Cristian

On the one hand, this is good stuff, great prices and integrated in Native Access. OTOH we're in 2021, who knows when I'll need the money. 🥴

Since I've been working on a 4+ year old laptop for quite a while (i5-7200U) an upgrade and a return to a desktop PC was a welcome change. Pretty content I managed to build a new PC with a Ryzen 5 5600X (only €14 above MSRP) and 32 GB of RAM (only €16 above MSRP). I did manage to actually save €31 on the motherboard so it evened out in the end. Then again, all this was at the end of November, just before PC parts prices went up everywhere.

Yep, looks like it's all gone.

Don't worry, you pay that "additional 45% off" right back when upgrading to Studio One 5. 😀

Now I feel a bit dumb having bought K11U -> K12CE during the summer of sounds sale 😂 I could have gotten a Komplete 12U / CE upgrade for even cheaper AND a K13U/CE for free...

It would be ironic if Microsoft hardware hadn't historically had lots of compatibility problems. The PlaysForSure and Zune fiascos to name just two of them that are relevant to this forum. As a rule, by the time MS figures out its hardware it's either obsolete or on the 4th/5th gen (except for their mice & keyboards).

Update 2004 bluescreens on me because of Intel HD video drivers, the official ones. One of the intel updates made a mess of the drivers, and now there's some BS somewhere deep in the registry (no idea where it is) and I can't cleanly uninstall them.

There's a bug in the forum. I've also encountered it. Seems to happen when you login to the main bandlab site and then come back to the forum.

Thanks for the breakdown. I had to write a mobile app that dealt with video streaming around 2012, so I have a (tiny😄) bit of first hand experience with anemic CPUs being unable to fill up the audio buffer in time. Yeah, increasing the core count won't come close to a linear performance increase because the lion's share of any modern application still runs on a single thread, and splits up tasks among cores wherever it can. And while you can do parallel signal processing, the synchronization can be a nightmare. Even then it still falls on the main thread to fill the audio buffer. After reading a bit more I think NI's choice of CPU might also have to do with them going with Linux as the Atom has been in a LOT of Linux devices. And unlike my initial thoughts, cost may be an issue too since N4000 only supports DDR4 (preferably dual-channel, as it has more memory bandwidth). The unit enclosure is also a great point, does the Maschine+ even have a fan? If they went with passive cooling then yeah, that base frequency will matter more. Also LOL the thought of even trying to compare the i9-10900 with these embedded CPUS 😂

I'm not really complaining. To be fair to NI, the price is competitive to MPC Live and MPC X. And obviously the price is never going to be just the price of hardware: there's R&D costs that NI has to make up for as well. In my case, I'm not really their primary customer given music is just a hobby for me and I haven't even really used my Mikro to its full potential. Besides if I need it, in 6-7 months it'll be 25-35% off on the second-hand market, from richer hobbyists who bought it as an impulse purchase and now want their money back. TBH my only question would be why NI went with the Z8350 and not the N4000 as a CPU, which is newer (2017 vs 2015) and better with similar costs.

So, buy another Komplete 12 upgrade on top of the one you already own? 😂

The Maschine MK3 is $ 600 and the PC board (with NI's published specs) is about $ 140, totaling around $ 740 in terms of raw hardware cost. So $ 1400 feels a biiiit pricey. That said, they did port the Maschine software to Linux. And they brought back the metal finish from Maschine MK2, maybe it helps with heat dissipation. As far as performance goes I actually tried out Maschine on a quad-core atom with 4 GB of ram and windows 10 and it actually ran pretty well, even with 3 or 4 instances of lighter vsts like Monark or Super8. So the Maschine+ should actually work out alright with its custom linux distro running nothing but Maschine.

A lot of modern musicians come from a background of working retail & services while studying, both of which have laid off a lot of people. And IIRC around a quarter US small businesses are pretty much on the verge of closing up shop. Federal "keep people employed" money just ran dry and September has just started. Several airlines have massive layoffs just around the corner. That 8% unemployment is at risk of going up pretty fast.

