Is Play Series planned for Maschine Plus?

It has been mentioned many times by staff, it is not planned, and moreover it has been hinted at recently that nothing is really planned anymore for Maschine, it is currently low priority, so if the abysmal release record previously was not low priority, then you can forget getting any more Maschine updates at all.

I just got myself an Akai MPC X SE.

It comes with 25 instruments out of the box, which is way more than Maschine+ and there are more to buy. There's also a proper browser and touch screen.

16 assignable knobs, each with their own display. It has onboard storage, plus an SD card slot, plus space for an internal SSD. I fitted a one gig drive and have all my old Akai S900/S1000 samples on there, plus all my Maschine Expansions. What's more, the storage is accessible when it's in controller mode, unlike the Maschine+.

I do still have and use the Maschine+ but NI could certainly learn a thing or two from Akai.

You won't regret it! 😉

It has absolutely nothing at all to do with Apple Silicon, zero correlation, zero causation.

Akai is doing fine against Apple Silicon in the same market space as M+, this is 100% down to NIs lack of support, lack of feature updates, lack of anything that constitutes any care for a headline product, but this has also been the case pre Apple Silicon anyway, nothing has really changed.

Right now we are just hoping for Reaktor 6.5, because that will keep it relevant until most of Komplete becomes legacy if forum hints are anything to go by

If even Reaktor is not being invested in and that is a large portion of Komplete products, I think it is a possibility that Soundwide see NI as Kontakt and add ons only in the long term.

Why not just sample the Play series instruments? Perfectly doable right now, no need to wait for products or updates.. Is it just me or are people becoming increasingly lazy to DIY anything anymore..

As for soundwide, I do hope they understand that NI's core products have always been Kontakt, Reaktor and Traktor.. sure, they can ruin everything else but at least keep those three supported

Well, NI can "double-team" it in this way:

Team 1: Develop Kontakt, Reaktor, Traitor, Machine, Massive & Battery at the current snail's pace.

Team 2: Develop a "Next-Generation Kontakt" fast as possible for the new expectations of the marketplace. Focus first on just porting the current Kontakt 7 libraries and Play series into this new product. Buy some existing competitive product as a foundation if this speeds things up... Buy Modartt too!

Modartt would have been a much better purchase for Soundwide than Plugin Alliance.. jeez.

I thought the speaker was a gimmick at first but it's been great so far actually. I think you'll like the live 2.