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Massive X - 2025 Personal experience, comparisons and wishes

Alita000
Alita000 Member Posts: 7 Member
edited April 2 in Massive X & Synths

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.

Tagged:

Comments

  • PoorFellow
    PoorFellow Moderator Posts: 6,260 mod
    https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/44087/massive-x-problems-in-2025

    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 ?

  • Alita000
    Alita000 Member Posts: 7 Member

    you're right, I edited it and made it more clear

  • Mark Oxley
    Mark Oxley Member Posts: 366 Pro
    edited April 2

    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.

  • Vocalpoint
    Vocalpoint Member Posts: 3,448 Expert

    @Mark Oxley

    "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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