Solved What is the point of Maschine? (I got the answer, I think I will leave the post so others can read)

Nah, it's not about anger or becoming awful... you're just new here and you're misinterpreting a few things (maybe lack of forum/community experience), most people actually agree with you.

Me and many, many, others have been complaining about the Arranger for years, trust me, I am an extremely critical person and my online history is out there puclibly. It's not about hating DAW's, I and most of the users here have DAW's. It's more about accepting that some tools are meant for certain jobs and if you want to use a 'groove box' to make music start to end then you have to accept it's different from a DAW, if it was the same then what would be the point? It's an alternative. I can't complain a guitar is not a DAW or a 808/909 is not a DAW.
If bridging the gap between a Daw and a drum machine was easy some company out there would have done it already, and so far... nope. Push2+AL is the closest thing to that utopia but browsing from the hardware, for example, sucks big time so.. pros and cons.

 

I hope there are some Elon musk level genius reading this post and make the ultimate easy Maschine workflow with daw capabilities.
One day my friend! One day!

 

I think Elon Musk types have bigger money making goals in life than revamping EDM software tools. Launching satellites in space and stuff like that ;-)

 

I like your negative energy
Keep it up!

 

I hope so too, it's a lot harder than it sounds tho, this sort of post has been around for around a decade... :S
Back in the day DAW's were only used to record bands real-time, now they all have built-in samplers and whatnot for production... I think the Music production world is heading towards a direction where DAW's will merge with other approaches, Live and Bitwig and a couple of other modern DAW's are trying to bridge the gap, it's not there yet... a few more years and will have full DAW's running in standalone boxes or standalone boxes doing almost as much as DAW's do... Until then pick the best tool for you.

 

Fortunately or unfortunately depending on your predilections NI do seem to want you to be able to make a track from beginning to end in Maschine and looks like their target at the moment. You can already make tracks from beginning to end in Maschine although it can be like pulling teeth and has quite a few restrictions. However that was not why it was made.

On the other hand some would much rather they sorted out current almost name only features like automation and revamped the editing and selection tools, accomodated after touch and hyper threading and made the GUI far more accomodating and versatile. Time may eventually not run out before these features are dealt with...................................................

What we do have though that doesn't exist anywhere else as far as I know is a series of brilliant (even if the could still be better) controllers that have enabled an awful lot of people to work quickly and imaginatively in ways they may not have considered before so why should that need to justify itself?

 

Automation with mouse drawing, proper arranger (Song Mode), audio tracks with editing/tempo matching, built-in Vocoder and RTA plugins, multi-lane MIDI editing, HiDPI / Retina and that's enough for me to love NI forever and ever and to call Maschine a DAW, purple unicorn, my little pony, whatever...

 

The key to any DAW.

 

No, the key to call it "My Little Pony", of course.

My opinion is (as always) highly subjective, it's all what I would like to see in Maschine for MY needs. Not to state the obvious, but your needs may vary greatly...

 

I'm a newbie to all this in my retirement and something about Maschine appeals to me and gets me enjoying trying to make music. I'm more into rock / synthwave and even I can see a few small tweaks, well within scope, would stop me rushing off to my DAW as I build a track:

• Some basic automation, even fade in/out volume on a pattern or nth occurrence in a scene (ie in scene mode, select an instance and then have a menu to turn on some fades
• What I think of as part of the much debated song-mode — have a pattern not fill a scene so I can bring in a drum near the end of an intro without a long pattern with only a small fraction used. Obviously this leads to just having patterns dropped at will in scenes, which doesn't seem a vast change. I realise the recent changes are in this direction, but a couple of tweaks and I can stay in the zone

I'd always want to go out to Logic to finish off mixing, much as I would always use a keyboard to play some parts

 

I think the real issue is that if people are doing stuff in addition to beat making, they need a DAW if they want to do things completely and without forcing things to work. Both DAW and Maschine have pretty serious learning curves....why learn both when learning just the DAW gets everything done?

My opinion FWIW is NI is being overly aggressive in trying to turn Maschine into a DAW....It's already a mature product and I can see that if/when Maschine also becomes a full blown daw its gonna be full blown kludge. and the upgrade path being incremental will be painfully slow and painful and may make Maschine run worse in the process. I think the DAW part should somehow be developed as something separate from Maschine, but tightly integrated w. both the Maschine hdwe and sw. That could generate tons of revenue from being a new product as opposed to an upgrade of an existing product

 

Well, let's not cut NI short here, if you ask me then they do know how to make something work out.

Now, in all fairness my comment is triggered by something else. See... this is the part I enjoy the most: I've been here before (and on a personal note this part is also why I feel so confident backing Maschine.

