News & Commentary

'Maschine Is Alive' Is the Headline, Not the Features

Native Instruments' first big Maschine update under inMusic adds three sequencing tools - and one press-release sentence that tells you exactly what users have been asking.

Native Instruments released Maschine 3.7 on September 23, free for Maschine 3 users, per MusicRadar. It adds a random note generator, per-note probability with a lock, and a Euclidean sequencer with a real-time mode, alongside three paid expansion packs. It's the first major update since inMusic - owner of Akai, Moog and Alesis - bought NI in May.

If you produce on NI tools, or you're about to buy into a groovebox platform, this is the first real signal of what the new owner intends.

Be fair to NI: these are good tools, they're free, and they shipped from a company that went through insolvency, layoffs and an office closure this year. MusicRadar's fair knock is that all three features already exist elsewhere.

But the feature list isn't the news. The press release said Maschine is "alive and evolving" - and companies don't write that sentence unless users are asking whether it's dead. inMusic now owns Maschine and Akai's MPC, two platforms doing the same job. The buyer's real question is which one inMusic is still funding two years from now.

Read the next update, not this one. If 3.8 ships something the MPC doesn't have, Maschine has a future. If it ships parity, it's being maintained.