The future of Maschine

CakeAlexS · 2025-07-02T19:58:34+00:00

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Yeah there have been billion threads with this title I'm sure!

Thanks for letting me spam the forums over the last week or so (sorry for the amount of posts). Hopefully they will slow down now I've read the manual and scratched my head a few times. I appreciate the help.

I think I stopped using Maschine at 2.4.(maybe 2.2). I was pretty fed up with the workflow and just gave up on it.

Things are a lot different with 3.2 it appears, I find it 100% workable, pretty logical and consistent, and I just need to get used to it.

Really there isn't much more I need, there are only a few issues in workflow I'd like to see addressed.

1) I do understand it's an old product but it is still supported. Please please please for the love of gawd supply a Maschine Studio manual for 3.2..Thx!

2) Please provide a pitch preview option for the Maschine Controller (please don't just limit it to the MK3!). This might seem a trivial enhancement but it's pretty important at least for my workflow.

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/46143/maschine-pitch-preview

3) Anything to help integrate with DAWs better would be good. Yup we can drag/drop/record MIDI and audio. But I'd like to easily move the instrument/effects plugins over to a DAW (and that's a big ask, not sure how it would be done). Workflow is better in Maschine, CPU performance IMHO still isn't that great.

4) And anything to improve performance. Running as a plugin sadly is not optimal, and that's down to limitations of the DAW mostly, I'm not sure how Maschine plugin could be multi threaded or optimized at this point, hey it's a plugin that contains plugins!

5) Maybe add audio tracks but then I have my DAW.

6) The plugin window looks a bit hazy for me on a 4K screen, but maybe it's my DAW. Anything to improve the display would be good.

Anyway, good job NI! Workflow is finally pretty decent (not sure how long it took to get here). It's still pretty basic and maybe automation needs an overhaul on the GUI but hey I'm primary looking at a sequencer and sampler. Anybody else here care to contribute to this discussion and have opinions here?

Thx...

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Comments

D-One

I doubt they do a full updated manual for the Studio, they struggle as is to keep it updated for the flagships (MK3/M+).

A lot has changed since you were gone, besides the technical differences and extra features, the main one IMO is that the latest few updates delivered things that were heavily asked back when you were active on the old forum… just a very small percentage but it's something, refreshing actually.

I dont think anything deep in the core of Maschine has changed enought or been re-written for Audio performance to improve, it's still the same app just with some extras… If anything, it might be getting slightly worse as stuff gets added but its marginal and sort of counteracted for those who keep modern computers (say the last 5-7 years tech), for people with 18yr computers of low end ones it's stil very bad. Some non-audio performance aspects have improved like dealing with huge amount of browser item, plugin scan at startup (although a few users report the opposite), etc…

In terms of people spitting out wishlists, nothing changed, we the users might read but then it gets buried by other posts, I wouldn't go expecting any different if I were you… A 'dev' is not gonna come out of the bushes to push for your desires specifically, so for the most part threads like this end up on a vacuum….

Or with really happy campers arguing with unhappy ones "Stop crying and go make music", you know the drill, some things never change.

CakeAlexS

Absolutely!

Yeah I hold no hopes, I provide a pretty basic wishlist nevertheless, like I always did back in the day..my focus was always on the "meat and potatoes".

Perhaps it will get more exotic in future when I get more confident.(still no tempo automation I guess!).

Still there is some hope now we are on 3.x but it appears their development resources are more restricted, and that could be a good thing now that the marketeers who always ruin things have perhaps lost interest .

Thanks D-One.

ozon

Since you’ve been away for such a long time, the Ideas Corner may be a interesting read to see how NI tried to approach feature requests lately (but only succeeded partially):

https://community.native-instruments.com/categories/share-ideas-for-maschine

CakeAlexS

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/232982#Comment_232982

So these forums are no more? Every suggestion has been closed? No way to create new posts. Any alternatives?

