Maschine Audio Export Signal Flow?

Nah, I was wondering the same thing. "Sometime in June"... . I'm getting hype though for this update though, it better be a killer. I know they said they want to roll out a few more during the rest of the year, but it's really been more than a year since a meaningful update and we are all pissed, so... If it is ****, then I'm going to assume it's because they've been working on the next version of the hardware. At least, that's my guess. What else would be taking them so long to do an update otherwise? Hopefully the update addresses this issue you've brought up.

On another note, what Maschine do you have? I'm wondering when the next hardware comes out if I'll get it white. I always thought the white studio looked dope, but I was concerned about the contrast giving me eye fatigue since I work at night mostly. I don't really know how they are going to improve the studio from a hardware perspective anyways.

 

I have the white mk2. I definitely love the white. If I were to get another Maschine it would be white even tho my KK is black. I could see them releasing something for this holiday season. Idk if I'd get it just yet though. I gotta believe more in NIs future game plan. Cuz this last year really pissed me off. A year ago I would've never fathomed buying a midi pad from another company. That's all changed in this year long stagnation

 

The Mk2 looks amazing in white, but I didn't like the studio in white from some videos, but that may be because of the camera or editing on the part of video maker. I think I'll go white next time (going against the stereotype lol ).

I'm excited, but I'm still annoyed. KK is cool and all but it's not something that we completely needed in place of fixing bugs and sequencer issues. I mean, ask yourself, would you rather have this audio export issue fixed over KK? (really which would you have I'm curious) Why didn't they hire another team to develop the keyboard? They did it to save money, so they could build us and bill us something to make us pay more money for products. We all already have Maschine products, so lets sell us more products because it's easier to sell products to existing customers instead of trying to convert or entice new ones to the product. They can say all they want, but that's the truth.

I'm no idiot and I know what they are pulling, and that being said I'll still buy NI products(unless they continue how they have been going). But if they think for a second that those letters and a Q&A are enough they've got another thing coming. We should always be respectful, but they need to know us customers have a say and we need to be respected or they are going to just walk all over us. We have power in these message boards and unless they know we are truly unhappy and will actually leave unless they start to listen to us and respect it's current customers then we will leave. Flux said it best, 2 years without bug fixes and promises left unfulfilled since 1.8... that is crazy. If NI didn't have the monopoly on the market that they have had for years they really would be hearing the complaints and would really be losing money. You are the living proof that this is what will happen on a much larger scale if we aren't listened to. Not trying to get all epic Braveheart speech, but if we all on these message board go all Koombaya (not saying that you are doing this) and get happy from two letters then we just look like fools to them and they'll just keep this up. I honestly don't understand what all this cloak and dagger stuff is with the Q&A and just saying what's concretely coming in the update.

 

You're right about the market monopoly. Even if we did want to jump ship, there's nothing quite like the Maschine out there. Ableton push functions more as a midi controller inside Ableton itself. The closest to the drum box type is akai mpc touch. And I've looked at it, but it looks horrible IMO. So it kind of reinforced my commitment to Maschine.

In regards to KK that's a good question. I'd probably rather have them fix the export audio functions. A quicker way to get in and out of the DAW is needed. It's a workflow killer. I love KK but I could've waited for it. There's nothing you can do on KK that you can't do on Maschine. The only thing is that it's the controller for Komplete. Whether that's worth 500 bucks is totally up to you. Not sure how or even if other keyboards work with Komplete. Still, the integration between Komplete, Maschine and KK that they raved about is still not all there IMO. More work on that needs to be done. When you use them as VSTs things start to act buggy

 

Precisely what I was getting at... and entirely possible. It just takes coding... not pipes.

 

I'm in no position to try to convince anybody here and I don't mean to answer an absolute statement with another absolute statement but : software development is a very complex process and I don't really think it all comes down to the amount of team you have. KK and Maschine are two product that have a very close relationship because of the amount of component they share, you could call the KK software a Maschine flavour.

It really took a whole Maschine team to be able to come up with some of the features in KK.

 

About the problem described here, I'm positive about the fact that the way "export by sound" works is : it takes the output of the sound (which normally then goes into the group to be processed) and writes it into a file.

As far as I understand it this is pretty much expected behaviour for me since this is what I'm used to in Ableton, if you decide to export all the tracks separately it'll bypass any kind of device that you would have on the bus that should normally receive the output of this track.
Although this doesn't mean that it's not a valid feature request but I found it difficult to find this absolutely outrageous but maybe I didn't really understood what was the real issue here.

