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The Mach Five (1.2.3) Review

Ok, so I finally did it; I finally left the EXS behind, I told myself as I came home from Turnkey in London with a shiny new box under my arm. I've been disappointed with the EXS for such a long time, and I was really looking forward to something being done about it.

Announcements of Logic Pro 7.2 came and went, and all without a mention of any real improvements to the EXS; and so, I took the decision to go and buy a third party sampler. EXS just didn't do what I wanted it to do; it was too limited in too many ways, and I spent too much time trying to think of ways to get around its shortcomings.

No, it was time for something new. And so when I went there, full of expectation and with four competitors for what would end up on my desk.

• Steinberg HALion - not something I really wanted to spend money on, and not something I was seriously considering, but I was open to persuasion. Strangely, the staff wasn't interested in persuading me on it either - so he must have had the same opinion of it that I had developed. I remember this from long ago, and it left a sour taste in my mouth then. Once bitten, twice shy.
• Native Instruments' Kontakt - the popular choice. When I think popular, I have to admit, the first thing that comes to mind is "ten thousand flies can't be wrong: eat shit". I didn't walk in thinking this was something I wanted to walk out with, but I knew it was the safe bet; I could take it home, and I'd be happy with it, and it would get rid of all of the problems that made me walk into the store to buy one. I didn't find it to be the most inspiring choice, though, mostly because I perceived it as being unnecessarily complicated and primarily better suited to its VST brethren. All of this was unfair, and as you'll see later, I made a mistake by not buying this.
• Yellow Tools' Independence - A newcomer to the field, and looked both interesting and sexy; it looked like a good time. I wasn't terribly familiar with Yellow Tools as a developer, though, and I wasn't fond of their nickle-and-dime strategy of selling add-ons for stuff that really should be in the box at that price, IMO.
• and last but not least, and ultimately my purchase, MOTU's Mach Five. Having just announced their 2.0 release, it felt like a safe bet; it looked the business, seemed to offer the creative potential I was looking for, had a good sized interface that offered a lot of detail on one page, and felt like the right choice.

My problem? My problem was assuming that Mark of the Unicorn meant I was buying a rock-solid product. I looked at it, said to myself that it was MOTU, and that I didn't need to worry about whether or not I had tested it; and I hadn't done a lot of research on it, to be honest. What little research I did do didn't really turn up any major reviews - it's as if it had just slipped under the radar.

Now? Now I think that if you don't see a review, worry: it hasn't slipped under the radar, but the media, as well as the UnicorNation forums, seem to take a "if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all" attitude. I didn't see one truly negative word about the MOTU Mach Five before I bought it.

So what happened?

On The Underground: Getting It Home

Like most tube passengers, I find ways to keep myself busy when travelling from my home to wherever it is I'm going and back. On the way home, I eagerly crack open the packaging to find a dongle. No, don't get me wrong - I knew there'd be a dongle. But it's HUGE. The original XSKey from Emagic's v6 days was dinky; the v7 key from Apple's iteration of Logic is even smaller. This? Gargantuan, and bulky - it threatens to take over the slot it's next to when it's plugged into the hub. Two inches of cheap blue plastic with a bulbous end and an ugly green light from underneath; gaps in the plastic where stuff from inside your bags can get into it and muck with the electronics. It's cheap. Really cheap. Poorly made and the rest. Thus begins a day of disappointment.

Next, the manual. HUUUUUGE BOX. Dinky 165 page manual. As a matter of fact, most of the box is taken up by padding, which keeps the CD/DVD install and sample CD separate from the book, kept separate from the iLok key mentioned above, and separate from everything else. Wads and wads of blue stuff doing nothing except preventing bits from making noise.

The contents of the manual are as follows:

