MX's development, does it?

I still know Massive X is a fantastic sounding synthesizer, and I know there had been some updates that not only had maintenance reasons (such as M1 compatability), like useful additions to existing modules. But nothing as fancy as advertised, however, and far away from great additions some competitors offer.

I still propose the following enhancments, which I'd like to see complemented and thought further to many additional ideas by Native Instruments' creative minds:

IMPORTANT FEATURES

- Performer: Presets! It'd be a pleasure to be able to save and load custom-made performer sequences. It's very tedious having to re-sculpt modulations on every new patch.

- Performer: Copy/Paste: I'd like to be able to copy performer parts, at least inside of one performer. It's very tedious to exactly redproduce modulations for different bars manually, before finetuning them from there.

- Enter values: I like being able to work precisely, and sometimes I just need to enter, say, a modulation frequency value by hand directly.

- Visualization of modulation assignments: I really like the concept of the mouse hovering over the modulation source's crosshatch leading to a visual indication of the modulation targets by the appearance of circles of the same color as the modulator! Since this doesn't work on currently hidden areas yet, I propose the following: Please implement color circles as an overlay to the respective category. Example: L5 modulates different destinations. If Insert effect B is one of them, but Insert A is visually active, then there should be a green circle above B when hovering on L5's crosshatch, so the user knows there's a modulation hiding at all. There should be color circles, respectively, over P1, P2, P3 to T1, T2, T3, T4 as well as X, Y and Z. Otherwise the user has to step through all panels manually to reveal possible routings.

NICE TO HAVE:

- Modulations coulf be visualized with live motions on each respective parameter.

- Wavetable visualization should not only change when moving the position knob, but also when being modulated (e.g. by a Macro knob).

- MIDI learn for all parameters, not just macros.

- Wavetables: Import

- Wavetables: Editor

- MPE implementation

All the best

Lucas Howden

Nico_NI

Thanks for the detailed feedback and your feature request Lucas.

Massive X development is still ongoing aside from other projects. We cannot focus 100% on it and bring as much as new features as we'd like to, but the new browser paved the way to additional enhancements and new features for the future. We cannot commit to any timeline yet, but rest assured more updates will come, starting with the M1 compatibility.

I'll definitely forward your comment to our team though!

Lucas Howden

And back again, almost ANOTHER YEAR has passed without any real progress. MX still sounds awesome, is still filled to the brim with tons of sound design capabilities where one could easily relinquish the desire for many a hardware synth, and STILL seems to have slipped out (to say the least) of NI´s focus and development.

"We cannot focus 100% on it..." is quite an understatement.

NI, does Massive X have a real future?

Murat Kayi

I think that by now the new vision the new owners of NI have for this company has become clearer to us.

I know it's not completely on topic, but Benn Jordan has done an informative take on the private equity buyout in music production on YouTube - highly recommeded

Kymeia

It still needs a usable browser - the current browser is only useful for browsing NI created content but this is supposedly a synthesiser and therefore designed (one would think) for people to create their own sounds with, and yet there is still no way to manage those sounds.

No wonder there are so few third party sound sets for this, particularly when you compare it to the original Massive which has inspired so many great sound designers and musicians.

NI are really shooting themselves in the foot over this

Maciej Repetowski

When I can use cursor keys and enter (to load a patch) in a browser, I will call it usable… 🤪

k999

I guess it's my love for the product that makes me a bit disappointed. There are so many ways it could be improved to make it one step closer to be the perfect semi-modular synth. For example, one filter is just not enough.

DaniloVillanova

NI has dropped the ball spectacularly on this one. The broken promises of development keep piling up and they don't go unnoticed. NI's reputation has taken an enormous hit in the mind of many disappointed users who were expecting Massive X and Guitar Rig 6 to be updated as promised.

NI was happy to take our money and then they just simply removed the line in GR6's page where they said it would get updated regularly with new models. How long until the same happens with Massive X?

IMO this should be illegal, and someone should get punished for some sort of fraud. A class action lawsuit maybe?