Unfortunately, in respect of the sample-based patches and other presets, Groove Machine is amixed bag. Groove Machine certainly offers sampling - and acquits itself quite well in this respect - but in any plug-in of this type, the battery of included sounds is still very important.
In times gone by, the measure of a groovebox was its built-in sounds, but as soon as you could throw sampling into the mix, the interface and tools became more important. Image-Line has really missed a trick by not offering an effects-only version of the plug-in, however. The fantastic sidechaining effect, panner and some brilliant LFO-driven filters are also highlights. All 10 performance effects are fun and very usable, and the slicing and reversing tools are so uniformly excellent that we actually found ourselves loading in sliced loops of tracks, just so we could use its performance tools to create glitch edits.
