Features in Maschine SW but not on Maschine+ standalone

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Answers

  • darkwaves
    darkwaves Member Posts: 336 Guru

    audio module in repitch mode seems about the same as the sampler. Audio module in stretch or formant modes is a hungry beast - even if you aren't stretching anything.

  • Flexi
    Flexi Member Posts: 366 Pro

    Maschine is horribly unoptimised, this wont be changing, if you need more CPU, you need a faster CPU, but RAM does play a big part in Maschine vs a DAW too, menory handling in most DAWs is vastly superior.

    (There is a possibility of fanism development on M+ though, as an example of that go look at TC Powercore, unsupported and discontinued, but one of the developers is still a fan and continues development in free time, the developer of M+ is the guy who basically made MK2 standalone with a Pi, so who knows.)

    All this boils down to userbase moving past primary developer expectations, Maschine was designed by its original developer as a drum machine that was part of a bigger modular system, that developer and NI parted ways a long time ago, you can go look at what he originally had planned by looking at what he has developed since vs what NI have developed.

    NI wanted a groove rompler and that is why you see little interest in core feature set updates/optomisation vs content and content able updates, this will never change, NI has built a reputation on "the content is better" you will see that in any MPC VS maschine comparison for example, and to be completely honest, it has kept Maschine alive, it lacks the featureset to stay relevant outside the content for the vast majority of its userbase.

    Add all this to now being owned by Soundwide, who have already started to show a leaning towards subscription for content, and you can expect just as few core updates.

    This could lead to big differences M+ (standalone) vs desktop, because M+ poor file system is less able to be an unlimited content box, even possible early demise of M+ (It does feel like previous company owners ****** child mistake right now)

    Just ask at any store of Akai vs M+ sales, the difference is absolutely insane (that is M+, Akai vs all Maschine variants is much closer, if you include keys)

  • D-One
    D-One Moderator Posts: 2,811 mod
    edited September 2022

    Freeze is in every single DAW, I'm aware of how it works and never meant to question if it does, it's pretty established that it works, I was just curious about how much since disabled plugs still consume CPU and it's highly dependent on what you freeze, buffer settings, etc.

    The auto-sampler is mainly designed to give users access to instruments that are not available on the M+; it's us the users who might look at it as a resource-saving workaround, auto-samplers have been around for standalones for decades (albeit not always built-in), it's not really an NI creation.

    Correct, you can get a ton of audio issues way before you hit the CPU 100%, that's in any software, that happens often if the audio buffer is way too small for your CPU capabilities, if you max your ram, there might be part of a song where more stuff is happening, or specific plugs/features that cause CPU spikes... This reminds me of another limitation:

    You can't change Audio Buffer settings on the M+. On computers, people often use short buffers to compose and bigger ones to mix, the latter comes at the cost of more latency but allows you to run more stuff, hence this trick to mix.

    If I load 6 random loops I'm still at 6%-7% CPU with them playing, no clicks or pops. I don't have that specific Expansion to check it out tho.

    Correction: The above is in Re-Pitch mode, with Stretch it goes to 28-30% (which is understandable since RT TS is known to be CPU intensive when the algorithm sounds good, however, if you're re-sampling yourself then the BPM is already what you need and thus don't need to actually stretch anything. (Edit2: I didn't see page 2 where @darkwaves also mentioned this)

  • tribepop
    tribepop Member Posts: 160 Advisor
    edited September 2022

    Yeah I was gonna ask about changing the audio buffer in standalone. It makes me wonder if they chose that value because there’s other optimizations they’re making elsewhere and that was the best trade off. I do love being able to switch to a higher one for mixing versus composing.

    The loop thing is blowing my mind because that’s most likely what’s causing my issues on both the SW and HW because I think a lot of my resampling of myself are set to stretch. I need to go in and clean it up, thank you both for mentioning that!

  • tribepop
    tribepop Member Posts: 160 Advisor

    @D-One @darkwaves Yep, I totally had a bunch of audio devices running in stretch mode so switching those to re-pitch dropped CPU load by 20-25% and removed pretty much all clicks and pops. Thank you guys for pointing that out, I remember reading that in the docs but totally forgot about it.

  • ozon
    ozon Member Posts: 1,302 Expert

    @D-One wrote:

    If I load 6 random loops I'm still at 6%-7% CPU with them playing, no clicks or pops.

    The interesting part is that it’s not necessarily the loops that click, but other sounds in the Group such as a Kick sample! And this also happens when Maschine is stopped, i.e. nothing playing. It’s also pretty unrelated to overall CPU load.

    I had this happen with a bunch of synth loops I had recorded myself. I think it was about 5 loops, on 7 or 8 pads, pitched differently. All of a sudden there were clicks and pops when hitting other Pads.

    IIRC I submitted a bug report for that on centercode.

  • tribepop
    tribepop Member Posts: 160 Advisor

    Yeah this was the exact behavior I was seeing on the standalone and SW version and it was because I had several audio devices using the “stretch” engine which is pretty resource heavy. The clicks and pops went away after I switched them to “Re-Pitch” mode.

    Seeing as how this seems to be a pretty regularly occurring problem, I wonder how many customers NI has lost because they thought the product sucked because it had all these clicks and pops but still had low cpu load. They need to do a complete overhaul of time stretching in general in Maschine IMO.

  • tribepop
    tribepop Member Posts: 160 Advisor

    Adding another feature I thought of last night:

    It would be nice to have an “LFO” device that’s either built in to all of the other modules that have automation targets so that you can add modulation using the LFO rather than having to draw in the automation. Similar to how the LFO assignment works on the Sampler and Filter devices but imagine it being applied to any parameter on any module. It would also be badass to have a step sequencer operation that has a similar purpose.

  • lwpweb
    lwpweb Member Posts: 20 Newcomer
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