Some quick thoughts after spending an hour or so with it:

• This is NI's first high-res, scalable interface. Finally! At 200% it's too big for my 27" 5K iMac. I attached a screenshot of what it looks like at 175%. Very nice. (Edit: looks like it got scaled down and overcompressed, and now looks like crap. Take a look at the official Massive X page instead.)
• There's an impressive amount of variety in the presets. You can definitely hear the Massive lineage.
• It sounds GOOD. Sure, it can do harsh, tinny, digital wavetable stuff, but it can also sound super fat, punchy, soft, warm, delicate, etc.
• More importantly, it makes all kinds of sounds I've never heard before. Not just weird random chaos, but new sounds I actually want to play with.
• I don't want to bag on Arturia (I really like most of their stuff), but Massive X immediately grabbed me in a way Pigments just doesn't. They're similar in overall concept, but the result is very different. Maybe Pigments just has terrible presets, but I haven't gotten anything I really love out of it when making my own patches either. (Anyone who loves Pigments…please tell me why I'm wrong!)

Side note: it's unfortunate to hear some people can't run Massive X because of the (previously unannounced, as far as I know) AVX requirement. Basically it means you probably can't run it if your computer is more than 8 years old.

So far, amazing!! Quite a beast indeed!

I cant even install it as it says my CPU is too old :( It's missing some later vector features.

I've been putting off upgrading my hardware. Massive X is probably a good excuse to give in.

What are some of your favorite presets so far? Theres not that many presets and so far I've been underwhelmed. For it to take this long to come out. Sounds like a bunch of EDM harsh sounds

Some of the ones I liked:

• Clean Strings — Might strike you as just a vanilla guitar sample but it responds very nicely to velocity and has some subtle detuning. The parameters tastefully shape the sound. Not the sort of thing you'd expect from a synth like this but I found myself playing it for a good 10 minutes.
• Comb Experiment — Try turning up the modwheel just barely above 0.
• Elizabeth — The beat continues even when you aren't pressing a key. Play a funk bassline or lead.
• Forever Now
• Magic Man
• Matrix Rainfall
• Vantage
• Wintery Tinkle — Fortunately this is not a simulation of someone peeing in snow.

A lot of the patches may seem ordinary at first, but using the modwheel or tweaking the macros usually makes some interesting things happen.

There is no way to make an init patch is there?

The amount of presets is quite low, I expected more of them.

Some presets are cool, but some use a huge amount of CPU.

GUI is sweet, and is different on each patch. Depending on modules used etc.

Soundwise it is up to par to other great plugins that are around these days

This was stated in the initial requirements long time ago.

I like two on your list...

Comb Experience I like I set the mod wheel at 4.5 on Kontrol and the sound is saucy.

Vantage, if you tweak it some and use the lower octaves makes beautiful sounds. I just started a track using it.

Indeed. I wish everyone did this for everything, but I get why they don't.

It’s an unfinished product. It is not even in a beta state.

1. There is a search icon next to the preset browser. It does not work. You can’t search. It’s only decoration.

2. There is no Init patch or init or reset function.

3. There is no undo/redo function.

4. The presets are a bad joke. All my software synths sound better. Not because they all have a better sound engine for sure, but because I don’t buy synths with as garbage presets as Massive X has.

5. When you edit the envelopes, the graphical presentation (blue area) does not change. (I edited Env 2) Again, it’s not even a beta software stage.

6. There is a filter below OSC 1. It seems like some kind of LP filter, but if you turn it to zero, there is still sound coming through it. I guess I should read the manual. But it’s the first synth ever in which I could not use a filter at all by intuition (had no idea about it after three minutes or less).

It’s a pity because the sound engine might be good. I spent only a few minutes playing with it from scratch, but I created a sound I often create in synths. It’s almost like "hello world" for me.

It took me no time to make it sound a way I like. It’s rare I can make it sound good as fast as I did with Massive X. Besides, I like the visuals and the resolution on a retina screen.

Without knowing anything about the development, I guess, they had to release it after so much delay and early pre-sale.

It’s in a condition that you are happy if it doesn’t fall apart. They didn’t find a sound designer so someone from the kindergarten jumped in to make a few patches.