6xes

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/232957#Comment_232957

im a firm believer in integrating applications like Maschine, into a DAW

there are many ways in which i have experimented with the best of what Ipad's have to offer, maschine,DJ software and a myriad of other applications… to combine them as one working system…

the newest application soon to come on the scene is loopy pro 2.0 which i will test out to see how much integration is possible with the DAW i use.

any application that provides in's & out's are valuable…

once you understand the value of in's & outs…. shortfalls in one application can be overcome by another

ALDREAD

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/232985#Comment_232985

I think what they’ve done , is take all those suggestions and started to work through what’s popular and what’s possible

We’ve had a few things recently, mp3 support, stems , piano roll additions, guide etc , audio takes , rumour has it ,they are working on automation right now .

Alternative would be the beta

CakeAlexS

Well I just realised Maschine and Studio One support Ableton Link nowadays, maybe this is the way.

Ah... decades of rumours.

D-One

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/232985#Comment_232985

Yeah, it was only open for a short period, which is too bad, at the same time if it's open for too long it would just become overwhelming to read.

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/233017#Comment_233017

Link support got added around 2016, maybe v2.5.x. It's very cool, but it's really just playback Sync.

Regarding Integration — I dont think there's any way to fully integrate Maschine into DAW's in an easy way for the user with the current tech, there's too many different ways to configure things, with options comes complexity… The NI can do would be to provide DAW project templates with everything pre-routed and configured for the most obvious scenarios, but this doesn't teach the user anything, so if one wants to edit it then the user gets stuck.

VST v3 introduced tech for plugins to talk to each other and fetch some data from the DAW, it needs to evolve further for any possibility of pressing a couple of buttons on a Plugin and have all your MIDI/Audio auto routed to/from the DAW… Maybe in VST v4; or, NKS becomes so big DAW brands decide to integrate it directly, or even better: DAW's collab with NI, but that's hard to imagine.

Thinking from their shoes, If i have major DAW I rather have my own dedicated controller and make money with it, the way Ableton does Push.

Whatever it is that will fix the issue of using a complex plugin that is almost a DAW inside a full-on DAW and have them work seamlessly… will not happen anytime soon, the technology is not there yet.

ozon

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/233070#Comment_233070

One thing which would make integration much easier is if Groups would be automatically made available as individual MIDI Ports and Sounds would automatically be routed to the 16 Channels of each Port. That way, it would be possible to send MIDI from the DAW to Maschine exactly the same way as if it was played back from a Pattern.

Currently, there is this convoluted setup including properly setting MIDI channels and Note Mapping for the Group and Sound.

It certainly would break existing DAW Projects but we would get back the "lost dimension" (Group/Sound/Note in Maschine vs. Channel/Note in MIDI).

ozon

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/232985#Comment_232985

You can still vote on the Topics and individual posts!

CakeAlexS

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/233226#Comment_233226

Right, but what's the point if feature requests aren't even being tagged.

Flexi

It is well over a year now anyway, generally that would be two different sets of development teams since then in Maschine years, so those topics are worthless haha.

D-One

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/233225#Comment_233225

That would only work if using Maschine standalone app or M+ standalone; in which case you can just create a ton of virtual ports on the computer anyway… This is only a 'Playback' solution, as soon as you want to finish a song you need to export audio around.

The integration topic is generally about Maschine Plugin, plugins communicate directly, not via MIDI Ports.

MIDI 2.0 utilizes a concept of 16 Groups, each containing 16 Channels, resulting in a total of 256 channels and it's supposed to have communication between host and instrument, basically the instrument can say "I am this kind of instrument, set up things XYZ way"… This could be a potential solution once it's actually finished…

But from what I saw, their focus is heavily geared towards hardware, having say an organ preset being auto-mapped in DAW, it would be nice if there was some focus on SW integration problems.

6xes

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/233243#Comment_233243

yea… you have to wonder… if & when the implementation of midi 2.0 comes along

1. will it be implemented into maschine

2. will NI come out with another version of Maschine hardware, thereby making older hardware somewhat restricted to midi 1.x

… not that NI would ever do that.. of course LOL

CakeAlexS

So after spending a very long day on it, I conclude there is just no way to get say Ableton or Studio One to accurately follow the timeline in Maschine standalone app song mode when playing around with the transport. Maschine needs to support/receive midi time code! (Rewire is pretty much dead Jim and not a supported solution). Sync'ing with Ableton link is pretty much useless to me as is midi clock.

Another thing, user templates and routing, often some settings are not saved. Surely it can't be that hard to fix?

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