MOTU MACHFIVE
Jan 1, 2004 12:00 PM, BY ERIK HAWKINS
Long known for MIDI and audio interfaces — as well as its popular digital audio sequencer, Digital Performer — MOTU enters the universe of virtual instruments with MachFive. Although a number of DAW manufacturers have been peddling virtual instruments for some time now, MOTU has opted for the quality-over-quantity approach. After surveying MachFive's wealth of features, it appears to have been well worth the wait.
For starters, MachFive supports sample rates as high as 192 kHz; multichannel audio features allow for 5.1 surround sound samples; an enormous number of sample formats can be imported for a virtually endless supply of sounds; and it's available in every popular plug-in format, as well as for both Mac and PC.
I conducted this MachFive test flight on a Mac dual G4/500MHz machine packing 1 GB of system RAM with Mac OS X (version 10.2.6). I put MachFive through its paces in Emagic's Logic Audio (Audio Units), Steinberg's Cubase SX (VST), Digidesign's Pro Tools (RTAS and HTDM) and Digital Performer (MAS). Copy protection is via iLok SmartKey, and one iLok that is preauthorized to unlock the MachFive (no goofy miniature card or online registration is required) comes in the box. The authorization can also be easily transferred to another iLok for consolidation purposes.
AT THE SPEED OF SOUND
All of MachFive's controls are available directly from its face. Subsequently, it's the largest plug-in GUI I've ever encountered. Unlike plug-ins with many pages of parameters, MachFive's design makes it a quick study and a breeze to navigate. It's a great-looking program, as well, featuring nicely rendered knobs on a gun-metal gray skin and backlit LCD-style displays that are easy to see.
The interface is neatly arranged into distinct sections: File Browser, Parts, Display Area, Keygroup Parameters, Master, Part Parameters, LFO and Effects. The File Browser provides complete file management of MachFive's instruments and performance setups. Sample instruments, called presets, are organized into Soundbank folders that are stored in the MachFive Sounds folder on your hard drive. Load a Soundbank in the File Browser; then, its associated preset files can be viewed and loaded. A preset can contain as many as 1,024 samples, allowing for huge multisampled instruments. Holding your cursor over a preset's name prompts a pop-up that displays its size in megabytes. I like this feature because it lets you see what you're getting into before loading the preset — instruments with a number of large samples can take an eternity to load.
Like a traditional hardware sound module, MachFive is 16-part multitimbral. In the Parts section, you can assign a different preset for each MIDI channel. Selecting a Part causes all of the MachFive's controls to switch to that preset — it can't get any simpler. But keep in mind that to take full advantage of its multitimbral functionality, the plug-in format being used must support multioutputs. This allows you to assign each Part to a different output for independent processing and mixing in the host program's virtual mixer. At present, multioutputs are only available with MAS and VST. (AU may support this feature in the future.)
Global controls for the currently selected Part are found in the Part Parameters section. Parameters include polyphony, transpose, glide time and bend. Master global controls are found in the Master section, including the master tune control and two mode switches: 32-bit mode and Expert mode. In 32-bit mode, samples are played back at 32 bits instead of being truncated to 24 bits, reducing some CPU strain. The Expert mode allows you to layer and crossfade the presets of different parts to create wonderfully complex instruments. Although MachFive doesn't include a dedicated stand-alone mode, the program is designed to work in a totally transparent manner, making it well-suited to live performance.
WARP CORE
Located in the middle of the plug-in's GUI is the Display Area, a masterful combination of keygroup and sample-editing tools, along with general information. When you want to build an instrument or dissect a preset, this section should be your first stop. The area can be viewed as a split screen with sample information on top (the Waveform Editor) and a preset's complete keygroup map (the Keygroup Mapper), along with a handy virtual keyboard, on the bottom. Most editing windows can also be expanded to the full size of the Display Area, losing the keyboard.
