Sik and I each bought a Maschine Mikro this week and the Maschine software looks like it could be the perfect way to keep using Orion whilst staying up to date with all the latest cool stuff or just to shake up your workflow here and there. It's early days but when I load one of the projects that comes with Maschine, it plays back in sync with Orion, in Pattern and Song modes, without having to put anything into the Playlist.
Maschine is kind of interesting. It's like having a DAW within a DAW within a DAW. When you run it inside Orion, you add yet another layer to it but you can do it with just one Mixer channel because all the stuff you'd normally take care of in the mixer can be taken care of deeper down into the layers. Normally I'd think that was just overcomplicating things that I prefer to keep simple but in this case it's really just moving the complexity into easy to work with layers. That makes each part of the process feel less complicated, by putting the complexity where it makes the most sense. e.g. If you want to add effects to your kick drum, you do it directly onto the kick in Maschine, instead of in the mixer. But if you prefer to do it in the Mixer, you just route it to a separate out and it gets its own Mixer channel in Orion, just like DrumRack. Because the Maschine UI is there in Orion, editing patterns and arrangements in Maschine is just as easy as doing it in Orion. That means working with Maschine in Orion is just as easy as doing it all in Orion itself. IN fact, it gives you a few workarounds that might make it even easier than doing everything in Orion. e.g. Being able to see/tweak an instrument UI while the piano roll is open.
For us, I can see Maschine replacing Sampler, DrumRack and the other drum synths we use in Orion, simply because of the sound quality on offer. The value for money is unbelievable because we got more than 15GB of the highest quality samples I've ever used plus plenty of NI plugins, including Massive, as well as the Maschine software, which could totally replace Orion if you were inclined to want to do that, and the hardware controller that makes it so easy to work with. All for US$299 - it's a crazy good deal and it all seems to work perfectly with Orion 64 bit.