MaxMSP

studiorat

Because I'm a glutton for punishment I'm going to try and get to grips with max. Just the audio stuff first...
Anyone got any tips, tutorial linkage, books etc??

Oh and since I'm at it, someone showed me this http://mabuse.co.uk/. It will manipulate video and audio samples for performance etc, for video idiots... And I think it's free!!!

ogy

ive been messing with max for the last 2 years but have really got into it in the last few months, its really good and really addictive:) have you got the new max 5? no better time to start using it i reckon!

the 40 or so tutorials that come with max are a great place to start, its really worth going through them a few times.

the max community is great for learning, theres a few good tutorials on the website cycling74.com

and heres some more tutorials etc.
Tutorials
ftp://arts.ucsc.edu/pub/ems/MaxTutors/
Lobjects
ftp://arts.ucsc.edu/pub/ems/Lobjects/
Mark Phillips Ma(r)xTutorials
http://oak.cats.ohiou.edu/~phillipm/#MaxMSPresources
Karl-Heinz Essl RTC
http://www.essl.at/works/rtc.html#dow
Stefan Tiedje Max Overview
http://www.cycling74.com/twiki/bin/view … efanTiedje
Gary Lee Nelson
Rand and other things
http://www.timara.oberlin.edu/~gnelson/ … oadmax.htm
Note and rhythm generators

Peter Elsea
ftp://arts.ucsc.edu/pub/ems/MaxTutors/MSP.tutorials
Mark Phillips E-A_MusicPrimerX
http://oak.cats.ohiou.edu/~phillipm/#MaxMSPresources
Stefan Tiedje MSP Overview
http://www.cycling74.com/twiki/bin/view … efanTiedje
Anthony Palomba MSP Overview
http://public.box.net/apalomba

hows that for starters:)

check out this irish guy, keith o brien aka amoebazoid: http://www.myspace.com/amoebazoid
all his stuff is done with max i think

cornbb

The Max tutorials are excellent, a great start would be just to go from the beginning and work your way through them. If you're sticking to purely audio stuff its a great way to learn about the ins and outs of digital synthesis.

I've downloaded the trial for Max 5, I haven't installed it yet though as its limited to 30 days and I can't afford the full feckin thing... has anyone used it? How does it compare to 4.x?

ogy

yeh ive been using it. its really good. if your a student you can buy the full version of max/msp/jitter for about €190 now.

some really nice improvements. its a lot better looking than it used to be:) presentation mode is really handy for not having to arrange your patches to be understood by both user and patcher, all time based objects now accept either samples/hrs.mins.secs/bars:beats:ticks, loads of little handy changes, but the core is still the same. definitely recommend it.

jtsuited

the max tutorials are very good, and seem to be the only way to really get to grips with it.
I know building counters doesn't really seem audio related but when you get to the MSP stuff you'll be grateful.

studiorat

Ogy thanks for all those links.

Well the demo I downloaded, I installed, but the date was wrong on my laptop. Battery... When computer reset its clock my demo was out of date.

Sooo! I downloaded Pure Data last night and so far have managed to build a simple step sequencer using a floating point thingy, a metronome and a simple oscillator. So far so good, next I want to be able to put a value on each step.

It's really addictive btw!

Anybody know the what these two programs have in common or the differences between them?

I've been messing with sonic birth and synth edit, the concepts seem similar.

cornbb

There's not a big conceptual difference between PD and Max. PD is open-source, and community developed whereas Max is a proprietory, commercial product. PD is viewed as being more difficult to use, not as pretty and the documentation is far more sparse and obtuse. It is just as powerful as Max however (perhaps even more so) and there is some good community support. There are 3rd party extensions available if you want to develope a nice UI (http://crca.ucsd.edu/~jsarlo/gripd/) and it is possible to write your own objects ("externals") in C/C++ if you are that way inclined! I think you can do that in Max too actually but I haven't tried it...

If you are progressing well now in PD then you'll be really flying once you get Max methinks!

studiorat

cornbb wrote: »

There's not a big conceptual difference between PD and Max. PD is open-source, and community developed whereas Max is a proprietory, commercial product. PD is viewed as being more difficult to use, not as pretty and the documentation is far more sparse and obtuse. It is just as powerful as Max however (perhaps even more so) and there is some good community support. There are 3rd party extensions available if you want to develope a nice UI (http://crca.ucsd.edu/~jsarlo/gripd/) and it is possible to write your own objects ("externals") in C/C++ if you are that way inclined! I think you can do that in Max too actually but I haven't tried it...

If you are progressing well now in PD then you'll be really flying once you get Max methinks!

You are right about the documentation, some nice stuff on you tube got me started. And pulling existing patches apart seems instructive. I've programmed synths and got the hang of making patches on the Eventide DSP 4000 so conceptually I'm head for the moment.


And thanks for the link. Could be a while before I use that.

ogy

never used PD but the guy who invented Max, miller puckette, got all hippy and left the company and released PD open source as far as i know, something like that:)

up until max 5 the only difference was probably the look of it, and that PD was a bit less stable but more varied because its open source. the new max apparently has totally rebuilt the old enginee, which was originally designed in the early 90s. have a read of David Zicarellis press releases on the www.cycling74.com, interesting reasons as to why max 5 was neccesary.

for not quite as powerful but sometimes easier to get mad sounds out of quicker, check out AudioMulch and NI's Reaktor too.

jtsuited

PD was made by Miller Puckette who as far as I know was one of the developers of Max.
Msp was apparently derived from PD. Well that's what Miller Puckette accused them of anyway.