This is an amazing thing: in MachFive3 you can have each note as a sample or a synth.

I love the way they treat a synth oscillator and a sample oscillator as one and the same (like Omnisphere)- it allows for some extraordinary sound design. It can even have one single key in the mapping editor that per velocity layer switches gradually from a granulized sound of fireworks to a fat ass PWM synth. The possibilities are mind-boggling.

And the synth is no poor relation- it's fully featured (subtractive/FM/wavetable/drum/noise/organ) and sounds great

Anyhow just sending big smiles to MF3. Is it Omnisphere with sample import (I don't have the Omni so someone else who has both could comment...?) Oh and that Browser is soo nice (I thing I dislike about Kontakt)








I know... ilok and no demo.....

MF3 has been front and centre on my radar for a while now, and you're not making things any easier for me.

Your radar is good......

looks very interesting, but even with crossgrade discounts it's too expensive for me. partly because there's no demo, partly because i'm worried that it's main benefit to me in terms of pure sound design might be quite limited or more workflow orientated. basically, from the tech specs, it seems to unify things nicely in one plugin - granular synthesis + subtractive synthesis + sampling. but as an avid user of ableton's instrument racks and modular environments like plogue bidule i have to wonder if i cant just make a patch using separate instruments/fx that would amount to the same net result;; if not better ?

until i can actually try a demo, or see some really in-depth youtube clips that focus on it's unique selling points, i've got to err on the side of caution and give it a wide berth

Ah then look at Groove3's tutorial for MachFive3. (sonnox50 code gives you 50% off (for the one month ALL PASS too!)) . It goes into a lot of detail. But yeh, no demo is bad.

Mach 3 can do also FM ( not so complex but true FM) and wavetables for example, and a lot of other things.

The general treeview based browser/interface is a bit complex to master totally but once you're used to it its iincredibly powerfull, as you can browse synthesis engines also this way.

I cant compare it to bidule, which I have no experience with, but its certainly nice too have so much tools under the fingers for sound design in a single instruments, because you can unify envelopes and other modulators, and use dufferent types of synthesis in a single patch, and then it becomes really interesting.

Some effects are really nice also, and they are very clean, you can really sculpt the sounds in a precise way.

It has many sound collections available ( like all the UVI packs ) but still somewhat less than Kontakt. If all major players should beginn to make their sound libs available for both Kontakt AND Mach 3, I woud not hasitate to make it my goto sampler.

The script engine is also very powerfull, but I dont have the necessary knowledge to compare it to Kontakt one though, but from what I read it is pretty capable.

According to their site it can load samples in Kontakt format.

But I guess it won't load Kontakt libraries that require authorization.

Yes, it won't load Kontakt Player libraries, nor will it convert KSP scripts (the syntax is way too different). Also, it won't convert the new binary NKI format that was introduced with K4.2 onward.

The Kontakt libraries- the ones that need authorisation no, and the scripts don't go across, but samples and mapping and (remarkably) key switching too (though I guess it depends what it's doing) and round robin is very easy to reinstate if the nki had it. (er not sure actually- all samples need to be in the same keygroup for round-robin and MF3 imports each sample to it's own oscillator in its own keygroup)

But you can still do this in many other samplers, so not so mind boggling. Youre just underlining youre view of the difference between an imported wave and an iternally generated signal. I dont think many people are that bothered by the difference unless they dont quite grasp digital synthesis concepts.

Im not denying its a great little app, theyve cetainly learned from NI.
On the whole I dont see much to differentiate it from Kontakt.

When did Kontakt add a full synthesis engine?

Well for starters Kontakt doesn't have synthesis at all, doesn't have FM, doesn't have ring modulator, and doesn't have the flexibility when the number of loadable FX, scripts and modulators is concerned. You're not limited by 8 FX slots, you're not limited with 5 script slots, you can insert scripts at any level in the instrument, you're not limited in the number of modulators and modulation destinations like in Kontakt, and you can do some really basic things that Kontakt doesn't even know about (like modulating insert and send effects, MIDI learning mute and solo buttons, MIDI learning output controls and effects, etc.

One thing that is unlike any other sampler out there, IIRC, is that when you declare one zone (called keygroup in MF3), you can actually stack unlimited number of soundsources in that one keygroup - so you can stack a sample, an analog stack, an FM layer, and another sampler. Each with their own settings. It's just so awesomely flexible, and simple.

Yeh this is a subtle but big difference to Kontakt. A Kontakt zone is not quite equivalent to a MF3 keygroup. The architecture is different in the way you mention. It does make importing Kontakt instruments that have round-robin not possible though because MachFive seems to take every sample and place it in its own oscillator in its own keygroup. In order to implement round-robin in MF3 all the oscillators (samples) need to be in the same keygroup and further there seems to be no way to move oscillators around (copy and paste) which is not good, because this would be the solution- grab all the oscillators on one note and move them to a new single keygroup and delete all the other original keygroups and implement round-robin.....not possible as far as I can see

In that case, you'de better use Layers Rules and use the Round robin Rules and put each RR in their own separate layers.

Hope this helps.