Maschine 3.0 General Discussion

Doubtful anyone on this forum made an “impulse purchase” considering it’s made up mainly of the same users that provided the feedback for the release. Being disappointed at spending $70 wasn’t the point anyways, rather that there are companies that charge for stuff like this and those that don’t. Akai used to be the former, and NI the latter. They seem to have switched places. That’s the point. To each their own to anyone who prefers paying for small upgrades on dated hardware while the competition is providing large upgrades to modernized hardware for free.

I know many are underwhelmed by this update, but as a NI user for over a decade, having both mk2 and mk3 versions of Maschine and the Kontrol keyboards, I was willing to pay $29 just for the cohesion. With the UI and navigation design language NI has been trying to streamline over the past year, Maschine's software stuck out like a sore thumb. Been using it today and yesterday and the much-needed expansion of filetype compatibility makes the sampler feel powerful all over again, I was able to import audio from an mp4 youtube video just by changing the extension to .m4a and it seamlessly imported into the sampler without a third-party conversion software. Stems separation is nice, hopefully more powerful audio routing options are coming in plug-in mode. Look forward to what's to come.

I use Maschine as a sound module in Logic Pro and the only features I am really looking for that I don't already have is automatic multi-output routing to DAW mixer. I have a template that I made where I individually routed each Maschine pad, and if I want to add a new instance of Maschine I either have to take the time to route each pad again, or open up the template. It is a bit tedious.

The other improvement I am curious about is the plug-in latency during tracking for the AU version of the plugin. I am aware that you can toggle SHIFT + CHANNEL twice, or press the Maschine icon in the plug-in to re-sync the audio, but this needs to happen EVERY time the Maschine track has been deselected. Not a huge deal, but still a minor pain-point nonetheless. I fear this may be a limitation with the AU architechture/Logic Pro exclusivity as this has been the case for several years, but I have hope there may be some solution.

I still haven't been able to use it yet. It downloads fine, but then freezes during the initial plug-in scan. It always freezes when it scans Addicted Drums. I don't know why that specific vst freezes the program. Has anyone else had this issue? And if so, what did you do to fix it?

@Lionzinio thank you for listing the locations! 👍

Scene Tempo : via the Shift + Scene buttons

Which I already mentioned to be available, but it might be hard to find for some.

Bounce : Only available in Ideas mode, via the Shift + Pad Mode buttons

I couldn’t find that, so I checked the manual and didn’t find it there either. That will be handy on the M+, as the previously available drag and drop isn’t possible.

Stem Separation : via the Sampler edit tools like Truncate and Normalise 

Indeed and it makes sense to find it there. I didn’t actually look for that because I have no use for it. However, I don’t expect this to become available on the M+ as, it needs a lot of CPU power.

@Milkman wrote

Then back at the end of 2023 something changed, to do with Bitwig + maschine2 routing, and all the years of templates and projects I had suddenly stopped working, causing me to make a support request with Bitwig. Cubase routing, somehow, was not affected.

This is probably related using Maschine VST3 instead ofVST2? A lot of developers had a hard time getting MIDI to work in VST3 plugins and some even claimed it was impossible, although others were doing it (for a long time). If the routing works in Cubase (which is the VST reference implementation) but not in Bitwig, the Problem is most probably with Bitwig and not with Maschine.

When you try to use your DAW to route midi in/out of maschine (really just out), it introduces problems and works differently DAW by DAW.

Why do you need to route MIDI out Maschine if you - as mentioned in a previous post- don’t use its sequencer? Or is this something Bitwig does automatically (wrongly) and Cubase doesn’t?

if the routing you are interested in saving is within Maschine (ie I want each pad to output to a different channel) you can set up a Maschine template and import groups to it without their routing.

If the routing you are interested in is in a DAW (ie I want each Maschine output to go to a different channel) you can set up a template within the DAW.

If I want to create a Maschine group that outputs each pad to a separate channel in my DAW I need to do both.

Once you’ve done the set up work, actually using these to add Groups and make music is easy.

Thanks for the update NI.

@Matthew_NI

There is one small thing I'd like to point out and in regard to the recent update, and perhaps this is something worth investigating for maybe a future update.

I would've loved to see support for WavPack (*.wv) audio files. I know the format is rather unknown still, but is gaining more attention.

WavPack is a free and open-source lossless audio compression format and application implementing the format. It is unique in the way that it supports hybrid audio compression alongside normal compression which is similar to how FLAC works. Unlike most encoding which can affect the sound quality, with WavPack not a single bit of the original information is lost, so there's no chance of audible degradation. Compression ratio depends on the source material, but generally is between 30% and 70%.
Compatible with virtually all audio data formats, including; 8, 16, 24, and 32-bit integer PCM; 32-bit float PCM; DSD audio; mono, stereo, and multichannel (up to at least 256 channels); and integer sampling rates up to 1 GHz.

In most area's (if not all), WavPack is beating the competition, e.g. MP3, MP4, FLAC and OGG. And in my humble opinion, probably would've even beat WAV if it wasn't for the lack of native support implementation with applications and hardware devices. In which WavPack probably scores worse than most of the competition out there (as for now…)

Nonetheless we finally start to see more applications, DAWs and plugins becoming available that allow it to read and write WavPack files.Adobe Audition (and CoolEdit), Reaper, Steinberg WaveLab, FL Studios and Audacity all support WavPack natively.

Here are just a few of WavPack's features that (I think) provide some important advantages over many of the more popular audio compression formats.

• Higher compression ratios, resulting in smaller file sizes.
(Making "WavPack" the ultimate audio archiving solution.)
• Better audio compression quality at higher compression ratios.
• Support and preservation of all header and metadata such as images and cue markers.
(Making it ideal for sampler function compatibility and sample library development.)
• Metadata is stored in "APEv2" format (up to 16 MB).
• Smaller size for audio file data means faster data transmission.
(Very beneficial data distribution of large multi-GB libraries over network/internet, device-2-device transfer and read/write operations).

More info here:
https://www.wavpack.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WavPack

GitHub repository:
https://github.com/dbry/WavPack

Kind regards,

Ron