The whole process to get your Reaktor Ensembles working in Maschine+ still is a little bit fiddly, but once you went trough this procedure with a couple of your favorite Ensembles you get a hang of it. These will then sit tight on your device for ever and ever, waiting a few clicks a way for some action. They will be mapped out beautifully to your Maschine’s controls and tagged to your personal preferences. And most of all, you will be able to share them, so that other Maschine users only have to load the Ensemble file into their unit and have it working just as nice as it does on your’s. So while this process may be a bit complicated for unexperienced users, I do have high hopes that it encourages others to convert their Reaktor stuff and share it on the Reaktor User Library.

In order to make this all work there are just a few things to take into consideration:

• You need to have an Reaktor license working on your Maschine+ and your computer.
• You need to have the Maschine software installed and set up on your computer.
• Reaktor should be updated to the latest version on both devices (Reaktor 6 all the way).
• Be sure to choose Reaktor Ensembles that do not heavily rely on a graphical interface to be controlled as these are most often not possible to be mapped to Maschine’s encoders (and you will not get a graphical representation of your plugin on Maschine+)

There are quite a bunch of forum rumors about which well known Reaktor Ensembles are compatible and which aren’t. In my experience it pretty much relies on Maschine+’s CPU, which likely will not be as forgiving as the one in your computer. That’s really something you have to test out yourself in order to find the balance of which Ensembles work and which will bring your CPU to it’s knees. It’s also likely that some of Native Instruments own Reaktor creations will not work. These sometimes have some kind of copyright protection and would only work if NI themselfes officially port the serials to Maschine+. Last but not least keep in mind that you will load your Reaktor Ensembles as presets within Maschine’s browser hirachy, not as self contained instruments or effects (as the plugin itself is always Reaktor). Because of that it’s quite manageble to export instruments and effects in a default state to Maschine in form of a single preset each, while exporting whole preset libraries may be way more complex. But honestly I haven’t really been diving into that rabbit hole as I mostly convert quite simple effect units and also prefer to start from scratch with them. And your Reaktor control states will always been saved within your project, of course, like any other plugin.

Once you went trough this whole process you will most likely not need to go trough this whole manual every time. But it can be very helpful to have a checklist on hand to double check all the steps, in case anyhing doesn’t translate as well as expected. So I will start this tutorial with a list of steps of what we are about to do. (Don’t forget to keep an eye on that fancy little + sign! In order to keep this tutorial at least a tiny bit tight, I will always refer to “Maschine” as the computer software and “Maschine+” as the standalone software):