I know what you mean about gear overload, I've barely scratched the surface of all the new stuff that Live 9 comes with but the upgrade from my old Komplete bundle is so irresistably cheap it's hard to pass on it. I probably wont use a lot of it but I do use Battery in just about all my productions & the new features & enhancements it comes with make it worth the asking price alone, for me at least, everything else is just gravy & everything is optimized to work with Maschine. Will have to wait & see how well Battery 4 works with Maschine. Also it comes with the one synth to rule them all so I don't think I can go wrong for a buck fifty :)

You won't go wrong for sure. All of that is easily integrated into anyone's productions, better still if you're familiar with their products.

The product that gets me really excited is Reaktor. I was hoping they'd be releasing version 6 for this one, but I guess it's to soon for them to do that, as Core technology still has a lot to offer - things like Razor and Monark. There's a lot of usable stuff in their user library one can get (for free) and build stuff like you would with a Nord Modular. I dare say the sound quality hangs in there with that, and if you're crazy enough like me, you can use core cells and dig your way into building some modules, like oscillators and filters - and learn a ton along the way.

What I'd really like to see is some option to connect existing modules fast, when more complexity is not needed, like you do on the Nord, and something within the lines of Maschine but more synth oriented...

But all in all, go for it! Max is very much like Reaktor to, and also has the convenience of being multi-platform and easy to share. It's a similar concept. And yeah, Native Instruments and Ableton both offer deep complexity for those geek enough (or crazy) to dig it, and also the hands on, intuitive, very streamlined, with tons of options, kind of setups. Hats off to both (and the prices).

If you like modular soft synths you might like KarmaFX. Very easy to use, cost effective, and has great visualization/animations showing what it is you're creating.

http://karmafx.net

Yep, I've looked at it. Maybe I'll buy it. Do you have it? Could you perhaps send me a few samples of some of your wildest patches? Would really like to know how it sounds, and I find most demos have some kind of public in mind that isn't me - if that even makes sense. Some synthesizers I really like, like Disco DSP Discovery Pro, have demos on their website that sound to lame for my ears, compared to the sounds I can get out of it. But that's mostly a matter of taste, anyways. But if you could do it, would be grateful ;)

Cheers

There are some sound demos on the page below. I do own it, but to be honest I haven't loaded it up in something like 2 years -- not because it's anything other a great synth, but because I've been completely revamping the home studio, and I don't even have the synth loaded on the newly set up PC yet. Working with modular synths takes more time and my priorities have been on other things lately, so synths with simple controls have been getting more use from me.

There are some sound demos here, and you can also download the demo for the synth itself. Some (free but donation supported) plugins can be downloaded from there too. I recommend playing around with the demo to see if you like the patch-construction process. It's like other great synths in the sense that demo patches never really show you what its capable of as it applies to your situation. The great thing about soft synths is the try before you buy aspect. Even if I sent some patches that appeal to me, the probability that they will be exactly what you're looking for is really slim.

I personally like some of the sounds that "MadGonzo" (guy that did some of the demo MP3s) gets out of it, but they may not be your musical style. I will say you can get everything from bread and butter to extremely electronic sounds out of it. Also you don't have to get insanely deep with it, you can always use an existing sound that gets close to what you want as a starting point and just tweak it a little. It's just that modular synths add so much flexibility that sometimes the possibilities are mind boggling.

http://karmafx.net/?id=1

I just realized that on my "general purpose PC" (which I use for general web use, development work, gaming etc.) I was able to more than double the workload above with no popping or crackles in FL Studio (I do not have Cubase installed on this PC). Literally 30 instances of Massive, the CPU use goes up to 75% or so but no signs of popping even with the buffer set to 2ms latency!

The processor in this PC is a little faster overall than the music PC I mentioned above, but not twice as fast or anywhere close to that level of difference. At this link you can see the basic CPU performance of the two PCs in various applications compared side by side:

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/45?vs=107

Looks like I have some serious investigating to do here. Wish me luck.