• pp. 5-8, a zippy little "overview" of what you might use it for. High-level use case stuff.
• p.9 has a one-page "Quick Reference" - which is actually just a screenshot of the plugin, and shows the different sections of the main display. It's quick - but not much of a reference, as you're never going to look at it, ever again. It doesn't even provide a good way of hopping to the right page in the manual, because only one of the sections has a page number reference in it.
• pp. 11-12: Installation. How misleading this turned out to be I'm barely able to begin describing; basically, install the CD, install the DVD, insert the iLok, and you're off. If only this had been true, I might not even have felt a need to write this.
• pp. 13-14: Quickstart. Two pages of what buttons to push to do something. Never ended up needing to read it, really; one of the benefits of Mach Five is that it really is relatively self-evident, and a well done interface.
• pp. 15-22: A walkthrough tutorial. Utterly ignored. It's made more complicated by the fact that they've tried to squeeze instructions for all five plugin platforms supported into it onto the first page, including instructions for DP and ProTools, Cubase, and Logic - which makes the whole first page a turn-off that taints what is otherwise a pretty good tutorial. This is for people who are allergic to manuals, and willing to deal with only a short innoculation, but who aren't comforatble with diving in blind, and can't be arsed to read the whole thing. As I'm an avid reader of manuals, I've got no problems reading later sections; I gloss and skip.
• pp. 23-44: "The Mach Five Plug-In". Here's the rest of the installation instructions that weren't mentioned under installation: How to get this thing running inside your host application. It co vers all of the formats that the plugin comes in: MAS, RTAS, HTDM, Audio Units, and VSTs under OS9 and OS X. The sections on each aren't huge - and are rather unclear. And you find out almost immediately that the implementations and capabilities are actually different between the different types, and that some formats have limitations that others don't. Specifically, AudioUnit versions of the plugin are feature incomplete
• pp. 45-87. This is the "manual" part of the manual; the bit that actually describes the plugin's functionality. 42 pages. The thinnest section of them describes all of the possible applicable effects in about three pages, - about a paragraph per effect. The manual chooses very strange things to be terse about.
• pp. 89-91. Expert mode. 3 pages. So expert that it doesn't even need documentation.
• pp. 93-100. Surround sound. Logic users should note that surround sound support is listed as "coming soon" for Audio Units. By that, I assume they mean the 2.0 upgrade they'll make you pay for. I've got to be blunt - by this point, not only am I a bit disenheartened, I'm a bit annoyed. The fact that they sell all the different versions of Mach Five in one box basically gives them license to lie to you about what you bought.
• pp. 101-116. Import tool. Touted as one of the big strengths; and I've no doubt it is. Importing is hard to do well - one look at the poor support for Chicken Systems' Translator on the mac is proof. Translator PC is well supported; Translator Mac is practically unsupported. This is one of the big reasons I selected this product - and quite frankly, I'm a bit annoyed that it bit me in the ass on day one. In theory, a great feature; in practice... in practice, I expect the product to produce poor imports from time to time - but not crash. A bad import I can live with and clean up; a crash destroys my workflow. Ultimately, this tool has turned out to be unstable for me; something that others have also reported. Unfortunately, probably also something that will only get solved by additional outlay on 2.0, given MOTU's quality of support to date.
• pp. 117-120. Sound bank descriptions... Which cover an unexpected set of content, one which again I'm upset by. 1) A demo of the full Bösendorfer by Soundlib. Sure, it sounds good, but you know it's a 'lite' version of the original. 2) An electric keyboards soundbank. 3) A guitars and bass soundbank. 4) A drumkits soundbank. 5) A 192KHz percussion soundbank, a demo and sneak preview of an Ultimate Sound Bank product (the makers of the core engine); also, and just as important to mention, another demo. 6) Surround church organ - another demo of a USB product. 7) Synths, including some modeled sounds and yet another demo of another USB product. 8) a collection of Soundscan loops - also demo products. Oh, yes, and 9) a demo of charlie, another demo. Whoops, forgot 2 more: A mini General MIDI bank, a light version of Plugsound Volume 6 (another USB product demo), and "Plugsound Free" - you guessed it, another demo of six more plugsound products by USB. Though the product claims to provide 4.3GB of sample material, 475MB of it is a demo bosendorfer, another 2G is unique material, and just about everything else is demos of USB's own back catalog. I expected a lot better than that. Perhaps that's unrealistic - but I don't expect something I shell out a good chunk of change on to fill its sample library with the partial cast-offs and B-sides of a company's other sample libraries.
• The rest is all addendums and troubleshooting - pp.121-126 cover troubleshooting, pp.127-144 enumerate each preset, pp.145-148 list effect presets by their name and the settings they use (a nice enough touch, acutally. Quite like that.), and the rest is index, glossary, and stuff.

Expect no warning as to the installation troubles that happen for AudioUnit users. Expect the missing features to be buried in the doucmentation; moreover, expect that the documentation, due to interleaving discussions on individual hosts into the documentation, to be a maze of trying to figure out which bits are applicable to you, and which aren't. It's a testimony to how not to write up multi-platform support.

Installation

And so here we are, installing. Install CD, containing 1.2: No problem. Install DVD... no problem. Wants a reboot for the iLok.

