NAMM 2009: Rumor – Native Instruments Releasing Maschine Groovebox

The stories of Grooveboxes just keep piling up in my inbox this morning with Native Instruments reportedly coming out with their own Groovebox capable of loading the company’s VST plugins. 

Earlier this morning there was an image circling the net from ZirconStudios.com which showed a scanned image of the reported box from an upcoming Electronic Musician magazine. The direct link to that image was here, but has since been taken down, presumably to a “cease and desist order” from NI. I have contacted the site owner for comment, but have not yet received a word from him/her. After searching the net I found several other discussions regarding the box on forums, including NI’s own forums, but almost all of the discussions have been removed or closed. To me this almost guarantee's the device’s existence.

The initial image though that I saw earlier this morning showed another MPC like groovebox with lit up display pads and apparently the ability to load VST plugins. Unfortunately I don’t have any more details at the moment on the box, but if someone has details on the specs or the original image please send an email to staff.livepa (at) gmail.com. 

UPDATE: I have just found a copy of the image of the new device and posted it above. It looks to be a nice hybrid software/hardware platform that incorporates some KORE like features along 16 backlit pads, 2 LCD  screens, 5GB of samples, effects, sampling/resampling and more. Lets hope that it can run stand alone without the need for a computer like the failed MC-808.

Update 2: Well the announcement is out and it appears that we are 0/2 with new Groovebox announcements. The Maschine is another Kore like hardware software interface for percussion sequencing and sampling. There unfortunately does not appear to be a stand alone mode without the software, but there does appear to be sequencing built into the box with midi outputs.There are no audio outputs on the box itself. Whether that means that the Maschine is capable as a sequencer for LivePA remains to be seen.