** Versus Maschine? **
First, I will say the Maschine that I own is the original MKI released about 13 years ago. I think I paid around $400 new for it, and was immediately impressed, it filled a need for a groovebox / dedicated drum machine type of device and the price was right. Over the years through various promotions / vouchers etc. I actually have a nice collection of expansions for it. And I've used it a lot,
but mostly only the plug-in, and mostly only as a drum sample player. By that I mean I never really vibed with the Maschine sequencer workflow.. the pads felt great, but I always found myself either entering beats using something like my Octapad (mapped to Maschine VST) or the keyboard... it's a hard thing to explain, but I never liked the sequencer or other software workflow, only the sounds coming out of the plugin. I tried sampling on it a few times and hated doing so.
My initial reaction to the MPC was like night at day. Some will tell you the MPC workflow is messed up, and it definitely does take some getting used to, but to me it was far more musical and intuitive than Maschine. The MPC just set off immediate inspiration.. some of that had to do with the form factor, the portability of the Live II. Granted, the much newer Maschine+ is good as a standalone / portable instrument from what I understand, but when it comes to the instruments, plugins like Massive or FM8 were not originally designed to run on standalone hardware. Sure they can, but I don't believe the experience is going to be the same as plugins that were designed to run on MPC. And that was always my problem with interacting with Maschine hardware... it always felt like "yeah you can do this, but do you want to?".
Add to that, stand alone grooveboxes like this are not competitive in CPU power with a good PC. I have heard complaints about Maschine+ that the plugins can bog down the CPU to the point where it's unusable. I can also say I have pushed the MPC, and when you get into the more powerful plug-ins and high polyphony, running into limitations is not hard to do. But, from what I understand the MPC is orders of magnitude better at remaining stable compared to the Maschine+ as it struggles to run PC-grade plugins.
Then again, I've heard some say they prefer the Maschine+ workflow.. so, maybe there is a difference between the newer models than what I came to know (which honestly has not changed that much in 13 years). My initial impression of Maschine was something that always needed to be tethered to my computer to make music, and at the same time struggled to co-exist in the DAW as anything other than a sample playback machine that happened to have a library of good sounds. No doubt the newer models are improved in many ways, but at the moment I can't justify entertaining a purchase for any of them.
By the way, regarding all the Maschine expansions I mentioned owning. I did purchase KitMaker (
https://www.kit-maker.com) which will convert Maschine expansions into MPC kits, and I'm looking forward to trying that feature. I did buy the software, but mostly only to build my own kits of existing samples. I tried it on a couple of folders and it worked excellently. I suspect it will work magic moving my Maschine kits over.