Can you clarify maybe what is sounding completely different ? In terms of dynamic you mean or is it more like some plug-ins sitting on your master that were ignored (such as a delay or a reverb). What would be your expectations ? Hopefully I can help you with that.

 

Exactly what I was saying. Pretty standard behavior.

Don't want to answer for the others. However, if you look at my statement that is quoted a couple post above, I think this is one of the feature request. The ability to bounce each sound as if it was in a soloed state all the way through the masted output. But to do it in one shot via the audio export options. When sounds are selected as the output, an additional option "export through master" would be chosen. It would be the same as if you set the export to master and soloed a sound and did the export x however many sounds you want. More of an offline macro.

From another similar thread, I was able to gather a second feature request. This would be for the audio drag and drop for the group to have the option to drag out the sounds as 16 separate audio files instead. It would be like soloing each sound or going into keyboard mode and dragging only you only have to do it once for all sounds in the group. The audio dragger would have a drop down to select sounds instead of group.

 

Yes, maybe it wasn't clear but when I said "Although this doesn't mean that it's not a valid feature request", I was referring to this ability of being able to export everything through the master chain. We've been touching this area with the new export options that will be available in 2.4.5 but those are only about how the files are separated and not really about how each and every individual files are processed. I'm interested to understand about how different it does sound.

Maybe @District Onagi, if you can just link me a project so I could pay a listen to what you really mean that could be an interesting start, or just some audio export files from both your master and the individual sounds.

 

Hey Adrien, thanks for commenting on these boards, I appreciate this openness.

In response to your last message, Eddie Jag was the one that originally brought this issue up, I believe he even posted a video of the situation he has encountered; so I think the question should be directed at him as he is more knowledgeable about this issue than I to be totally honest.

 

Whoops, my bad, my questions was meant for the OP @Belegur NI or also to @Eddie Jag.

 

Really don't understand how you guys have this problem. My software exports all the sounds individually, exactly how they sound with effects still on them like reverb etc. And it sounds perfect, OP exporting it like that sounds like a huge struggle, when I started I used reason and would track out like that cause they had no export feature, which maschine does perfectly. has to be your guys software. Even when I buss multiple tracks to a plug in I have on a different pad like a reverb, it'll export that reverb track and all the sounds I bussed to it wet.

 

Hi @Adrien @ NI ... thanks for taking the time to read through the forum here

Presumably, like many other users I often start with a project from an expansion pack etc for inspiration. Or I build a new one by quickly grabbing some groups I like together, and then start jamming out ideas. I think what was throwing me off the most, was that through starting like this, a lot of these 'presets' have processing on sound, group and master level. Also, some sounds are mixed level wise a fair way from unity, then go through other gain stages later in the signal flow. Thus, exporting using the 'sounds' option was giving dramatically different results from what I had been hearing.

For working 'in the box' at home it's not too bad, but for taking a project into a large-format studio that doesn't have Maschine installed, it means spending more time to prepare a session ready to mix in a studio.

I get that it's probably not a huge deal for a lot of users, but taking tracks into other environments, and mixing through Neve and SSL consoles is something I'll be fortunate enough to be doing regularly over the next twelve months.

As a workflow option, it would be great when exporting 'sounds', if we could choose the signal path of the individual sound and have them basically batch processed with the options we select. For instance... option to export sounds through group, or through group and master. It would save us a lot of time, either bypassing everything at group and master stage and adjusting at sound level so we hear what we're really exporting, or the alternative which is soloing every 'sound' and exporting through group or master.

I understand it's probably not a two hour job to code something like that, but in this modern music environment, a lot of us are using many different tools, or collaborating with others who are. An option like this would make Maschine an extremely flexible tool for us...

Just a week or so ago I spent the time to prepare a session to mix through an SSL 9000K setup... it was pretty time consuming, but in the end the result was great. For now, with the workflow I've developed I'll be very mindful of using existing groups etc, and making sure I bypass all the other processing beyond sound level. I just think one of the appeals of Maschine is a lot of the stock, expansion, and third party sounds are almost mix-ready with their existing processing, so it would be nice to be able to quickly export them as we hear them.