Unfortunately, as of today os - 1 actually means windows 10 1507 which was released in July 2015, around 5 years ago. This isn't really the choice of the developers either. Management is the one that decides which OS versions are supported. The update for the C runtime can be found here https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2999226/update-for-universal-c-runtime-in-windows It will help a lot of programs install under windows 8 and 7, but it might also not be enough.

As far as 8Dio strings go, at least from what I've seen, Agitato Grandiose Ensemble Violins, Adagio Cellos and Adagio Violas seem to be considered pretty good. They stand well on their own and even complement other orchestral libraries nicely.

Windows 8 is no longer officially supported by MANY apps. Working as a software engineer, even our team's flagship product is no longer officially supporting windows 8 starting this year. And we're talking software that started being developed in the early 90s. Sure you CAN STILL install it under Win 8 (even 7) AFTER you install the dependencies (which come with Win 10). Part of this is a lot of software is moving to Visual Studio 2019 whose dependencies are not installed on older windows by default.

Eh, it's the typical flat UI that's found in many modern apps. I mean, ultimately it does what it says on the box. Squareheads' NORA is another similar plugin, with a slightly better organized GUI (but don't expect a miracle).

Yeah, $250 (on sale obviously) will be a very good upgrade price with all the new stuff that's included. Props to NI for not forcing us (yet) to subscribe. TBH, if I was made of money I'd be tempted to preorder,.. 😂

It's either a scam, a knockoff or a shipment of stolen goods.

I got a license for the full MPC 2 software for $20 off e-bay about a year ago. Nope, you can even use the Maschine Controller (at least MK2, though by now they should have MK3 support), or just the mouse and keyboard if you don't have a supported controller.

I got my links about 24 hours after applying. Haven't installed it yet but it looks like a light version of the full MPC software v2 (which I have installed). Basically it's similar (but not quite the same) as NI's Maschine.

By DAW I assume you mean Ableton or Cubase or Studio One. Native Access has nothing to do with the DAW itself, it's a standalone program. After I've activated the licenses for whatever I've installed, I can take my PC completely offline and have no issues running NI VSTs. If you have a weak internet connection, one (true, pretty dumb) suggestion would be to take your PC to a friend's house (and if you have a laptop, just go to a local library or McDonald's). Though 100 GB of updates honestly sounds very weird, given you already bought the HDD version of K12U. Maybe Native Access prioritizes online downloads for you, in which case I'd recommend installing from the HDD by hand. As for what I did: when you download an instrument once, Native Access doesn't immediately delete the setup files, so I just copied those setup files to an external drive. Next time I need to reinstall for whatever reason, no more downloading. And given you have the HDD already, even better, install Native Access and log in then close it. Then you install everything you have off your HDD manually. Then you can start up Native Access again and let it activate what you installed. Even if it prompts you that it has updates, you don't NEED to install all those updates, especially not the bigger ones.

Uhhh... that's not really how it works. You don't need an internet connection to your DAW. I'm assuming you mean your music computer is not online? In which case, yeah NI offers no real solution there. But if you have even only a limited internet connection, it still works. For example, I have a bunch of NI installers backed up (because the downloads are large). On the few occasions I needed to uninstall & reinstall a library (say to a new HDD or SSD), Native Access just picked it up afterwards. And on the (even more rare) occasions it didn't, it asked me to point it to the library on my HDD.

Intro price is $249.99 but I got an e-mail with a code for another $50 off, so check your e-mails if you want this. Personally I can't afford to spend $200, right now, on yet another library I have no time to use. 😂 So, if anyone wants this code, go right ahead and use it 👍 (assuming it's not account-bound or something).

SongWish's reMIDI and Squaredheads' Nora are quite interesting "sequencer" VSTs, that basically let you plug in MIDI files and then allow you to "key-shift" that MIDI data in real time. Both have demo/trial versions available.