The fun begins: 1.2 doesn't validate in Logic 7.1.1. Go and download 1.2.3. And the fun part? Neither does 1.2.3. After *much* non-obvious hunting, you find out that 1.2.3, released in late September, doesn't validate under Logic 7.1.1, released in early October. It's now January of 2006, several months after 1.2.3 stopped validating - and it still doesn't work. MOTU hasn't bothered to update their software, even though they know it's broken, and bury the documentation that might help you get the product installed. Here's a company that knows it's screwed up, but is unable or unwilling to pull their finger out and either tell you in the product you downloaded that installing it might not have the effect you expect. Nor is it noticeably placed on their website. You have to hunt for it. Here's the problem: Why am I hunting for a solution to a problem that every single MOTU Mach Five customer running the latest versions of both plugins has encountered every day for the last four months? This is not a secret. It should not be one. And unlike most bugs, where you might not want to discuss them with the customer, this one affects your initial experience with using the product on day one of its purchase - something that, when it goes wrong as evidenced by this review, leaves a permanent aftertaste. Every time I start logic, I'm reminded of the fact that this plugin, broken for almost four months, hasn't been updated. Every day, I get a warm fuzzy feeling about MOTU from it; the same one you get when you put your hand into a cowpat.

You're asked to ignore the fact that it doesn't validate, and use it anyways. This places the plugin in your pop-ups, not under "MOTU", but under "[Incompatible]". Mach Five can be found under "incompatible" under each of the appropriate plug-in insert popups.

Conversion

And so we go on: Let's load up our EXS presets. The first thing to notice is that they didn't really intend for you to do any kind of mass migration. There's no way for me to convert the folder structure of my EXS plugins into Mach Five in any sensible way; though I can "batch import" the whole lot, minus any structural information. Or, I could. If it wasn't crashing each and every time. As it is, it looks like one of the piano samples that shipped on one of Apple's Jam Packs is crashing the import process every time - and it's unable to skip what it doesn't understand, and instead resorts to a crash.

This has essentially made the import process something that is going to take time - which means it's staying right where it is, for now, in EXS. I may well transition them as I need them - but the dream of just "hopping over" to my new sampler is already dead in the water unless I'm willing to waste countless hours getting this stuff converted. Chicken Systems can't help me here - though they've got support for this stuff on the PC, their mac version is frozen in time, and the company hasn't a clue when things will improve, if ever - it prefers to point out that "most people who have a mac, have a PC". Bully for them. As is, screw them, and screw MOTU for not getting this right. Instead, I've got two companies giving me excuses for why I have to waste my time after giving each of them good money for product. In the case of both, it's a "you get what you paid for" experience - and with both, you live with the mistaken belief that the company has solid support and will likely close the gaps between the differences between the various versions of their product.

Chicken Systems has a much stronger excuse than MOTU on this, however. EXS import is pretty critical to get right, given that it's what Logic ships with and is almost guaranteed to be what most of their OS X users are upgrading from. And though these bugs have been known for some time - and the forums list several problems with crashes - those crashes haven't been fixed in the four months since this version's release either. Instead, we read that version 2.0, which customers will have to pay for, will include "improvements" to EXS and Giga import. Unfortunately, what I expect is that the version I've already paid for will be stable - not that I can have the privilege of upgrading to a future version. The fact that, because of the luck of my purchase date, I'll get a free upgrade is no consolation: it's unfair to everyone else who's paid for the product to have to upgrade to get basic bugfixes for known and reproducible crashers. For unreproducible, strange stuff, I can see a 2.0 being a fix for. "Stability" is hard to fix in a point release sometimes. But reproducible crashers? And, for that matter, features that the product is sold on but are missing in the AudioUnit version? It just goes too far.

And finally... The Sound

Despite all of its negatives... it sounds great. There is a positive side to this - it has a great sound. Its effects are somewhat limited, but it has great stackability, and you can layer sounds very well in it. And it sounds lush. It has great, great, great sound.

In Conclusion...

Don't buy 1.2. Try 2.0 and see if it does what you wan't, but I'm afraid that Mach Five is not something to buy "sight unseen". Its problems, even when obvious, aren't fixed within a reasonable period of time by MOTU. MOTU seems to take a lackadaisical approach to releasing stable versions of this product, and that will probably continue into the future; and while we can all hope that 2.0 provides a more stable codebase - especially since this engine is also the basic, underlying engine providing audio for a range of products by MOTU and others - there is no guarantee that things will get better with time.

Each sampler is different; each sampler is unique. But each of the samplers in my list that I walked into the store with would probably have provided a better experience in my first two days of use than Mach Five has. Instead, I'm left with the distinct feeling that I've bought a lemon.

I'm off to make lemonade; and while I find it slightly bitter sweet, it's better than weeping over my lemon.