There is a chance that the sound engine is great. I didn’t spend enough time using it to tell, but even after a few minutes, it’s much better than I thought based on the presets in the "Best" folder.

In other words, in at most two minutes, I created a sound that was better than any of the presets I tried. And I’m a beginner. It’s not about how good I am but how bad the factory presets are.

In about one year, it might be a finished product, or at least a stable beta release.

Update - Massive X Does NOT Alias!

Excited about this one!

There is an Init patch because I’ve used it tonight! Think it was just in the preset browser. Also, referring to your point no.6 - that filter is just like an oscillator tone control or tilt filter. The main filter section is to the right of the oscillators - fairly obvious!

Yeah, found it under Basic

The 2 Oscs are really crazy with options, it is insane.

And those 2 noisegenerators have also the most wild options, very nice

Yeah this is a **** implementation. It needs fixing, and also a realtime tracking of the env stages would be nice.

I figured it out.

But if you look at it, by default, that tone control is labeled as "Filter", and the filter is labeled as "Asimov".

Yes, there is an F letter above it, as well as LP4.

Back to the thing you call tone control, I would expect at least the Gorilla being able to stop the sound. He is the king of the rainforest. At least, what remained of it.

By the way, the Gorilla has a cool icon. The other one I like is the icon of the ART.

On my Macbook Pro 2015 the fan gets to work quite intensive after some time with Massive X i Live 10. CPU only about 20%. How can this be?

On my Macs, I had the impression that whenever I use Reaper or Live, most of the heat (= fan noise) is generated not because of the CPU but the display/GPU.

Update: I found this on kvraudio:

As for the Init, there is no "Basic" folder but QuickStart. They are there.

What annoys me the most is that there is no numeric feedback about any of the controls. (Same as Massive. Probably that’s why I don’t use it.)

If I change something, I have near to zero chance to put it back to the same position.

If they don’t want to display meaningful values (for example, Hz for a filter), then why can’t they display an abstract number? Something between 0 and 100 or -100 to 100.

u-he synths do it, and most of the time it’s perfect.

Having no feedback is just stupid.

Also, it’s a bit offending how unfinished it is at the release. For example, there is no right click function in it. Not at all. Not on the controls, not on the presets. Nowhere.

I guess I skip this one. (I wish I knew any other reason on Earth I upgraded to Komplete 12).

I am missing your link!

It is like this only with Massive X.

Massive X uses AVX, which helps wring more performance from your CPU... which, in turn, means it’s working harder and therefore sucks up more watts to run, generating heat, and potentially requiring additional cooling measures.

Not quite, AVX allows the same operation on several vectors at once, for the cost of a single operation. So this doesn't easily translate to "speed", it's more about how much data can be processed in a single operation. For some things this can be a great performance boost.

I looked everywhere last night for anything with the work init in preserat. Nothing came up. Even under search. I will try under basic.

But so far. I with with the , this seems like it needs a lot more work and uldates., Crowd. And it needs a friggin in depth manual. MX is far from a stripped down easy to use interface.

Sorry, it is Quickstart folder where the basics are in

https://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewt...start=3105#top

If you don’t see it on it, Page 208.

Massive x was a massive disappointment!!

32bit!!!! Ni haven't done 32 bit for a long time now, let alone on a new product.

I wish NI would just move to an annual support subscription instead of the update revenue model. I am going to do the Komplete 10 Ultimate to 12 Ultimate update for $199 before the end of the Summer sale, which of course, includes Massive X. I would just as soon pay them $100/yr for a continued support contract. It's not exactly unusual today to have basically paid public betas with this increasing power and complexity of these platforms. If the choice is to be part of the beta process or wait for a polished product, I would rather have it now, and participate in test and debug. You sound engaged, so I guess we have a responsibility to submit bug tickets to help them track and prioritize .

Sounds excellent and you really can do whatever you think of. But they really need to fix Envelopes animation thing.

I agree. They said they’re working on it.

There’s a feedback forum on NI’s site (separate from the main forum) where they’re asking for feature requests and bug reports.