Some impressions on MachFive 2...

[anotherbreed]

I'm using MachFive since one week, and noticed a lot of bad things that makes difficult to work with it:

- Cracks and Pops when use bigger patches and playing fast notes;
- Random crash when loading sounds;
- Sometimes it causes freeze when attempting to load the gran piano of the second dvd;
- Can't handle some of my own Virtual Sampler 2 patches... altough manual states otherwise!
- Permanent error messages ("sample not found") when loading some MachFive2 own patches ("male ohS SUS" choir);
- Sometimes it loads a patch and as you play it you get lots of loud annoying cracks, (I hurted my hears a couple of times) then the patch can`t play anymore or Cubase crash;
- Sometimes opening a project means to lost all the used patches I have loaded and working with the day before, after closing and restarting the settings and patches are all there again!

When it doesn't crash loading sounds, it seems stable and it's a good piece of sampler with great and unique interface. MOTU should work on these bugs instead of giving up...

[MIDI Life Crisis]

MOTU should work on these bugs instead of giving up...

Or maybe you should work on your system before posting how bad the software is. It works great for most of us.

What machine are you on? Cache settings? A lot of things can affect how VIs run. You should play with your audio settings, etc.

Or you can just keep bitching w/o actually tweaking things.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

'scuse me: buffer settings...

[bongo_x]

Really? It works great and all problems are the fault of the user? I think that would be a surprise to many people. If I wanted to spend all my time tweaking system setting to make things run correctly I'd still be using Windows.

M5 has always been a mess for me, so much that I've hardly ever used it (to be fair the iLok has also been a factor in that). I sat down one afternoon and spent an couple hours with it and started making a list of bugs. I filled a whole page, then I just got tired of that game. I can get it to crash just by spending 20 minutes playing with it.

I just saw the price yesterday on a site and it reminded how much I paid for it. Ugh.

The fact is they've done very few updates and it's been ages since the last one. If it worked perfectly that would be fine, but that's obviously not the case. It's a good program with a lot of bugs that could make it great but they seem to have just decided to ignore them instead.

bb

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Not my experience at all. Then again, I don't use loops.

[bongo_x]

I don't use loops in M5 either, but I bought it and intended to use it as more of a sound design/synth tool than a sample set playback machine. That may be why I have so much trouble with it, if I was just playing back sets of piano samples maybe it would seem more stable. There are smaller, cheaper things to play sample sets, many of them included with the samples now. M5 was advertised as much more than that, and was certainly priced that way.

bb

[MIDI Life Crisis]

I use it as both an instrument and sound design tool and it is really rock solid for me. What kind of issues are you having? The crackles described earlier by the o/p are often buffer and/or clocking issues. I will say, M5 v2 does NOT play well with Plogue Bidule and crashes it EVERY time. Stand alone is also unstable for me, but in DP 5, 6 & 7 it works great for me.

[anotherbreed]

Or maybe you should work on your system before posting how bad the software is. It works great for most of us.

I'm a composer not an IT enginneer or bug tester. I bought a software that's supposed to work right out of the box, just like the other software I own. I never had one crash with Motu Symphonic Instrument for example.
And hey, I said *how good* the software would be!

What machine are you on? Cache settings? A lot of things can affect how VIs run. You should play with your audio settings, etc.

My DAW is a computer (Core 2 Quad 2.83Ghz, 4gb Ram) assembled especially for audio applications, called Synergy. It is running an optimized and updated copy of Win XP pro, and Cubase 5 as sequencer.

Or you can just keep bitching w/o actually tweaking things.

Yes. I'll keep " bitching " sir. As I would prefer to spend time in music, not buggy software.

[James Steele]

My DAW is a computer (Core 2 Quad 2.83Ghz, 4gb Ram) assembled especially for audio applications, called Synergy. It is running an optimized and updated copy of Win XP pro, and Cubase 5 as sequencer.

Well, that might be part of why our experiences are different, because the reponses you have gotten are from Mac users. I also have MachFive 2 and it works pretty good for me but I'm also running a Mac. Maybe a Windows person can offer you some help.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

...I'm a composer not an IT enginneer or bug tester....

Many of us here are composers as well, but if you are depending on software with as many variables as a DAW to work on all systems right out of the box as if it were a loaf of bread -then you'd best go back to paper and pencil, score paper for orchestration, manual copyists and standard mail for creation and distribution.

Or you can take responsibility for what you feed you computer. Today's composers, arrangers, and orchestrators who use computer-assisted methods are often their own technicians.

[emulatorloo]

I'm using MachFive since one week, and noticed a lot of bad things that makes difficult to work with it

Never had any of those problems. It works great.

Maybe there is something wrong with your computer.

[anotherbreed]

Never had a crash with my daw and plugins (and even the other MOTU Vstis I own) since I started using Machfive 2. And I have been running a lot of heavy projects this year...

Believe or not, I just read on this forum of people complainig about the same issues. Users or DAW fault?

[AriWinters]

Unbelievably frustrated. I'll save a performance, and every time I try to load my session, it M5-2 can no longer find the samples, even though i have tried every which way to save the performance (with/without samples, different folders, etc.). While attempting to find the samples, you have to go sample by sample to find them, since the "find all" option just hangs there spinning. This has occurred on 3 different systems (all MacPro 8-cores, 2 are nehalem, one is not) at our studio. MachFive2 has crashed DP quite often. It's quite incredible how poor of an impression this software has made on me.