Why are Maschine “Group” previews not tempo synced?

DEEMUS · 2023-10-25T03:45:38+00:00

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DEEMUS

When scrolling down previews in the “loop” section of the browser, the “loops” are synced to the tempo.

Why aren’t the “Group” previews in the browser not also tempo synced?

Surely this feature couldn’t be too difficult to implement, could it?

Regards,

// X

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D-One

One thing to note is that previewing Loops synced and stretched came on the Sounds.com era, when NI was going hard at promoting it to the point of adding it inside Maschine (despite most of the userbase being very against it), this might also explain why it only works for "Loops" as that was the main selling point of Sounds.com... Since it's dead now theres low chances of NI revisiting this soon IMO, new features tend to be released when theres new HW or similar is released (sounds.com in this case)... The same way the Auto-Sampler was only made after the M+ came out.

Previews for instruments that have tempo-sync tag (things with arps and such) could also benefit from being stretched and synced for example, not just Groups.

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/103009#Comment_103009

OGG is not necessarily that bad, it can have higher bitrates like 320kbps, NI uses 192kbps, (32bit, 44100hz) it's not great but not that horrible... remember.. tons of people sample from youtube nowadays which can often be way worse. I tried stretching one of the original previews and it sounds OK ish...

OGG has metadata (any file can have it) "Vorbis comment" or whatever it's called, theres no tempo/bpm in the spec tho, not that it matters as NI does not even use standard wav RIFF metadata, they have their own proprietary shenanigans that they use for tags and whatnot. Looking at Hex data from an OGG I couldn't find the usual chunk NI uses for metadata tho.

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ozon

Preview of One Shots and Loops plays back the actual sample. Loops are WAV files containing tempo and loop point information. So they’re using the regular playback engine.

Preview of Groups plays back a dedicated preview sound file. They are provided as OGG files, a highly compressed audio format which cannot be used with the regular playback engine.

DEEMUS

Hey Ozon,

l Appreciate the detailed response.

Why is a different playback engine required for Groups?

D-One

The simple answer is: Because the NI team did not implement it, likely because they believe that to get an ideia of the intention of the Group/Kit it has to be heard in the original BPM (which of course is highly debatable); or they simply don't see much value or don't prioritize such feature... impossible to guess.

This is not something you can fix yourself, only the NI development team can.

This is a quite irrelevant but regarding "why playback engines":

In order for a software to read any type of file support for that file type has to be added to it, this is why people use media players like VLC, it designed to play almost anything because it has tons of "playback engines"; a more correct term would be an API, codec or library, like this one. Coincidentally the wiki page for "computing Library" uses .ogg as an example:

Maschine already has a way to read .ogg or they wouldn't play them to begin with, the browser is simply not coded to time stretch and sync them... And no, it wouldn't be difficult to implement for a professional development team but NI doesn't pick what to work on based on difficulty, they got their own mysterious ways prioritizing their backlog.

ozon

There’s another more technical aspect to this: As a lossy highly compressed format OGG is not suited to time stretching because you will hear artifacts and it doesn’t offer standard meta data to denote BPM and loop points. It’s neither intended nor suited for that purpose.

DEEMUS

The reason for the original question is that I enjoy loading a Group and removing unnecessary sounds from the group. Loading a new Group and repeating this process until it creates a new collage.

Using Groups this way acts like Loops on steroids and editing is more efficient because of the loops and midi combination. (Read it like Drake)

Though tempo-synced Groups would be nice, D-One makes a great point about being able to preview the sound of the Group in its intended form.

Correct me if I'm wrong but the explanations above explain the purpose of codec, not why Groups and Loops/One Shots use DIFFERENT codecs.

LostInFoundation

Wow…I learned more from a 6 posts thread than from years of researches 😂

the most deserved “insightful” I ever gave…thank you

D-One

Previews for instruments that have tempo-sync tag (things with arps and such) could also benefit from being stretched and synced for example, not just Groups.

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/103009#Comment_103009

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