Massive X - 2025 Personal experience, comparisons and wishes
Hello everybody , how are you all been doing? I hope you are having a great day or evening wherever you are in the world. This is Ali reaching out. I recently had a chance to get Massive X because I have Novation and M-Audio MIDI keyboards thanks to NI's decision :D
Comparisons:
About the UI I love the colors and the looks of it being complex, similar to modular synths. I had my eyes on Massive X since it released in 2019 to be honest. those time period after trying it, it felt incomplete and dissapointed many people including my music teacher who is a EDM professional for over 10-15 years. I have a good experience using synthesizers and doing sound design this time, and I was playing with Massive X for a few weeks now and there are still a lot of questions come to my mind. why is it not possible to automate pitch bend and mod wheel in the DAW (FL Studio in my case)? I was creating a patch today and noticed it's still not possible to automate some knobs (my case in Filter section) , it still can't detect what I am manipulating and shows "Macro 16" instead of the actual parameter I intended to automate! you can't automate Master slider as well. you can't automate unison spread also. (you can macro it however). Massive X has Unison voices of 6 in total?! Old Massive had 16 and other synths have at least 8, Sylenth1 has 8 unison per osc for example . no control over unison number per osc and unison patterns per osc . not having Pan per osc. old Massive has "Options" in it's main drop down Menu, and you can set Default Author and not repeat renaming presets Author over and over for each patch, Old Massive has Recent files allowing user to use previously used presets in their current project. old Massive had Randomization feature which Massive X misses. on old Massive we had 3 oscs on X we have 2 😀 Filters look different I have not had enough experience with filters but in filter section I see only 1 module that has multiple modes.
Enhancements done:
I know that some requests regarding visual updates have been addressed , envelope visuals, knobs having weight (I enjoy how it feels like analog physical synths though), Master slider movements, PDF manual which is everyones favorite have been added. the flexible routing is so good. Performer looks big and wide which is awesome I like this more than Serum's. tons of other good effects including recent OTT effect. Unison chord feature.
Overall Personal experience:
these are all great. I created a few metallic monster patches like Au5 with Massive X too😀. but really I was so hyped and planned to read the whole manual this week but these I mentioned above causes me (and maybe others) to second guess to even start the manual or go with other synths…. ☹️
Thank you for everything and the efforts you do for developing it.
Comments
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Sorry this got long
Alas it is virtually impossible to extract what you think is a problem and what you see as feedback or what is wishes. If you have anything that you want to communicate then perhaps it would be better if you describe it in short and divide it into respectively problems , feedback and your feature request if any ?
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you're right, I edited it and made it more clear
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I found massive x to be a bit of a disappointment when it was launched and mostly still do. Like most of NI's software it's been largely neglected and only recently had an update. A compressor effect and a few pesets was the best they could offer after waiting for 6 years. The compressor might have been more useful if massive x had a standalone option which is something often requested along with the ability to load your own wavetables / samples, better handling and saving of user created sounds which seems to fall on deaf ears. I use Serum but my go to synth plugin to replace massive x is now Arturia's Pigments.
Massive x was billed as the next step in the evolution of the original massive but in my opinion the original is still better in many ways.
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"I use Serum but my go to synth plugin to replace massive x is now Arturia's Pigments."
Pigments is the bomb - and I also throw Omnisphere and the outstanding u-HE "Triplets" (Diva, Zebra and Hive) into my stable of "go-tos".
Between these - there is literally nothing one cannot do.
Unfortunately - Massive X is simply not at this level - in my opinion anyway.
VP
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Hello, may I ask to remove this post? I played more with Massive X and personally I want to stick with it and even suggest it to more producers I judged it soon🫣 on the other hand I didn’t find remove post option here on the forum. Thanks.
