Massive X - 2025 Personal experience, comparisons and wishes

I absolutely agree.

I find it quite peculiar to label anyone who criticizes Massive X as "pig-ignorant nerdbro

I'm not. There are definitely a number of valid criticisms to be made, and I made an effort in my earlier post to highlight several particular points where we agree. I'm not sure if you were active in this space following the initial release of MX, but I was and I can tell you firsthand that, while it was definitely released less-than-fully baked and some of the chilly reception was merited, the vast, vast majority of the complaints were about—

• low-amplitude harmonic partials misidentified as aliasing—gratuitous aliasing, even—many of whom made reference to one particular review video that purported to demonstrate that it aliases like crazy by playing a ~10kHz square wave from MX into Fabfilter Saturn with saturation cranked and Saturn's own antialiasing disengaged.
• the LFOs are not bandlimited and can produce aliasing when used as an audio source (which is true, and is a good thing—cf. the Gibbs effect, just about the last thing you'd want in a modulation source).
• the static pictoral diagrams of the EGs (since addressed), and that the LFO sections, which necessarily occupy the same graphical real estate as the EGs, were, in their judgment, too big.
• insisting, prior to and still till long after its release, that MX was, in some way, somehow, really just a Reaktor ensemble; and furthermore that that confers upon it some sort of ineffable "badness" that I don't recall anybody ever bothering to try to justify regardless.
• that it was too confusing for anyone to reasonably program—especially owing to the lack of animated envelopes.
• the exciter envelopes being confusing, and which some reasoned to be buggy LFOs (on the grounds that the impulse is optionally bipolar) that failed to cycle.
• the lack of retriggering on the envelopes and tempo sync on the LFOs & delays, which it in fact always has had.
• that it didn't have [insert Serum feature here]; some of which it didn't, and some of which it did and they just didn't bother looking in the first place.
• that it didn't have [insert effect or feature here] that is in fact available in triplicate in the auxiliary modules, had they bothered checking.
• and my personal favorite: the interface is grey.

—you know, ignorant nerdbro stuff. Lots of accusations of aliasing; lots and lots of inapt null-tests; and most of all a bunch of gazing at spectroscopes and bandying about terms they didn't understand, mostly referencing the same handful of similarly muddled, shallow youtube reviews.

It had a rocky release, sure, and could still do with a bit of love from the developers, but the fact is it just was a fashionable synth for people who had no idea what they were talking about to bash from the get go. And referencing an innately unreliable AI that in turn references that body of insipid discourse and the lousy reputation it's thereby never been able to shake off can add little of constructive value here.

Being one for constructive criticism, I will go back to the browser:

• I can't use computer keyboard to navigate presets with arrows and can't load presets with Enter, like it was in original Massive.
• Preset needs to be double clicked to load, tedious as hell
• Double clicking on preset loads it and immediately makes Massive X to go back to main screen, unless one will figure out the need to click on microscopic pin icon…

With all NI expansions, I have more than 3000 presets in Massive X which are real pain to browse.

2025. The year when we needed A.I. to have an opinion.

It's also the year AI is starting to make better statements then this one 😂