Max/MSP

[thawkins]

I found a game changer the other day - plugdata, which appears to be pure data but visually nicer and usable cross platform. I got it working on my iPhone too. Basically it looks like it supports all the pure data objects and also has cyclone stuff and some other neat effects. Obviously it borrows a lot from Max too, but I am happy that this kind of thing is just available for free.

https://plugdata.org/

[geosmina]

cool, glad free stuff exists, as it should be... Hope Max 9 gets a lot better tho, particularly in the stability and visual specs.

[cern]

On 7/24/2024 at 3:06 AM, thawkins said:

I found a game changer the other day - plugdata, which appears to be pure data but visually nicer and usable cross platform. I got it working on my iPhone too. Basically it looks like it supports all the pure data objects and also has cyclone stuff and some other neat effects. Obviously it borrows a lot from Max too, but I am happy that this kind of thing is just available for free.

https://plugdata.org/

Check out the Plugdata Discord group https://discord.gg/b7EccJVQ  Super Talented and friendly people and the Plugdata staff there developing everything. People doing amazing stuff with it! 

 

 

[Crazing]

probably shared already?

 

[ignatius]

dillon bastan's new M4L devices are dope. patch genetics for anything really. 

 

[Crazing]

Always amazes me how some people so easily slide from musician to coder

Anyone got any favourite eureka moments with max?

[ignatius]

48 minutes ago, Crazing said:

Always amazes me how some people so easily slide from musician to coder

Anyone got any favourite eureka moments with max?

if you're referring to dillon bastan.. he's more of a performance artist. clips of dillon's performances are on youtube and instagram and seem very conceptual and hilarious and character driven. his max for live devices seem like another creative outlet of a different kind.. but there's heavy concept in them and the mind behind all his max stuff seems pretty intense and thoughtful. 

as for eureka moments.. i haven't used it in a while but have a thing i want to do once i can focus on it.. and because it's still a new thing for me even though i seem to be hovering around it for a long time now.. it's fore head slapping eureka moments every time i use it. it's endless. russian nesting dolls. but i think the main thing for me was realizing the entire state of a patch could be saved as a preset and morphed to another preset... when i was using audiomulch a lot i used to make snapshots of devices and then sequence the snapshots and that was the main way i did things w/it.. sometimes performing the snapshots live to 2 track.. other times automating them in the automation timeline. once i started looking at what can be done in max w/presets and pattr etc.. it's just crazy and kind of overwhelming.. 

[Crazing]

Been going through the electronic music and sound design books and the fact that they use a lot of externals or vs. objects is sometimes irritating - even though it basically just shows what you're saying here @ignatius - little objects to be used everywhere - i just feel that it doesnt help my learning as ultimately i know that the patch won't work without those 3 patches with 2 other patches inside each of them. 

Been really enjoying mc.target use recently - to mess with aspects of other mc. objects. 

Also resampling with poke is fun. 

[Mr.Sensi]

19 hours ago, Crazing said:

Been going through the electronic music and sound design books and the fact that they use a lot of externals or vs. objects is sometimes irritating - even though it basically just shows what you're saying here @ignatius - little objects to be used everywhere - i just feel that it doesnt help my learning as ultimately i know that the patch won't work without those 3 patches with 2 other patches inside each of them. 

Been really enjoying mc.target use recently - to mess with aspects of other mc. objects. 

Also resampling with poke is fun. 

 

You might be better off learning with Pure Data and its documentation, particularly The Theory and Technique of Electronic Music which is freely available. I found SuperCollider and Reaktor to be too advanced when starting out, especially SC since I had to learn a lot of foreign programming concepts and so on which still confuse me. I know about the book you're using but I am not familiar enough to say much about it. The only reason I'm recommending PD is because it is by far the best way to get started because it absolutely lacks (intentionally) a lot of modules. It's very KISS and that makes it better for learning because you become more familiar with dsp from the ground up, forcing you to create patches for things you get right out of the box in Max and Reaktor. Reaktor was so bloody confusing to me, even tougher than SC. At least I got to use other people's instruments.

 

Another really great book that I found is Computer Music: Synthesis, Composition, and Performance by by Charles Dodge. I think it's from the late 80's. Most of the book is filled with the sort of block diagrams used in Max and PD. I'm not writing this to deter you from Max, btw. Just throwing it out there as a steppingstone for Max. Off on a tangent now, but does anyone else feel like documentation from the 80s is vastly superior for learning shit like this? It took me decades to really learn Linux/UNIX until I started reading books from the 80s, lol. I have a really hard time learning modern things anymore because it feels like there's a sort of void in the history of why things operate the way they do, some sort of unintentional walled garden that constantly frustrates me. Modern computing feels like you need some sort of neuralink just to keep up with the constant changes. 

[exitonly]

not sure if getting a "sound design in max/msp" book is the best way to learn max/msp. Start with the built in tutorials and the topics in the Max reference. They arent going to use external libraries and they are geared towards learning the fundamentals. You can spend years building things off of those tutorials and what is in the help patchers for each built in object.  I would also recommend getting sound design/synthesis books that are NOT based around Max/MSP and learn the fundamentals of that and figure out how to apply them in Max/MSP.

