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All of the changes in Maschine 1.5 have been made to the software.

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When Maschine launched in 2009, it was something of a game changer for NI, and the software studio market in general. With a product that mimicked Akai's MPC series with the almost endless versatility of a software engine and hardware controller, NI was able to tackle (and tackle successfully) several niches at once and Maschine was welcome with open arms by the pad-pushing public.

Maschine wasn't without its faults, though; from launch, NI's forums have been alive with feature suggestions. The 1.1 update in November 2009 added plenty - direct MIDI sequencing from the hardware to your studio gear, drag-and-drop audio rendering of your patterns and more - but the salivating public never rest and more feature requests have been met v1.5. And once again it's free to all existing Maschine users.

In detail

Instead of listing every new feature (and there are a lot) we'll take you straight to the juicy additions.

The first things you'll notice in Maschine 1.5 are the new Sampler tab settings when you load a sound or kit. Instead of the familiar Pitch/Gate page, we're met with a new Voice Settings page, where you can reduce the polyphony of your sample from 32 voices to one, or bring it below zero to introduce a Legato mode.

What's most exciting about this new page though, is the new Engine section. Here, you can replay your sounds via emulations of classic samplers, namely the Akai MPC60 and E-MU SP-1200. These new playback options are fantastic for adding fizz and air to your beats, especially percussion, snares and claps. Have a listen to the examples at the end of the review.

The system really comes into its own as soon as you pitch your sounds up or down, adding satisfying grit.

Unfortunately it's not possible to apply the emulation across a whole Group, only on individual sounds. NI's reasoning behind this is solid, though. Firstly, the artifacts in these vintage samplers come from a re-pitching algorithm and how much a sound is re-pitched during playback, so it wouldn't be true to apply it to a Group as a whole.

Secondly, NI says the engine is quite CPU intensive, so to include an option to 'batch-process' every sound in a Group with the same emulation would eat up your processing. Hopefully, NI can work out a way to apply these engines to every sound without too much CPU sufferance, as they do sound fantastically fizzy.

Speaking of MPCs, it's now possible to import MPC banks directly into Maschine. Any long-term MPC users with unfinished (or finished) projects will be over the moon about this.

Tighter integration

Bridging Maschine and your host DAW has clearly been a priority for NI, and a few other new features seal the deal. Quick dragging of audio to your DAW was introduced in v1.1, and it's now possible to do the same with MIDI. Your Maschine patterns can then be used either with other plug-ins or to send MIDI back to Maschine.