I didn’t know maschine was this incomplete

Well... When a product line is aimed at newcomers and to be to be is as cheap as possible you're bound to cut corners and omit functionality, I think that's fine, however, there's a limit to how far one can push that philosophy especially when a company has a history of "high quality" stuff, I mean... NI is not exactly Behringer. Maschine already has a lot of weird ways to deal with things that are opposite to many industry standards software wise, now there's a HW line that does the same, I've always owned cheap portable interfaces and never saw those two major issues, ever.

I think the lack of MCU is a consequence of a wider issue, a sub-issue if you will: Focusing on only 2 or 3 major DAW's and ignoring the rest; since I have Ableton and it has remote scripts transport on the kksmk2 works fine. Either they're not aware of the wide range of DAW's people use nowdays, or don't care.

Yeah. Considering the size of the company getting a few consultants in for early product development stages seems like an obvious need for NI. Some areas are fine like the KK/Kontakt Instrument's, Synths, etc... Others are struggling to keep longterm customers happy.

I don't blame the HW/SW companies on this one, they all have a budget for sending out stuff to influencers nowadays and they do it without guidelines, meaning they don't ask for positive reviews or tell YouTubers what to say, that would actually be illegal. Those dumbos on YT just choose to be biased by themselves, people give them views so they will keep doing it.

Yep. 20 years+ with a target audience, then changing it is a huge risk especially if they don't fully understand the newbie needs. How can one cater to newbies and ignore FL Studio? That's what all the Dubstep/Trap/EDM kids are using, good luck making them happy with a Mikro when they struggle to integrate it.

I think that's acceptable, a huge number of interfaces in the same price range also does not have the old physical MIDI ports, most people don't use it. When you lack a feature and most of your competitors do too then it's fine, at least you're following along with the standard.

 

It doesn't work with Pro Tools. Pro Tools. Their own video with 40/Noah Shebib discussing Maschine Studio features Pro Tools. You would think that if a producer as significant as 40 is using Pro Tools still that it would be more significant to not include MCU support.

 

I am not disagreeing with that, catering to only Ableton and Logic is dumb, even Cubase always comes months later. Using the most widespread protocols for transport (like MCU) seems only logical.

Noah has a KKS and an Mk3, but also has an MPC live, MPC X, OP-1, ASR-10 the list is endless since he is a millionaire. I doubt he goes in depth about making sure he's gonna squeeze all possible functionality from all that gear and integrate everything into PT, not saying that as an excuse though.

 

That's reality. We're discussing a Native Instruments marketing video that heavily implies that their products integrate into a nice workflow for Pro Tools.

 

I think in that respect NI are just following the money, and the industry. The Akai Force for example only has integration with Ableton. That dissapointing to say the least but it’s kind of maybe excusable given its focus. I’ve been moving away from Ableton and it’s kind of disconcerting how a lot newer hardware caters to Ableton first and sometimes only.

 

For AKAI Force I think it makes a ton more sense to limit advanced integration to just one DAW.
They have more history with Ableton since they were the ones actually manufacturing Push 1, the hardware itself is "Ableton style" and can function as an Ableton dedicated Controller, it's standalone so expecting it to integrate with all DAW's would be delusional, those are reasons enough IMO.

On the other hand, a Mikro Mk3, for example, should have advanced integration or templates for all popular DAW's because it's designed to be used in a DAW, no one realistically expects to be able to make songs using a Mikro+Maschine software only.

It might have a great workflow for someone like him since he most likely has gear dedicated to transport control for PT so lack of MCU most likely doesn't bother him. But I do understand and agree with your point.

 

And yet those shiny adverts do almost imply you can.

Odd that most peoples complaints about the Mikro centred on the screen although I found the screen usable. What I couldn't deal with was the areas not covered by the controller that could have been. Shame because I'd hoped that that and a KK S61Mk2 would be a great combination... was a little bit wrong there innit.............................

 

I guess if development had been different over the last few years I could believe that the Mikro was just released and will get better with time, but we know how that line of thinking has worked for previous releases...

I think the "Song Layer" has become somewhat of a symbol on the forum we use for everything, just to say development is disappointing.

