Massive X

I am hugely surprised that a company as NI with all their experience and knowledge sell such an unfinished and raw product. Yes, the engine is top notch as always, the sonic palette is endless but the experience of using this plug-in is painful. You can not scroll options like changing wavetables or modes on the fly, yes the same is true for Massive but now there is a lot more of everything and you have to navigate with a mouse click every single time and it is a lot of clicks while exploring and designing a sound. There are no options to deal with presets, you can not create your own folders, well you can, but it will be shown as a single list and when there are a lot of presets this list will become a long long one, there is no option to find presets by author or bank, NIs own expansions are installed in the Public Document folder meaning that you will have presets in different places without an option to make a single one Massive X presets folder. And overall Massive X files are scattered all over the place for some unknown reason. Initially I thought that NI will make an user experience more pleasant with time on this synth, but now after couple of years nothing has been improved on this matter and I found myself using this synth only once in one song because of how clumsy it is, and I think it deserve more, but 3 years after it still gives an impression of being a very raw and unfinished product. So in the end this is NOT a synth I would advise my friends to buy even though it is a sonic powerhouse and I've seen a lot of comments on other platforms expressing dissatisfaction with Massive X, some even call it the most failing NI product ever. This is something I might agree with and it is not that it is failed at it's core, no, it has the potential but it is all those small things like the preset management that makes big different, especially for a go to everyday synth. And the most baffling thing for me is - this NI synth I'm talking about! like wth? Why? Has it been outsourced and developers stubbornly want to keep it as clumsy as possible? Or what is the reason? Cause it is not some obscure option I'm talking about it's the basic things that should be obvious by default.

One of the best sounding plugins to buy at the moment (Tops Serum and Pigments soundwise).

But NI should work on GUI, both named do it much better.

I rate 5 because mainly the sound counts.

Edit: I've spent even more time with Massive X, working around the poor GUI performance on Mac, and I have to say, the sound is top notch. In particular, it growls and grunts and rasps in a way that maintains its character when pushed to extremes, where other synths would dissolve into white noise and buzzing. And in less extreme settings, the sound still has a certain je ne sais quoi, a dimensionality that is hard to put your finger on but is nonetheless there. Sorry if that sounds like audiophile voodoo. I doubt it's an illusion on my part, because my initial response to the synth was overwhelmingly negative. I'm going to let most of my old review below stand because IMO the criticisms are valid and not nitpicks. Raising my rating though, in light of the great sound engine and in expectation of some nice updates.

Here's what I don't like:

- It handles like a cow. It's awkward and sluggish.

- it uses huge amounts of CPU on Mac when the GUI is displayed. I think this is the first Mac product from NI that uses retina resolution, and it appears they have some work to do in the optimization department. In the meantime I run it at 50% size, which helps.

- it's obscure. Nothing is obvious. Very poor ergonomic design, compounded by the lack of a manual.

- the GUI looks tired. It's full of wasted space, and paradoxically manages to look empty and cluttered at the same time. And it also makes me think that this is fundamentally a polyphonic Reaktor blocks ensemble with the hood welded shut. That could explain the performance issues, compared to the first Massive which looks to have been coded from the ground up.

- You can't import wavetables.

- The "switcher" LFO clicks when it's switched. Whaaaaa...? What... is the point??

- Want to map a MIDI controller to a control? Forget about it, you have to map it to a macro and then map the macro to a control. Why??

What are the good points? Well, hopefully my criticisms can be addressed in updates. And the sound is very, very good. It'll do that skronky womp womp post-dubstep EDM thing that people will want to use it for, and more.

Looking forward to raising my rating when the updates drop.

This is more of a summary than a review, made after my initial few hours use of NI's latest synth creation. It's very incomplete as there's quite a lot of avenues to explore with this synth.

Good points.

1. Sounds very good. In fact, it sounds considerably less harsh than Massive without having to resort to filtration. Have only made a few sounds so far but it's surprisingly easy to grasp the basics without the manual, although i'm quite sure that any in depth understanding will take some time longer. There are a lot of wavetables as well as plentiful ways to treat them.

2. The routing is exceptional. Its things like this that will keep it at the top of the pile for the forseeable future.

3. Resizable GUI.

4. NI are having one of their 50% off upgrades until the end of this month. I wasn't going to spend any money on music software this year but i've relented and am very pleased I did. I've gone from Komplete 7 to this, so have a lot of catching up to do.

Bad points.

1. No randomisation. Whilst not essential, Massive's ability to do this was very useful when you're not in the mood to sculpt sounds from scratch.

2. Envelopes don't have visual feedback. Also, not essential but being able to see shapes goes quite a way to carving out textures for better sounds. Todays oomputers are extremely powerful and can handle automated graphics, so Massive X's absence of visual animations makes me want to shout at the design team. Also, it would be great to have the option to save envelopes and LFO's to use in other sounds.

It would be good to have a patchable oscilloscope as well.

3.. I'm not so keen on its GUI. Whilst it is resizable, I would like to have single percentage increments rather than the much larger increments it offers so it can perfectly fit my laptop screen and whilst the layout is reasonably clear, there's something confusing about it. Perhaps this will go once I get fully used to it.

4. 1 complex filter for everything. Yes, there are other filters built into its routing (util) so you can dial in parallel and serial filter combinations but these filters are much more basic. This may or may not be a bad point once I get used to it.

5. CPU usage is high. A 4 voice patch takes up approx 17% of my processor power (I5 3320M), whereas it's only 2% with the original Massive. That's a lot, although i'm sure they've made it as efficient as possible. Looks like i'll be doing a lot of bounces.

6. Needs an AVX capable CPU. Thankfully, mine already is.

This will do for now. I may write another in a few weeks time.