Some great classic books on synthesis are "Electronic Music: Systems, Techniques, and Controls" by Allen Strange, recently reprinted in a Kickstarter campaign - https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jasonnolan/allen-strange-redux-2023/description and the Computer Music Tutorial by Curtis Roads  https://www.amazon.com/Computer-Music-Tutorial-second/dp/0262044919/

Also if you do want to get some Max books, I'd highly recommend "Step by Step" and "Generating Sound & Organizing Time". https://cycling74.com/books. These really heavily on just built in stuff in Max/MSP. GSOT is heavy in the gen~ which may be a lot for beginners since it is a bit of a departure from how the rest of Max/MSP operates.

 

[Crazing]

1 hour ago, Mr.Sensi said:

 

You might be better off learning with Pure Data and its documentation, particularly The Theory and Technique of Electronic Music which is freely available. I found SuperCollider and Reaktor to be too advanced when starting out, especially SC since I had to learn a lot of foreign programming concepts and so on which still confuse me. I know about the book you're using but I am not familiar enough to say much about it. The only reason I'm recommending PD is because it is by far the best way to get started because it absolutely lacks (intentionally) a lot of modules. It's very KISS and that makes it better for learning because you become more familiar with dsp from the ground up, forcing you to create patches for things you get right out of the box in Max and Reaktor. Reaktor was so bloody confusing to me, even tougher than SC. At least I got to use other people's instruments.

 

Another really great book that I found is Computer Music: Synthesis, Composition, and Performance by by Charles Dodge. I think it's from the late 80's. Most of the book is filled with the sort of block diagrams used in Max and PD. I'm not writing this to deter you from Max, btw. Just throwing it out there as a steppingstone for Max. Off on a tangent now, but does anyone else feel like documentation from the 80s is vastly superior for learning shit like this? It took me decades to really learn Linux/UNIX until I started reading books from the 80s, lol. I have a really hard time learning modern things anymore because it feels like there's a sort of void in the history of why things operate the way they do, some sort of unintentional walled garden that constantly frustrates me. Modern computing feels like you need some sort of neuralink just to keep up with the constant changes. 

Love block diagrams - followed a YT tutorial on flangers recently and made so much sense going through it with a block diagram. Will have to look at PD although I am pretty much invested in max by now. 

 

1 hour ago, exitonly said:

not sure if getting a "sound design in max/msp" book is the best way to learn max/msp. Start with the built in tutorials and the topics in the Max reference. They arent going to use external libraries and they are geared towards learning the fundamentals. You can spend years building things off of those tutorials and what is in the help patchers for each built in object.  I would also recommend getting sound design/synthesis books that are NOT based around Max/MSP and learn the fundamentals of that and figure out how to apply them in Max/MSP.

Some great classic books on synthesis are "Electronic Music: Systems, Techniques, and Controls" by Allen Strange, recently reprinted in a Kickstarter campaign - https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jasonnolan/allen-strange-redux-2023/description and the Computer Music Tutorial by Curtis Roads  https://www.amazon.com/Computer-Music-Tutorial-second/dp/0262044919/

Also if you do want to get some Max books, I'd highly recommend "Step by Step" and "Generating Sound & Organizing Time". https://cycling74.com/books. These really heavily on just built in stuff in Max/MSP. GSOT is heavy in the gen~ which may be a lot for beginners since it is a bit of a departure from how the rest of Max/MSP operates.

 

Absolutely - the max tutorials are awessome - should definitely stay there for a while. Step by step is very useful for small ideas which can be added into patches. I've already integrated some of those. 

[Crazing]

2 hours ago, Mr.Sensi said:

I have a really hard time learning modern things anymore because it feels like there's a sort of void in the history of why things operate the way they do, some sort of unintentional walled garden that constantly frustrates me. Modern computing feels like you need some sort of neuralink just to keep up with the constant changes. 

Definitely 

[Wunderbar]

What is usually the aspect people find difficult when they say they have a hard time learning all this dsp/max stuff ?

[Crazing]

18 minutes ago, Wunderbar said:

What is usually the aspect people find difficult when they say they have a hard time learning all this dsp/max stuff ?

Having used daws and off the shelf synths fot years it's just a completely new way of doing things...hard to get used to. Plus standard science maths stuff is hard for me. 

Edited August 12 by Crazing

[Mr.Sensi]

7 hours ago, Crazing said:

Love block diagrams - followed a YT tutorial on flangers recently and made so much sense going through it with a block diagram. Will have to look at PD although I am pretty much invested in max by now.

You can google a free PDF of that book, I think you'll like it. I bought an old used paperback that I keep around. It's handy just for having stuff like a formant tables I can access when using my hardware sampler's filters.

 

2 hours ago, Wunderbar said:

What is usually the aspect people find difficult when they say they have a hard time learning all this dsp/max stuff ?

