Here’s quick tip that I think will improve your workflow with NI’s  Maschine.

When I’m looking for samples to use in a project I often find that I need to browse what I have on disk since not all of my samples are available via the browser within Maschine.

You can browse what you have on disk if you hit the DISK button in the upper left corner of the sample browser but I find it much more intuitive and convenient to use Finder (since I’m a mac person).

There are 2 drawbacks to that though.

1. You cannot preview the samples as easy as you can from within Maschine.
2. Once you find a sample you want to load you need to go back into the Maschine file browser and look for it again before you can load it.

Actually both of the above statements are wrong. Here’s why:

1. You can listen to just about any sound file on the mac if you hover over it’s icon in the Finder window. You’ll see a little ‘play’ symbol in the middle of the icon. Press this and the file will start playing.
2. You can drag and drop a sound file of a compatible format (such as .wav) directly from Finder into an empty Sound slot in Maschine.

Try it out :)

[Tested on Maschine 1.7]