In this sort of rant threads, it's easy to get a notion that we are all haters but in fact, it's because we love it that we complain. It's like having a bipolar but otherwise perfect wife who refuses to take her medication or get help, she's still amazing just has issues that need to be sorted, if she doesn't a divorce eventually will happen.

 

This is it..............if we hated the products we would just walk away but we don't and we know they could be great if only NI felt the same way about them. Guess we just need to find out what medication to give them .. maybe a bottle of New Improved CEO would set them to rights.

 

This is my thinking. It seems insane to use the argument "but maschine is just a sketch pad" and then when you use it as such, there is no easy way to integrate it into ANY daw to carry on with that sketch... It just seem so lost as to what it is supposed to be.

Is it aimed at beginners? Great, then why have they made it so damn hard to use with ANY other software.
Is it aimed at pros? Then why cant it do even basic stuff that is expected of it.
Is it made for full songs? then why is it so limited when trying to make arrangements,
Is it NOT for making complete tracks with? Then why even include that whole scenes POS if its not meant to be used as a complete production environment

For me right now, it is a toy that I play about on for 20 mins when I cba making anything serious in FL, nothing more. I think Maschine is just a confused product that even NI doesn't know where it's supposed to sit. But that's all just my opinion.

 

100% this. It needs a lot of work putting into fleshing out the workflow of Maschine. It's a great foundation, but there's so much wasted potential. The hardware is very good, perhaps some of the best, if not the best as controllers go. With the existing hardware and power of a fully fledged computer, there's really no limit to what it should be able to do and even what it's expected to do.

 

I'm sure all our conceptions misconceptions misgivings and frustations will be appeased when Daniel Havers does his live online Q & A with users at the beginning of April.................................

 

"We're giving you 10 free sounds on sounds.com to celebrate Maschine's 10 birthday. You can't have them today though. We've delayed them until February next year, and then we'll delay them until the Summer of next year. Koming Soon."

 

maschine is just a sound module with a few extra options. dont expect anything more than that. find yourself a good daw to use with maschine.

 

Sound module? It's quite clearly a workflow.

 

That's true, except it's absolutely not.

 

Nice to see myopia is alive and well at any rate..........................................................

 

Indeed lmao. The stock sounds that ship with Maschine really aren't that special, IMO, and it's a very expensive way of getting some basic samples that probably ship with most DAWs or are available free online. Treating it like a sound module, IMO, is silly. The reason to buy Maschine is the hardware interface for the workflow. NKS leaves a lot to be desired, but the integration with so many go-to plugins like Waves and a plethora of industry-standard synths is admittedly excellent.

Tbh, Maschine is a lot like any other DAW; it's not that great out of the box, but once you start augmenting it with further software and hardware, it really opens up, and if users bother to learn the workflow and read the manual, they'll see how fast it can be to get some quite complex things done, which baffles me when basic things aren't possible in Maschine like split and merge!

With that said, I think NI expect, or rather, hope, that you'll buy more software like Komplete Ultimate to expand your capabilities. I came back to the Maschine eco-system because after ditching Live/Push, I realized I still used a lot of NI products like Kontakt, Massive etc in every production. Big time-saver having it all nicely mapped.

 

It is so easy and quick to initally get your ideas down and for me I find it much better to play on pads than either a stringed instrument or keyboards plus it's hard to be tight playing on your own so being midi and being able to quantize where neccessary is great. (I'm probably going to get Jam Origin so I can convert some guitar things to midi rather than go through the pain of trying to transpose to pad or keyboard....being a 'non musician' can have it's drawbacks LOL)
What I can't fathom with NI is why they are not doing everything possible to encourage more companies to adopt NKS rather than the ridiculous strictures they apparently put on adoptees.Surely the more adoptees the more chance of it becoming an industry standard and the more chance of your controllers being like wise. Is my thinking so flawed on that?

Quite...ditto event mute, garbage automation, not being able to easily assign your own chord sets etc etc

It's not moribund..hell even the much neglected Guitar Rig is still very capable in some areas..it just needs belief and development from 'on high'

 

What do you mean? Are you referring to the new Komplete audio interfaces? My impression of the Komplete 1 and 2 products is they are intended for bloggers or singer songwriter acoustic guitar types -- it's just NI targeting a different market. Electronic computer musicians will buy the Komplete 6. I don't interpret it as lost cost entry move.