Group Pad Lock and Randomization Feature Request

To D-One and any others interested,

What is the legit way to submit a serious feature request that will get in front of the eyes of NI Machine developers. For years, I have looked for the feature, where one can randomly populate the pads of a group to build random group/kits. This is a great way to foster higher levels of creativity. Plenty of tools out there do this now (Jamsoft with their RanDrum player inside of their SampleSort audio file manager, loopcloud drum, and so on).

Essentially, keep randomly spinning the group pads, lock the ones you want, and keep spinning until you have a dream kit. Save it off in your user groups, and you are gold!

There is no reason why this cannot be done in Maschine. The fact that Maschine has created a robust tagged database of sounds, loops, etc., make it easy to execute. And here is one more advantage of Machines tagging system. Say for instance you have an "almost" dream group kit, but you want your last 4 pads (13-16) to have some random horn samples on it. In this case, you would lock pads 1-12, and then for Pads 13-16, you could have a randomization feature that would let you set these pads to "Type = Horns" (or something based on your tag labels), and then spin until you find the sickest horn samples to populate those pads.

This would be a game changer. You not only have access to the thousands of sounds that come with NI libraries and expansions, but you have your own User sounds that are tracked in Maschine to add to the mix.

I am spending more and more money on products like XLN Audio XO and other tools, when this could be easily (I assume) implemented into Maschine. So whatever I can do to write up some requests or specs for NI, I am willing to do. Just hope that enough synergy here pokes NI to add this as well. I just don't know if me simply posting this in the forum is going to encourage NI to take a serious look.

Of course, if this feature already exists in Maschine, then please everyone, beat me up, and direct me to where I need to read in the manuals. Thanks for your time, fam!

God Bless,
JB

 

Randomizing Samples based on tags sounds great to me.

Hum... There is no guaranteed / legit way of knowing if whoever makes decisions is ever gonna truly see one's request and take it into serious consideration, you can just hope.

Even if an amazing suggestion get's tons of feedback from other users and 'gets in front' of who matters it doesn't mean anything, they got their own priority list of what's gonna be worked on in the near future and I seriously doubt someone is going to surprise the decision-makers enough to have their suggestion fully jump the priority cue... I've never seen that happen, ever. Sorry, I don't mean to crush your dreams but I've been here for a while.

As far as actually implementing what people ask I only see that happening immediately after a new SW update that has a new feature or on a newly released hardware, when that happens you see new @ NI faces on the forum engaging with users then they vanish until some new faces show up, the cycle repeats. I don't like talking about this topic as I'm a bit scared of offending folks at the office since everyone I've met from NI has always been extra nice to me it feels bad to be so critical, but it is what is.

On a more hopeful note, there are people in the company that want to bridge the gap between users requests and MAS development, hopefully, they succeed where others have failed... The upcoming new community might also have a better way of dealing with requests eventually if all goes well.

 

D-One, it's really good to see you chime in! Thanks for giving me more insight. We'll see. At least it's out there in the universe now. In the mean time, I will just resort to using other 3rd party tools to get where I need to. In some cases, there are 3rd party solutions that integrate into Maschine fairly well to get somewhat in the ballpark, like Atlas 2. Thanks again for your input.

Take care,
JB

 

Hello Maschine Fam,

Just replying here to gain any momentum for any people interested in plus-sing up this request.

 

Such a feature sounds really great!
Good enough to have a new boost for the Maschine basis until other feature requests are in development.

Wasn´t NI´s POLYPLEX slightly similar... regarding polyplex, I have some dice buttons in my mind.

 

I believe so. But I'm thinking like on a massive (no pun intended) scale. In this case, any samples in your user or maschine library are fair game. Could even use tags as filters to limit what goes to pads when you spin the dice (figuratively speaking) after potentially locking down certain pads (or not) between spins.

But humorously speaking, the dice icon is so cliche now. NI could use the infamous white and teal NI 3-D logo or Maschiine logo to click and make it spin around!

 

Ohh, don't get me wrong. I'm not for dice-buttons. I just linked it with my memories of POLYPLEX.
I´m also good with $$$-Symbols...

 

+1

Sounds like a useful way to leave well known paths aka favorites

 

Yes i would absolutely love this.

In fact i already do this the manual way.. sequence a bunch of stuff and then just randomly spin up different groups or sounds until i hit on something inspiring.

It would be a complex feature to do correctly but worth it.

+1

 

If its based on tags it could be simple... XO for example do this the hard way, it actually looks for similar-sounding samples based on spectral analysis, been trying to resist buying it for a while now.. Not to mention it does what takes a ton of manual work for user samples with NI's approach (tags) automatically with some machine learning magic.