Massive X is a risk for the brand's strategy

clock speed is no more related to cpu performances, some 1.8 ghz single core can be faster than some 3.2 Ghz, you should read the link you provide.

anyway i don't play live and i understand you can be mad if something you need won't be available, btw there is many other great synth outside MassiveX.

 

That is your opinion, writing it in a so absolute statement it sound objective.

So maybe I am wrong, and a brand can pretend to offer an all-in-one panacea, where the user who appreciate Massive for the modulation management, must also appreciate internal effects as the brand command.

Or maybe I am right and NI is ignoring:

• the basic marketing practice to let the customers decide the using trends
• the recent marketing trends regarding variety of use/purchase
• a big scene of videos, courses showing how musician use external effects, layering and multiband effects on Massive because everything has some limit to overcome

If you are right Massive X will be the best synth ever.
If I am right, we found an extra possible dent in NI brand's reputation.

Of course I had read it.

You see, if you don't play in live set, you don't have the same need.

Entering this conversation in that way of course doesn't help NI. I don't care about myself only.

As you said there are are competitors. If you like this brand, invite them to listen, don't defend them off-topic.

Up to you

I don't expect that much, I would be surprised if they don't fall in the threats I am warning about.
As I told in another post, their marketing strategy is raising expectations in the audience.

 

Sometimes even the most passionate and talented people design products considering few customer's need.
Maybe you see so much negativity outside this forum because the range of customers the brand is not considering is higher than normal, and some consequences about marketing are emerging

 

No, that is not just my opinion. There are a number of VST instruments out there with absolutely great quality FX in them. u-he Repro, for example, has almost universally acclaimed quality FX in it.

 

That may be, but maybe not. In many other forums, in social media, etc., I have seen a lot of dissatisfied customers from other developers too, who would like to have their own special wishes implemented, ideally immediately, otherwise they are offended.

Everything in this world is becoming faster and faster, accessible all around the clock. Making compromises is becoming increasingly difficult, waiting for something to get anyway.

The demands of the customers are getting bigger, the tone rougher.

Of course I understand beeing not satisfied with something one bought that had been promised, but you will get.

I bought it too, and I can wait. I am excited about it. And I am happier with a working app than with one, that only works flawlessly after the third update.

This is my opinion. Peace.

 

You are comparing Massive to a vintage style plug-in with vintage style FX.
It is normal to use internal FX in that kind of circumstance.
You are changing topic.

I was telling there is a big trend in layering and effecting Massive in multi-band with crossovers. Bass is a delicate matter.

If, as you are suggesting, Massive X can really work in an autarchic environment (no need of opening and external processors), NI can strengthen its market's power.
Otherwise it will be an issue for the brand. Users will see that the recent strategy is focused on controlling the market and much less in product development/innovation.

Massive X has to be released within 36 days. I hope all the forecasting I was doing is wrong, and I wish you good luck.

 

Yes the world is getting faster and customers less tolerant, one of the reason is that that time is a new currency. It is not my opinion, it is academic marketing theory.
Three updates are not a long time to wait for a flawless plug-in.
In my opinion it can not be said now you are a tolerant customer: you are waiting, postponing the tolerance.
I know customers, it is my job to know them.
There is a point when customers meet expectations or not. That point for you is the time you expect the third flawless upgrade.
If NI disappoint you there, you may remember you were defending the brand, tolerating the brand, and this didn't make the product better. You may release all the energy and the expectations you accumulated.

I expect from NI much less they you.
In my opinion they are running into fire, in your opinion you are sure they will fix everything in three upgrades.

Please, let me warn the brand. I was a brand advocate upon a time.

 

NI has their own marketing department and plans and vision, I don't think they need any warnings from a random forumite Especially since their livelihood does not really depend on success of a single product... If MX succeeds then great, if not, they still have a product which outsells any other plugin from literally any other plugin developer (Komplete in all its versions).

No, I'm not changing the topic. You said there's no plugins with great built in effects (I quoted that exact statement of yours), this is demonstratably untrue and the particular niche that the plugin that has great effects covers absolutely does not matter.

 

Ok, I exaggerated speaking in general 3-4 posts ago, I am sorry you focused on that and not on how important are external FX for massive. But after so many posts, in my humble opinion, you are avoiding the discussion.

I don't know how they need this "random forumite", maybe they are listening every other much better than you are doing with me, it would be fair.

If I am still free to talk, I would like to answer you about the one single product.
After abandoning Kore and releasing Maschine NI had two periods: in the first started to sell a lot of products which are dependent from Reaktor.
That period accelerated the risk of being unable to open a live-sets after an upgrade.
The second (recent) period is relative to NKS.
It has been years (after Maschine) NI don't release a stand alone plugin (i mean a plugin that works independently from Reaktor/Kontact).

NI conquered the position of "industry standard" with Massive, it means before to start an important project it may be worthy to wait to see what will be your future bass synth. There is high chance the old Massive will become an abandon-ware (no further development, upgrades, support).

Users like "random forumite" may watch what is NI doing with Massive X and they will try to observe if behind the curtains:

• is NI really developing professional product or are they going in the direction of good-looking interfaces gives less internal control?
  
• are they trying to standardize the market to sell their controllers?
  