Slightly offtopic maybe, sorry, but as I mentioned in my post above a lot of this brings me back to my Reason 4 years, and I loved them (still do). Where plenty of my friends turned to Komplete I turned to Reason to enhance my Live setup. Reason 4 wasn't a DAW in the sense of the word; no audio in, no MIDI out and definitely no VST's... connectivity was basically fully evolved around REWIRE; so allowing one DAW (the master) to control the other (the slave).

Fast forward 8 years later and Reason has made it into a full fledged DAW on its own. Once again: eight years later. In full fairness: the exact moment is open to interpretation, not the point here, the point here is that it took a lot of time and effort (and thus manpower and thus money) to get there.

Which I think is something to take into consideration as well.

Did I ever mention Balance? A hardware audio interface which was suppose to support Reason. Let's just say it is no more.

See, the thing with Maschine is that it is hardware that was made to support software which in its turn was made to control the hardware again. You don't get the Maschine hardware without the software, and it shows (my personal comparison is Ableton Push; I love this critter (Live sits at the center of my home studio, so (sorta) obviously I love their flagship product)). You will notice when you're dealing with hardware which was solely designed to support software (before Push we had the APC40, which I also own) OR if you're dealing with hardware which was designed in combination with the accompanying software.

As much as I love Push (and Live) I can't conclude otherwise that Maschine sits much closer to being an actual 'instrument' (rather than a MIDI controller) than Push is.. even though I often reference Push as a 'Live instrument' (to me it really is).

My point here... Propellerhead.. sorry: Reason Studios managed to turn their flagship product (Reason) from a niche product which only specific people enjoyed into something much more mainstream. Considering the awesomeness which I think Maschine is (my key features: lock mode & that awesome "4 mode" touch strip) I think N.I. may easily end up surprising us.

And I see options... Maschine Mk3, the traditional setup. Maschine Mk4: the full studio DAW experience....

So: keeping Mk3 alive while also pushing the full DAW forward into Mk4.. I'd be tempted

 

I'm not saying we shouldn't but personally Maschine will need HT and PDC for that to be feasible at the very least and can you see those coming any time soon? That's why i use Live, to fill the gaps!

Maschine in Live is super flexible but i want to try and take tracks from initial idea to mixed and produced in Live where i can utilise the PDC with FX in live and use the more technical things and more flexible audio editing, track freeze, oversampling, mix referencing etc. It's a very specific workflow i've adapted based around the concept of splurging.

 

damn i had no idea about that preset magician. i thought it worked liked everyone said it did. i'm sorry man.

 

It works for some stuff, like Air and UHE plugins are perfectly handled, there is a lot of functionalities, there was a great dynamic around this project that has been discontinued...It definitely works but it is a shame that unfortunately it had to be stopped for good reason though,...still it was so promising, few features and format are not working... for instance it doesn't handle any NI format except NIFX ... I wished I could manage my Massive banks with it , there is so much of those out there, it is still a very popular synth . Like many musician I think every synth is kind of immortal as they are all singular and you know what you want and what you get when you choose one, so no instrument would it be analog , physical or virtual is ever deprecated because they are just what they are and you love them for what they are and how they sound.
Don't be sorry I a very happy with what I have I just like to be a grumpy old git sometimes

Big Up NI !

 

My guess… Ableton and NI just team up: Results will be...
- … Live 11 made by Ableton + Maschine MK4 for Live 11 made by Native Instruments.
- … all these discussions will come to an end

 

"Ablechine 1.0" coming in 2021.

 

i don't understand, i finished 5 beats the night i bought Maschine... If you know how to make a beat before Maschine, then its easy... seems like you are hoping Maschine would make the beats itself...

People create these post forgetting this is a plugin with Standalone abilities, Not a DAW that can be used as a plugin....

 

right, but i doubt you actually attempted to use maschines extensive features the first night you bought it. That's not realistic within a night. It takes time to use a program and see what works and what doesn't before you can make an accurate assessment. Kind of silly to come to a conclusion in "just one night". Also, no offense, but if all you're doing is making a drum loop and calling it a beat, then yea, you can make 5 of those within the first night of buying maschine. The problem is when you try to do more with it; incorporate in your current workflow, come up with variations using automation, use tempo changes within the same track, exporting/mixing/mastering and comparing to other uploads etc.. have you done all of that within a night?

 

This kid most be a real prodigy then... very talented and a quick learner! Hahahaha
He does it all, in one night! Braaaaah!

Because Maschine has 12 Pads, and we only have 10 fingers, that doesn't mean you can't play it!