Maschine on the Record #6

Hello and welcome to a new session of 'Maschine on the Record'!

Following the recent announcement of 1.8, this Q&A session gives you an opportunity to put your Maschine-related questions directly to Jens, James and other key members of the Maschine development team.

Important information explaining how 'On The Record' works can be found here:
http://www.native-instruments.com/forum/showthread.php?t=112914

In a nutshell:

• This thread works like a mailbag, all posts go in an internal queue and won't be visible at first
• Only NI product owners with the corresponding forum status can post questions in this session, send me a PM if you need your status updated
• Please keep it focussed and suggest only one topic per session
• If you have any other questions, send me a PM

This thread will be closed for questions on Friday the 18th of May, and the answers will be posted the following week.

Over to you and thanks in advance for the questions!

Cheers from Berlin,
Keir.

 

Thanks for all the questions everyone, we got a great response.

The answers will be posted hopefully this week, but due to the number of questions you'll need to bear with us.

Thanks!

 

Further to my last post I wanted to let you know that the OTR answers will be going live next week.

The delay is due to volume of questions we received. Jens and the team are of course very busy and we all agreed that it's important to answer as many of your questions as possible!

Thanks for your patience.

 

Sorry for the delay and thanks for bearing with us. I'm happy to report that Jens (Head of Product Development), James (Head of Product Design) and Product Designer Florian have taken some time out to answer your questions! They've answered as many as possible and I hope you all find it interesting.


And here we go....

 

The development of effects and application frameworks is carried out by different departments within Native Instruments. The integration of effects such as tube saturation was not a trade-off against other Maschine features.

 

The Transient Master in Maschine uses the same high-quality algorithm as the separate Komplete Effect. The only difference is that we omitted the Smoothing option, which is geared towards distorted guitar riffs.

 

Indeed, multicore technology is not equally beneficial in all areas of an audio software. Essentially, tasks that run in parallel can be distributed among the available CPU cores, which can be of help when you want to run multiple CPU-intensive plug-ins at the same time, for example. However, since the audio tasks are decoupled in that case, they have to be synchronized in the output stage in order to ensure consistent timing. This can add latency to the overall process. We are working on multicore support for Maschine's engine, but have high quality requirements to achieve great efficiency and rock-solid timing with low latency at the same time. This is a complex engineering task, and the results will not yet be introduced to Maschine with version 1.8

 

Sidechaining is very closely linked to the routing capabilities of the underlying audio engine of Maschine. Implementing sidechaining requires major work on the engine, and we decided to link this effort with the development of multicore support which is on-going.

 

We are currently reworking the concept of how notes in Maschine translate to plug-ins and MIDI, and the import of MIDI note data will come as a part of that development effort. Since this is part of a larger change, we decided to postpone it beyond version 1.8.

 

We are of course always looking into ideas for developing the Maschine hardware. However, it’s important to note that current compatibility with the existing controllers will always remain an important focus for us.

 

We have no plans to merge Battery's functionality into Maschine. Battery remains a specialized instrument with very powerful features for building complex drum kits. Maschine, on the other hand, is very much focused on creating rhythms and grooves in one environment, and one of its major strengths in that regard is its straightforward and tactile workflow. However, we are continuously working on the closer integration of Battery and Kontakt as plug-ins inside Maschine, as was demonstrated with 1.7.

 

Thanks for the suggestion. This is something we’re looking into at the moment.

 

We are working on refining the tagging structure of our sound libraries, and a focus on timbres will become more important in the future. At the same time, we want to keep browsing from the hardware as quick and easy as possible, so categorizations would rather be refined than differentiated further.

 

We are working on taking Maschine's sequencing capabilities to the next level. At the same time, we don't want to compromise Maschine's creative immediacy. Therefore, any new features will be implemented to seamlessly fit in with the groove production-oriented workflow of Maschine.

 

Solo and Mute automation will be tied in with extended automation support in a future version of Maschine. This also relates to changes in the engine and has thus been postponed to a version beyond 1.8.

 

Yes, this is definitely on our radar. However, it again is closely related to engine-specific developments, and has been postponed to a version after 1.8.

Secondly, it’s difficult to release a general statement in regards to an individual case, because we’d need to look at the hardware in more detail. We are open to considering making a few standard parts which are easy to replace available, but there’s no final news on this.

 

And it's a big thanks to Jens, James and Florian for taking the time out of their busy schedules to answer the questions.

We'll run another On the Record in the next few months. Thanks to all of you that took part!