• are they trying to control the market beyond the real merit?
• is NI developing products without considering the users?

Massive X is a node to understand many things, it is an important momentum for digital marketing in the digital music industry.

Than let's say good luck! I really wish to see a product meeting expectation. 35 days due

 

Luca. you are using a whole host of logical fallacies to cause arguments where they need not be any.

You have made quite a few incorrect assertions in this thread. The one about CPU's not being faster is patently nonsense for one. Simply go on cpu.userbenchmark.com and key in the Core 2 Quad Q9505 and the i5 9600k (both the same cost) and you'll discover there is a 213% increase.(In those 10 years). And if you wait until Ryzen 3 is released next month, you'll probably get an even larger increase (for the same price).

And those are real world numbers, not a user answered question on a dubious website.

Also the notion that no VST has decent FX built in is also wrong. When an example was shown, you then moved the goalposts saying "well, that's NOT the kind of VST you were talking about", something to do with it being Vintage style FX (without actually qualifying what you mean). In that case, may I remind you of Serum, a Modern Wavetable Synth, akin to Massive, which had such good internal FX, that they ended up releasing them separately so they could be used outside of Serum. Will you be telling us next that those FX aren't what you mean either because they are "Modern"?

You say one thing, and then when someone disagrees with you in any way, then you say that's not what you said and then blame others for changing the subject when all they are doing is disagreeing with you.

If you cannot handle being disagreed with, then perhaps a forum isn't an ideal place for you to be.

 

Well said!

 

Hi Evildragon,
In a recent post in the "new release date" you wrote: "CPU speed is more important than number of cores, for audio at least".
What do you mean?

 

It means that a lot of computations are sequential, i.e. cannot be parallelized. In that case more cores don't matter, but a single cpu clock rate is the limiting factor.

 

Dear Oliseo,
thank you for replying!
I understand your disagreeing, but please don't attribute me too many things
Actually I wrote "If Massive X is implementing effects that are inferior to external specialized plugins, it doesn't make any sense" and "an instrument plug-in internal effects are NEVER good and variable as external one". I don't mean that internal FX are not decent at all as you attributed me, but I showed there is a wide trend in layering and effecting in multi band, two characteristics that internal effects usually don't have. The variability of course was meant about the choice. Serum's plugin in fact enlarge my choice of external FXs.
In the marketing perspective it's like the car's radio. Those pre-installed are decent, but some customers want some better devices because pre-installed devices are not enough for someone. Massive had a bypass system in the routing that was very useful, will massive X be like those car companies that limit the installation of better hi-fi?

About CPU: remember I was talking about the opportunity to save resources with Program Change, without that it would be challenging for many CPU to open many, many instances together, a topic closely related to live-sets and laptops: devices with heating issues.

 

So for music, is an Intel i7-6700@6700HQ@2.60GHz providing sensibly better performances than a T9500@2.6GHz? The second is about ten years older and both are the best CPU on Latitude serie, I play on laptop, is important in order to play music in live set.
Is today good to abandon the Program Change and to incentive people to adopt multiple instances when playing live set?
Are the brands deciding the trends or the musicians?

 

First of all, they both have a 2.6 GHz clock rate, so they both suck. Old i5-4590 runs at 3.3 to 3.7 GHz. But it also depends on other more subtle stuff.

For the program change: It depends. Instances that don't play anything shouldn't consume cpu performance at all (or very low) and this shall actually be enforced with VST3. Unfortunately a lot of vendors still create VST2.x virtual instruments. So in the end just try it out. I think that PC should be available for Massive X (because it should be fairly easy to implement) but it wouldn't be the end of the world if they ditched the concept

 

Yes the i7 can overclock, but the nominal speed is 2.6, even when they show 3GHz+ when they sell it. I don't change my laptop every year, and 3 years a go I did't see so better CPUs offer (maybe in bulkier laptops, but not with sensible better performances).
In order to don't play anything I guess the plugin should be shut down directly from the DAW, which is not exactly fast to manage as Program Change when having more than 8 sounds. And Program Change is saving anyway more resources, because it play one instance only.

 

Would be bad if the DAW just "shutdown" a virtual instrument. You don't know what state it is in and if it would recover. That's why with VST 3 an idle mode was introduced.
Anyway most modern CPUs don't run faster, they are just "smarter" in how to process stuff, having new instructions that can do operations on multiple data in a single cycle (SSE, AVX etc), calculating two paths in parallel if there's a branch etc.
For music production sheer clock rate is still a thing though. I actually wonder why there aren't any special DSP cards just for music production.

 

And actually it's NOT enforced by VST3. The developer still needs to implement that feature. For example, Roland Cloud VST3 plugins consume CPU at all times, even when no notes are playing whatsoever. Lame developers, right?


Nevermind though. Some hosts do have an option not to process muted tracks (like Reaper), so if you just mute a track not being used, it's not going to waste an awful lot of CPU. So using multiple instances instead of program changes is perfectly plausible in this case. You just need to beef up the RAM (which is always a good thing, anyways).

UAD is exactly that. And it's not a perfect solution, with some of beefier UAD plugins you don't really get an awful lot of instances on their largest (octo) cards.

 

That's why I wrote "shall".