Massive X 1.4 update!

[iiinnaJ]

I wish in the future updates you could favorite presets since there are so many. Or am I missing something?

[aMUSEd]

At the moment you can if you use it in Komplete Kontrol, which provides some semblance of organisation for MPX presets that it otherwise lacks

[Azbest]

Just came here to gush over the Creak filter a little. Absolutely beautiful for heavy, distorted bass.

[slaambo]

From the off the preset browser - or lack of it - was the main minus point with MX. Such a gorgeous-sounding instrument with such a diabolically stubborn implementation for the functions which are so crucial to a pleasant workflow! I'm getting back into the synth now coz it's heavyweight but I don't go near the browser, just save my stuff as AU presets in LPX.

Without a Favourites function you try to save a preset you like and find the save icon greyed out. You contact NI support. 5 days later they come back and say this is normal. Apparently you have to move knobs or sliders before the grim beast will let you save something. Finally the icon lights up but you now have to move the slider or dial back to its original value if you wanna save the patch exactly. But once your preset is stored you make the big mistake of adding some 3rd party stuff to the library. It's get's scanned - sometimes every time you instantiate, as peeps here have many times pointed out, O nooooo!!! Then, in total frustration you realise your preset has gotten lost in the semi-random forest of the User menu because imported banks are not stored as such. Presets simply populate the vast User area necessitating much scrolling and scrutinising to simply find your lost patch, so painfully stored.

Really great move, NI. Equip the supersynth of our times with a browser from prehistory, yeah. Then fail to get to grips with the issue in updates while threads like this one multiply and proliferate. I know I've said nothing original here, I'm only echoing what's been said in this forum and elsewhere. But if more peeps bitch and bellow maybe NI will listen.

Maybe?

[chk071]

As far as I understand it, the main focus in the latest updates was on getting the synth to work on M1 Macs. Which took long enough. Have a bit more patience. I'm sure they do their best to address some other things.

[zerocrossing]

I can’t believe their flagship wavetable synth doesn’t have scroll wheel support, MPE, polyphonic aftertouch support, a decent patch browser, wavetable import/editing and modulation animation. It’s why I’m more likely to use Vital despite the fact that I love the sound of Massive X.

[pdxindy]

I can’t believe their flagship wavetable synth doesn’t have scroll wheel support, MPE, polyphonic aftertouch support, a decent patch browser, wavetable import/editing and modulation animation. It’s why I’m more likely to use Vital despite the fact that I love the sound of Massive X.

Also no arrow key support, no midi learn and no direct parameter automation.

[Azbest]

Yet here I am having a blast with it. Pigments and Europa gather virtual dust.

[Sinisterbr]

I can’t believe their flagship wavetable synth doesn’t have scroll wheel support, MPE, polyphonic aftertouch support, a decent patch browser, wavetable import/editing and modulation animation. It’s why I’m more likely to use Vital despite the fact that I love the sound of Massive X.

I agree with everything, but just upgrading the preset browser would do it for me. This is by far the most important thing, IMO.
Oh, and they could get hid of the lag when opening the GUI or changing presets.
(and no, I do still favor MX over Vital )

[slaambo]

A cautionary note from VSP (making NI look proper naff).

Note: Native Instruments designed Massive X with some limitations.
Currently, all the presets need to be added to the users folder.
Massive reads all presets in the users folder as one group so be aware that X-Squared and all presets in the user folder will show up as that one group.
Hopefuly they will allow for third-party presets to show seperatly in the future.
Copyright 2019 VSP
User ID tagged to download

[slaambo]

So dropping these 100 VSP presets into the User folder as required they end up scattered at random among many hundred others. I admit this is partly down to VSP who should've added his VSP prefix to each patch-name in order to keep them together, but O my days, what a mess.

[v1o]

The preset handling in MX really annoys me. When you add a prefix to the filenames of patches in explorer, Massive won't recognise any changes.

[pdxindy]

As far as I understand it, the main focus in the latest updates was on getting the synth to work on M1 Macs. Which took long enough. Have a bit more patience. I'm sure they do their best to address some other things.

Well... when MX first came out, people said have patience, NI had to release it cause it was already months late and that they would follow up with updates to address the shortcomings.

It is now 2 years and 4 months since its release and it has not changed appreciably since. I have plenty of synths so MX can just sit there and maybe in the future I'll find it useful. If it's another 2-4 years before any major update, that would not surprise me since NI obviously has a huge work ahead getting all their stuff modernized and implementing native Apple silicon support.

[Biome_Digital]

Hi, it's me again. Back again, looking to see if massive x has a proper preset browser yet? Oh well. On we go.

[aMUSEd]

As far as I understand it, the main focus in the latest updates was on getting the synth to work on M1 Macs. Which took long enough. Have a bit more patience. I'm sure they do their best to address some other things.

Well... when MX first came out, people said have patience, NI had to release it cause it was already months late and that they would follow up with updates to address the shortcomings.

It is now 2 years and 4 months since its release and it has not changed appreciably since. I have plenty of synths so MX can just sit there and maybe in the future I'll find it useful. If it's another 2-4 years before any major update, that would not surprise me since NI obviously has a huge work ahead getting all their stuff modernized and implementing native Apple silicon support.

What annoys me (despite also loving the sound) is that NI clearly have a version their end that is capable of saving presets with bank and category information, otherwise how are their sound designers creating banks with it? So it's not like it should really be a lot of work to get this into the public release, it seems to me there's some sort of attitude at NI that user and third party content is not as important as content created in-house (Komplete Kontrol has the same issue when it comes to users not being able to save banks). Personally I think this is a very self destructive attitude that forgets that one of the key things that saw NI rise as a company was the promotion of a thriving user community for Reaktor, and later on we saw the same sort of thing take off with Massive. I really worry that if they don't address this issue people will continue to lose interest in what should be generating lots of great user/third party content (as the original Massive did), but isn't right now.