Even if you can't get it to work like a mad scientist computer, you can still freeze tracks, have the presets and midi in reserve - if you need further adjustments and take it from there. Those instances of Massive, I take it for granted they're very simple ones, right? If you're talking something with unison and complex modulation, having 30 instances of that would totally bring shame to almost any computer I've used so far. And that latency is to low. I usually settle for a bigger buffer size and latency, 'cause I feel the machine has a bit more oxygen in it that way. Logic has the "delay compensation" for recordings, so it doesn't bother me at all - even for recordings. And I usually go as high as 130 tracks on most tracks - not all of that is midi, mind you.

One thing that makes a big difference is the disk you use, and if you have the chance to have a secondary drive with your samples and recordings in that one, it really boost the performance, big time! SSD hard drives work like a miracle to! Good luck!

Yes, the "1991" patch mentioned in my steps to repro is a very simple patch. To be honest, my primary PC can probably handle about 50 of these without giving something up. I got the idea for this particular test from this video which was done with an older version of Cubase:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhcd7X3t6Cw

I think I'm beginning to zero in on the problem... My audio interface is Focusrite Saffire Pro 24 Firewire. The music PC in question has already been upgraded to Windows 8 64 bit. Lots of people with FW audio interfaces of various brands (RME, MOTU whatever) are saying that Windows 8 doesn't have a legacy firewire driver. Without the legacy driver, supposedly fireware audio interfaces under Windows are dicey at best. For example this one works, but I'm not getting the performance I should be. Focusrite lists this as a product that fully supports Windows 8 so it may be a matter of taking it up with them.

The PC I mentioned above that works properly is still on Windows 7, but more importantly the audio card is PCIe rather than firewire or USB.

I'm not pleased right now. I've spent the better part of my cumulative spare time and weekends over the past several weeks setting all this up, and if the answer turns out to be that I have to reformat the PC and go back to Windows 7, I'm probably going to just say fuck music for the next 6 months or so and focus on my other hobbies until the sting of wasted effort wears off, because I've spent way too much time tweaking, getting synths set up, getting the patch directories right, etc. Now I remember why I never pursued music making professionally. When something like a driver exclusion for an OS release can completely nullify a time investment like I've put in so far, then sorry but I've got other ways I'd rather spend my life :)

I've read of some options for getting the Windows 7 legacy Firewire driver working under Windows 8 so I'm going to investigate that as an option.

Plan B might just be to get a USB interface, even though it will cost me, if I put a dollar amount on my time per hour it might be the cheapest of the options.

Just an update here, which is kind of good and bad news.

The good news is that it does not appear to be Firewire related. I was able to tweak Windows 8 to use the Windows 7 legacy FW drivers, and after that made no difference I tried using the UltraNova built in USB interface, removing FW from the equation entirely and still getting the same result.

The bad news of course being I still have some investigating to do.

OK so I finally got around to doing the 'test' on my Macbook pro. I might add that I recently removed the optical drive & replaced it with a SSD drive & the difference in performance is amazing. If you really want peak performance I cannot recommend an SSD enough.
I started a new Live 8 session as Live 9 still has a few bugs that need fixing so I thought it would be better to use the more stable 8 version. I created a midi track with an instance of Massive with the '1991' patch on it & started duplicating it. At 20 tracks it was playing all instances fine, at 25 I was hearing some crackles & pops here & there...bit like one instance of the virus plug in, Lol. At 30 instances it was beginning to get too much & the fan on the processor started to gear up. Still not bad for a laptop computer I don't think. Watching the video, which was extremely painful & tedious ( just duplicate the track already ) I noticed that around a dozen instances it started to lose it. It also reminded me of why I would never go back to any of these programs or a PC for that matter, ugly cluncky shit if you ask me. Your issues probably are related to your soundcard as you say, hope this helps. :)