You can perform detailed waveform editing in the Waveform Editor screen. Looping and editing functions are nearly as powerful as with a dedicated waveform-editing application. Processing choices include fade-in/out, normalize, reverse, silence and truncate. There is a complete selection of loop types, from a basic forward loop to “forward until note off, then to end” to alternate (forward, then backward). Crossfades to smooth loop points are totally adjustable. Additional information about your currently selected sample can be found in the Sample Info, Spectrum Analyzer and Tuner (which is modeled after a VU-style tuning meter) screens.
The Keygroup Mapper is the section in which you map samples to keys and velocity zones. It's a snap to use because you can define a sample's key range and velocity zone with handy edge edit and move tools (Zone Edge, Velocity Edge and Move). Assembling a complex multisample instrument is like playing with a child's building blocks. Samples (AIFF, WAV and SD2) can be dragged and dropped directly from your desktop into the Keygroup Mapper. (The ability to import REX files has been promised.) Keygroup zones turn solid when they are triggered by incoming MIDI, letting you quickly see exactly which samples are being played at different velocities. A Group Editor screen lets you group keygroups for editing, and a List Editor screen provides an overview of all of an instrument's samples and keygroups and allows for various adjustments to be made to each keygroup.
Below the Display Area is the Keygroup Parameters section, a collection of faders, buttons and a large Cutoff dial. There, you set a keygroup's subtractive synthesis parameters, like filter (there are six types: LPF, HPF, notch, resonant and two comb filters), pitch, amp and pan. More than two dozen modulation sources are available to control those parameters. The LFO section even offers four independent LFOs that can be employed as modulation sources. LFOs can be synchronized with your host program's master tempo, enabling powerful, rhythmic control of your sounds.
As if the powerful sample-editing features and arsenal of keygroup parameters aren't enough, MachFive's impressive collection of onboard effects provides even more sound-sculpting power. Every preset can have a maximum of eight effects; four parallel effects can be applied to a preset's individual keygroups, and another four serial effects can be applied globally to a preset. Additionally, four parallel effects buses are available to all 16 parts, and as many as four effects can be stacked on the plug-in's master stereo outs. That's a grand total of 136 possible effects in just one instance of the MachFive — impressive. The effects algorithms are extensive (more than two dozen), useful and sound solid. Examples of the effects include reverb, ping-pong delay, chorus, flanger, tremolo, auto pan, rotary speaker, auto wah, compressor and Double Drive.
UNIVERSE OF SAMPLES
A virtual instrument is only half-baked if it doesn't come stock with a ton of great factory presets. Here again, MOTU pulled out all the stops, bundling more than 4.7 GB of quality sounds. The highlights are several large (50 to 500 MB in size) multisampled instruments. For example, at a little more than 457 MB, you need a lot of system RAM available to load the Bosendorfer piano preset, but it sounds amazing. Multisampled guitars, drums, basses and loop instruments (featuring both drumbeats and instrument gestures) also require a significant amount of system RAM, but they all sound killer. Presets that show off the MachFive's unique high-resolution and multichannel capabilities include 192kHz drum samples and a 5.1 Surround Church Organ. The less-than-50MB presets, which are crucial when RAM is limited, pale in comparison to the big multisampled instruments.
The problem with large instruments is that they take a long time to load — my setup took nearly 45 seconds to load the Bosendorfer. Although load time will vary depending on the speed of your computer, it would be much more convenient if presets could be loaded in the background. Also, note that due to how OS X handles system RAM allocation, it's actually possible to load more MachFive presets than the computer has available RAM. When this occurs, OS X tries to cache the earliest items that were loaded, causing the output of MachFive to stutter and break up, like the computer's processor is being overloaded. In this instance, switching to 32-bit mode and adjusting the host program's buffer settings will not fix playback because the problem is not insufficient processing power, but lack of system RAM. The company offers two solutions for this problem: The first recommendation is to install more system RAM. Second, users can download the latest MachFive update, which includes hard-disk streaming.