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Following the post from:
Being very excited about the next category of updates, I had to log into this forum to comment:
I hope that this year NI will take a very serious stance in their instrument category (apart from Kontakt), and here I come with a series of suggestions:- Synthesizers, is the category I mentioned above, this is where they should invest the most, and I am willing to support them with the purchase of the new Massive (if that's what it will be called) I want to see your potential in gaining ground against the competition, especially Serum 2 and Pigments, because Massive X has an exceptional sound (almost like Massive OG) but it needs a reformation of the types of audio synthesis models (more variants like serum has now brought to the market, but with the brilliant sound of Native Instruments, not the sterile one of Xfer).
- The last category of updates I would like to see is in the other Battery instruments, FM 8, please redo the interface so that it can be scalable, it is NECESSARY.
In conclusion, I can't wait to see the news in terms of updates on the side of those mentioned above.
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NI definitely has to get it together now and do some serious updating for Massive X.
I love the sound quality above all and that's probably the main reason why I still use it and recommend it to my students. Having been teaching Komplete at leading NYC EMP schools since 2007 and also creating courses for it, NI has greatly disappointed lately in the field of synths. Axing Absynth was an abomination especially when Brian Clevinger would have been willing to update it. Do we have an issue now with Massive X because of Mike Daliot or why exactly are we stuck with basically the same synth since its inception?
Adding a MB compressor is not going to suffice, even though it gives me hope for future development.
The GUI needs more animation: while CPU considerations were valid back in 2019, we have much more powerful computers now with the advent of Apple silicon.. Pigments did a great job with its GUI and also serves as a reference with other features like granular and spectral synthesis. How about adding granular to an expanded Noise module? But of course MX sounds better and bigger overall than Pigments and that's why I'm still using and showing it in class. Same applies for Serum which sounds rather thin once you take off all the effects from a sound and a synth has to sound good without souping it up with effects. They are an additional production step. I know people want quick results but why cave in to quick solution here when the results could be so much better when using a superior sound engine in the first place?1 -
@heinrichz I absolutely agree. MX is my favorite sounding software synthesizer. It's always important that the basic sound sounds great, without effects. It's like mixing. Unfortunately, this is not reflected in most sound libraries and many users don't understand or know this. The subject of basic sound design...
Bugs: Fix sustain pedal bug.
More improvements: It would also be very useful to be able to save performer envelopes.
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yes I noticed that Envelopes and LFOs can’t be copied/pasted or saved for later use like what we had in the original Massive ☹️
I like it’s sound though. Just finished the manual recently and plan to play with the synth.
Aside all the situation; RAM usage is still a big issue for me even though I am on a 13900K i9 intel and 32 Gb or RAM! Just 1 instance with init preset eats up near to 3 Gigabytes of my RAM then if you plan to print each line then the SSD gets full little by little slowly but surely. On FL studio even after freezing the MASSIVE X instances the RAM is not getting freed. Sometimes I think of switching to other synths tbh
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Something major is really wrong (most likely in FLStudio) if a single instance of Massive X with the initial preset is taking 3Gb.
Just tested this here on my I5 13600 and a single “init” instance of Massive X (within Komplete Kontrol v2.9.6 or within Studio One v7.11) uses 572MB of RAMVP
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Oh thank you so much for responding. I use a graphic card of 3050 8gb. I could do a research using A.I. And there were 3 responses that it suggested and I can doubt about among all the rest:
Graphics usage spills into RAM:
- Massive X has a high-resolution dynamic UI
- If your GPU (graphics card) runs out of VRAM, part of the UI memory shifts to system RAM
DAWs sometimes exaggerate RAM per plugin
- In DAWs like FL Studio or Ableton, when using oversampling, plugin delay compensation, or freezing,
it may allocate extra RAM to each plugin instance (not even used by the plugin itself)
Feedback loop issues
- If your routing includes Feedback into itself or stacked loops, RAM and CPU can spike like crazy
- Easy to miss — check your Routing page for any unusual signal loops
This evening I am Going to check out these to see if it gets fixed, probably an FL Studio thing. Not sure0
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