Infinitely held MIDI note without re-trigger?

How long do you need your compositions to be?

Maschine can have patterns of up to 256 bars.

One workaround (although I admit not perfect, since it will bring some other disadvantages) would be to set up the tempo of the song very low.

Let’s say you work on a composition that is at 120 BPM. If you instead set up the tempo at 1/4 of it (therefore 30 BPM), your composition will last 30m 08s before it starts looping back. Or if you set it up at 10 BPM, you can even have a 1h 42m 24s.

Do you need more time than this?

Of course as said this will have other disadvantages (practically unusable metronome, eventual audio can’t be so easily time stretched,…).

Another workaround (alas also not perfect) could be to sample those instruments (maybe with Maschine Auto Sampler) putting very high values and then setting up a long loop inside of it, so that when it starts looping the “evolving” will still be there.
Not so convinced about this last “solution” (even because it would require a looooooooong time sampling the instruments and a lot of space), so take this with a grain of salt.

Best solution imo would be to use Maschine as a plugin inside of a DAW (there are also free ones) that can have unlimited time for the compositions and load those instruments in tracks of the DAW instead of in Maschine. Practically using different tools for different tasks. Use Maschine and the DAW for what they are strong at, instead of working around their limitations

I think his problem is that “ridiculous length” is not enough.

As said, Maschine can have patterns of maximum 256 bars. As an example, a song with a pattern of 256 bars at 120 bpm lasts 8m 32s. It’s not so unusual for ambient tracks to be longer than 8m 32s… maybe with those “evolving instruments” playing from beginning to end (and he wants to avoid the patterns to loop and go back to start, which could cause the retriggering to be noticeable because of difference of sounds and/or pops, clicks and what else)

@Tom Auger While we are here, and since it seems you are into Ambient… you could be interested in this plugin (looks interesting for Ambient effecting) which is free now until 22

And maybe of interest also for the others (well….anyone could be interested… it’s free ☺️)

What BPM are you using for yor ambient compositions? And what about the time signature suggestion?

if you are looking for an alternate method… take a good look at Reaper & Realearn

there are many idea's i have implemented that have Maschine in the midst of it all…

the simplest idea… was running 4 maschine instances with 2 maschine Jam

simple as it maybe… this is only scratching the surface

and the routing in Reaper is something special… and this is a big component when dealing with audio sources internally or externally!!

once you have your routing out of maschine sorted… the options really open up!!

i have used chat GPT to create me Reascripts for Reaper… which allows me to do things which are not builtin natively… and although they are simple scripts & simple audio functions… these are often the little barriers that get in the way of a performance workflow…

so as one envisages their performance workflow by utilising the controller you choose.. you will build your mappings accordingly.

best way to view Reaper… is as a audio Hub