If the large number of excellent stock presets isn't enough, a handy program for importing the presets of other samplers is also included: UVI-Xtract can read an impressive number of different sampler formats, including Akai, Roland, Emagic EXS24 and GigaSampler. (See the sidebar “MachFive Xtra” for the complete list.) And the application does more than simply import samples; it can merge different programs via velocity stacking and crossfading and play the samples off a proprietary CD-ROM like the tracks of a standard audio CD (a neat way of auditioning samples). There are so many cool sample libraries available in all manner of formats, it's nice to know that with UVI-Xtract at your disposal, you will probably never run out of sounds for MachFive.
BATTLE STATIONS
MachFive ran well in all of the host programs that I tested; indeed, I had no crashes that seemed to be caused specifically by the plug-in itself. Even when I overloaded the computer's system RAM with several really big multisampled instruments, the host program did not fail. And in all cases, the plug-in's parameters could be automated. Although the AU plug-in functioned well in Logic Audio, it's a bummer that MachFive's multiple outputs are not presently available in this format.
Unfortunately, the HTDM and the RTAS versions of MachFive also suffer from the absence of multiple outputs. Consequently, to play back multiple presets from different MIDI tracks in Pro Tools, you must instantiate more than one MachFive. As usual, insert the instrument on an aux-return channel to hear its output. Even though the HTDM version of the plug-in appears in Pro Tools' TDM plug-in menu, it does not actually employ one of the DSP card's chips for its processing power. Instead, it depends on your computer's CPU just like an RTAS plug-in; the only advantage is that the HTDM version can play back 192kHz samples. A small detail missing with the HTDM plug-in is that multiple instances of MachFive aren't automatically consecutively numbered in Pro Tools' MIDI menu. For example, several Access Virus instruments appear as Virus 1a, Virus 1b, Virus 1c and so on. Without this nomenclature, it's difficult to determine at a glance which MachFive instance you are assigning to your MIDI track.
The VST and MAS versions of MachFive are by far the most flexible because these formats support multiple outputs. The ability to have a total of 16 distinct sounds coming from one instance of the MachFive is extremely convenient. This system is a lot better than having to insert the plug-in on a new channel each time you want to dial up a sound for a new track. Virtual instrument tracks are a new addition to Digital Performer 4, and although they work well, the multiple-output implementation is not quite as smooth as it is in Cubase SX. In Digital Performer, you must assign each MachFive Part to a bus and then assign each respective bus to the input of an aux channel.
FINEST IN THE FLEET
MOTU has created a powerful virtual sampler with MachFive. Beyond its wealth of sound-sculpting parameters, built-in waveform editing and onboard effects, its ability to play multichannel surround and 192kHz samples, import (with the help of UVI-Xtract) a bunch of different sampler formats and support all of the most popular plug-in platforms gives MachFive a serious edge over competing products. With more than 4.7 GB of great presets and all of this for a reasonable price, MachFive is a serious studio contender. If you use one of the host programs that supports the multioutput plug-ins, MachFive is a no-brainer. But even if you don't, this is a virtual instrument that deserves serious consideration — just be sure to have a fast computer with a whole lot of system RAM to really take off.
Product Summary
MOTU
MACHFIVE > $395
Pros: Well-designed, powerful, intuitive. Supports AU, HTDM, RTAS, MAS and VST plug-in formats. Drag-and-drop sample support. Excellent, extensive stock sound library.
Cons: No multioutput feature available on AU, RTAS and HTDM plug-ins. No stand-alone operation.
Contact: tel. (617) 576-2760; e-mail sales@motu.com; Web www.motu.com
System Requirements
MAC: G4/800 or faster; 1 GB RAM; Mac OS 9.22/10.2.5; AU-, HTDM-, RTAS-, MAS- or VST-compatible host program
PC: Pentium III/500 or faster; 1 GB RAM; Windows TBA; DXi-, RTAS- or VST-compatible host
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