Standalone Menus and Navigation Bar

The Standalone menus are only present in the standalone version of MASSIVE and will not be seen when it is being used as a plug-in. (However, note that the File menu can also be accessed in plug-in mode by using the File Popup Menu in the Navigation Bar.) The Standalone menus File and Help provide access to basic file management functionality and to help topics:

New Sound, Open Sound, Recent Files, Save and Save As

Use these options to load and save your sound files. Refer to section The Browser and Attributes Views for general information about file handling.

Options

When you open the Options dialog in the File menu, you will see three tabs: General, MIDI and Browser.

The General Tab allows you to set the default author’s name, which will then be pasted into the Author field in the Meta Information of a new sound. You can select whether the name is pasted in when a new sound is saved, or when a sound is saved under a new filename (i.e. with the Save As command).

The MIDI Tab controls MIDI CC assignments as MIDI Setups. Each setup saves all MIDI assignments made in the User Interface (refer to section Faders and Knobs). For example, if you have a MIDI keyboard with 8 knobs you can assign them via MIDI learn to the 8 Macro Controls and then save that setup here for future use. Note that MIDI CC assignments are not saved with the Sounds: you don’t have to check which MIDI CCs are assigned to the Macro Controls in a given sound, but simply use your own customized MIDI Setup to control them. This greatly unifies and simplifies your MIDI interaction with MASSIVE.

The Browser Tab allows you to add or delete paths from the database, specifying where your Sounds are stored. All Sounds found within the folders set here (or their sub-folders) will be integrated into the database when the Rebuild Database button is pressed. (See also section The Browser and Attributes Views for further details.)

Audio and MIDI Settings

The Audio and MIDI Settings are explained in detail in MASSIVE’s accompanying Setup Guide. You can find a fast introduction to these settings in section First Steps.

Help

Here you can find information about MASSIVE: You can launch the Native Access to activate your copy and check for updates. On the MASSIVE website you will find news and additional information about the synthesizer. The entry “About Massive” finally opens a screen that displays the software version, your serial number, and a list of all people that helped creating MASSIVE.

The Navigation Bar runs along the top of MASSIVE. It features two popup menus (File and Preset) as well as some control buttons and informational indicators (see image below). Let’s look at these from left to right and see what they do.

File

The File popup menu is identical to the standalone’s File menu and contains the same entries. Refer to section The Standalone Menus for details.

Preset Selector

The Preset Selector allows you to quickly load a sound without switching over to the Browser View. Upon clicking here, a list of the current Search Results is displayed. The content of this list is specified in the Browser View: if you loaded your last sound from the Browser’s File Tree View, the list will contain all sounds of the last selected folder. If you loaded your last sound from the Browser’s Database View, the list will contain all Search Results that fit the given set of attributes. Finally, if you loaded your sound from the Program Change List, the list will show all sounds contained in that list. The small icon at the menu’s left will indicate the list’s mode. (See section The Browser and Attributes Views for more information about the Browser.)

The two small up and down arrows at the menu’s right allow you to step through the list without opening the popup menu.

Voices

The Voices indicator shows two numbers: the first indicates the number of voices currently being played in MASSIVE, while the second indicates the maximum number of voices available, which can be set in the Voicing Page in the Center Window (see section General Pages for more on how to set this up; section Signal Flow and Voicing contains additional information). Note that the maximum number of voices here is a theoretical limit; the actual number of voices you can use in practice for a given preset depends on the complexity of the patch and the speed of your computer. (See the CPU section below.)

MIDI

The MIDI indicator shows which MIDI channel MASSIVE is currently receiving messages on. If all is displayed here, MASSIVE will receive messages on all 16 available MIDI channels. Select which MIDI channel to use by clicking here.

CPU

The CPU Load Indicator shows you how much of your computer’s CPU resources MASSIVE is currently using, expressed as a percentage. This will change depending on the particular preset you have loaded, as each preset will require more or less CPU power depending on how it is configured.

As you play more notes you will notice the CPU meter rise. If the CPU overloads or you notice the graphic interface starting to get sluggish, just release a few notes. The audio output may also become grainy or distorted if you are using too much of your CPU power. In this case you should try increasing the latency/buffer size of your soundcard. If you are running MASSIVE as a standalone program, you can adjust this in the Audio and MIDI Settings dialog, accessible from the File menu. On a Mac, you can simply adjust the Latency slider left or right to increase or decrease the latency. On a PC, you can click the ASIO Setup button in order to open the control panel of the soundcard you are using, where you can make adjustments to the audio buffer size. (Note that some PC soundcards may require you to quit all open audio programs first before allowing you to adjust the buffer size.)

Panic

The Panic button (labeled with a small ! exclamation point) will stop the sound and reinitialize all internal DSP parameters. If something unexpectedly strange, loud or unpleasant happens, don’t panic: just click this!

Save and Save As

Further to the right from the Preset Selector popup menu, there are two shortcut buttons labeled Save and Save as. These will allow you to quickly save your sounds without having to access the File menu.

The View buttons

Moving further to the right, there are three buttons which allow you to switch between different views in MASSIVE: Browser, Attributes and Synth. When you click the Synth button, you will be returned to the main view of all the synthesizer controls in MASSIVE. (This is the same view you see when MASSIVE first starts up.)

Clicking on the Browser or Attributes buttons will switch to views that let you work with MASSIVE’s Browser, where you can save, rename, delete, and describe the factory presets along with any presets you may have created yourself. See section The Browser and Attributes Views for more information about how the Browser works.