 

The math and physics stuff can be frustrating if you're not naturally good at that sort of thing or just never had a strong foundation to begin with. Thankfully Youtube now has a shit ton of really good videos on certain math topics that have helped me immensely in understanding how certain ideas have come to be, with lots of visuals. PD/Max are much easier for my brain to comprehend than SC though. My introduction to this sort of dsp stuff was SuperCollider and CSound, and that shit isn't fun if you don't have any real background in programming beyond simple scripting. Eli Fieldsteel has really great videos for SC though.

I think that most of the people who get on a bit easier with this sort of stuff are usually introduced to it at University. 20 years ago when I first became interested in this sort of stuff, the only thing I was recommended was an engineering mathematics book on a forum and a good luck. I'm learning far more shit from Youtube as a middle aged man than I ever did in school. Older books definitely explain things better too. I think the documentation was just vastly better when all of this technology was still fresh. For example, reading old books on UNIX is better for learning the ins and outs of Linux's command line than anything else I've come across on the net.

Edited August 12 by Mr.Sensi

[geosmina]

I got an are.na channel full of anything related to Max/MSP and more, if you're curious: https://www.are.na/tilde-colon-pipe-degrees-degrees-bullet-period-pipe-colon-tilde/max-msp-e33dfs9uzu0

[exitonly]

20 hours ago, geosmina said:

I got an are.na channel full of anything related to Max/MSP and more, if you're curious: https://www.are.na/tilde-colon-pipe-degrees-degrees-bullet-period-pipe-colon-tilde/max-msp-e33dfs9uzu0

that site charges $7 to bookmark your stuff, lol

[geosmina]

6 hours ago, exitonly said:

that site charges $7 to bookmark your stuff, lol

it's more than bookmarking, tho. Lazy to explain—probably too advanced for you anyways.

[cern]

This has maybe been posted before.. Or I don't know? I missed it anyways. 

Someone has taking the open source code of Mutable Instruments Eurorack Modules (Like Plaits, Marbles, Clouds etc) and made them into Max Patches!
Pretty awesome Idea to do!  I have not try it out yet so I don't know how well it works compare to the real deal. 

https://vboehm.net/2020/02/mutable-instruments-max-port/

[exitonly]

1 hour ago, geosmina said:

it's more than bookmarking, tho. Lazy to explain—probably too advanced for you anyways.

not sure why you are attacking me but ok. 

[ignatius]

1 hour ago, cern said:

This has maybe been posted before.. Or I don't know? I missed it anyways. 

Someone has taking the open source code of Mutable Instruments Eurorack Modules (Like Plaits, Marbles, Clouds etc) and made them into Max Patches!
Pretty awesome Idea to do!  I have not try it out yet so I don't know how well it works compare to the real deal. 

https://vboehm.net/2020/02/mutable-instruments-max-port/

certainly very convenient to have those right in max as a package... 

it's in numerous M4L instruments with sometimes additions/improvements.. also there's a bunch of free VCV rack modules that are direct ports. 

example - 

https://trnr.gumroad.com/l/flechtwerk?

Edited August 13 by ignatius

[cern]

ignatius That was a slick and cute little plaits clone! 

I was reading a topic yesterday about reverbs in Eurorack group and there was this dude saying! "I always use Clouds module in my daw going via Max/msp"

I got curios about it really.. Sounded like it is some extra benefit to have your gear hooked up via max. 
I wonder how that would be if he not ment a clouds clone in a max msp Patch form.. 

[exitonly]

1 hour ago, cern said:

ignatius That was a slick and cute little plaits clone! 

I was reading a topic yesterday about reverbs in Eurorack group and there was this dude saying! "I always use Clouds module in my daw going via Max/msp"

I got curios about it really.. Sounded like it is some extra benefit to have your gear hooked up via max. 
I wonder how that would be if he not ment a clouds clone in a max msp Patch form.. 

you can send control voltages from max/msp using something like the expert sleepers modules or even a midi/cv converter.

https://www.perfectcircuit.com/expert-sleepers-es-9.html

[Crazing]

Why did Mutable make their code open source? Very down to earth people. 

[ignatius]

48 minutes ago, Crazing said:

Why did Mutable make their code open source? Very down to earth people. 

she would usually do that after the module was released and had been out a while. there's probably a post somewhere on the mutable website or wiki or forum about the who what when where why of as she saw it. but generally it's the basic reasons people do open source.  to generate innovation and see what people could do w/her code. this worked well sometimes but sometimes was basic clones ripping her code.  but some people would innovate/iterate on her ideas... condense or expand the module etc.. one of the first real innovations was making a Braids module that was 8hp instead of 16hp.. so, half the width but w/same functionality. also, someone made greatly expanded modes for a braids firmware where every parameter for each model could be accessed within Braids. it made it kind of like a classic "painting the inside of a house through the mail slot in the front door" kind of scenario but all the things were possible if the user wanted it that way. at this point there's countless clones and versions of her code in different places both software and hardware.. some done tastefully and quite well and others just cash grabs using someone else's work..such is the risk of going open source. overall it was a huge net gain imo and those modules/ideas/code bases will live a long time beyond their creation. 

Edited August 15 by ignatius