Again... thanks for taking time to check out what the community is saying. Really looking forward to seeing what future updates might bring

 

@Belegur NI, what are you running on your Master/Group channels that is so important that it needs to be include in your export ? Because I cannot understand that you would need any kind of dynamic processing, normally meant to be used on a whole group, for each and every sounds.

Again not saying it makes no sense but I really don't understand what's the use case of processing a single stem into a processor that is meant to work on a whole group, maybe this is how it's done in studio and I didn't know about that.

I think, in any case, it's difficult to make a stem export and expect it to sound exactly the same when you re-import it into something else. The group from the expansion/factory content are in fact mixed with some devices on their master/group level but you cannot expect that exporting each and every individual sounds separately through this processing chain and then re-importing them into any DAW would give you a 1:1 sound. That's just impossible.

Am I making any sense ?

 

@Adrien @ NI Thanks for the speedy reply.

I understand that doing so individually won't sound exactly the same as multiple sounds being summed, especially for dynamics, but the results would be a lot closer to how things sound in Maschine, than the existing 'sounds' export. Through creating this thread, we've seen there are other users with similar requests... so I guess it's not just me. The way I look at it... is when I'm in a studio environment, sometimes I like to commit to some decisions with 'to tape' processing, and having this option would allow us to achieve results a lot closer to what we're hearing in the Maschine environment, and we would have these processed stems for use in other studios, or in collaboration with someone using Ableton etc etc...

There's many cases in history where it's become popular to use hardware or software outside the manufacturers original intention... like 'all buttons in' setting on the 1176. Maybe this is just a similar situation?

The responses on this thread helped me put a workflow together that I can still work with, so it's been beneficial for sure. The feature discussed would just be nice, to save a lot of time, and open up other creative options for us users. At the moment, it appears there are quite a few users who are manually soloing everything for export etc... and I know a few people with Maschine hardware collecting dust for this reason, as they now prefer to work exclusively with Ableton (also why I'm likely picking up a Maschine Studio pretty cheap).

Users hear the sounds in Maschine, as you said... pretty much mixed, and then when they export they sound dramatically different and they fall out of love with them. They either turn to something else, or have to spend time trying to duplicate there or thereabouts, the processing that was in Maschine. Idealy... we just want to export individual stems and have them sound as close to what we hear in Maschine as possible, and I think if this option was provided it would be a significant step towards that for a lot of us. It would be interesting to see the results of a survey, where users are asked if they ever export individual sounds, and if the results are as they expected? It might be surprising how many people are using Maschine in this way.

At the same time... I realize there are a lot of users who create a whole track inside Maschine and will never come across this problem.

I love Maschine, and will continue to use it, while I pray to the coding angels for the icing on my Maschine cake

 

IMHO Maschine's audio export options are pretty comprehensive and, apart from not having dither options, it is just as flexible as Ableton Live's export audio.

 

Indeed.

I think a lot of this comes from an expectation that a stem is a mix. It is not and is not meant to be. There is also this wan't for a premixed product or trying to avoid having to do the work of mixing from scratch. The export at the sound level is for the purpose of getting the raw sound files out so you can mix elsewhere. This is by definition what a stem is and wanting the mixed summed processing is getting outside of the whole entire point of breaking out stems.

As a mix engineer, nothing irks me more than getting prepossessed files that have me painted into a corner and limits my ability to get the best sounding mix. For stems going to any mix engineer worth their weight, it should be as minimally processed as possible. Particular using cheap stock processors when I have dedicated effects that will do a much better job. I really think some of you are missing the whole point of individual track exports here and how it is implemented at a professional level. And there is no magic button that will make the job of mixing easier. There is no "ready to go". Mixing is an art and science and each song will need to be tailored to the specific elements inside it. Adding cheap stock processors before it gets in the hands of your mix engineer is not helping, but rather tying your mix engineers hands and limiting what he can do with it. When it gets to your destination DAW, you still need to process and mix it there anyway. And your approach can be wildly different once all the elements of the song are present.

 

I completely share this point of view, but I would be curious to know if a lot of people actually complain about the export not working as they were expecting, maybe something is not clear enough.

 

Some people get it while others don't. I would say it comes up frequent enough to at least deserve some explanation in the docs. The export through master feature still won't hurt and will give more options. I just don't see the point of it though.
The other drag and drop feature would be the more useful imo. as you are just doing a multi sound export via drag and drop.

 

Is it possible to export sounds with Choke group settings applied?