Peter Elsea recently announced an updated version of his Max/MSP tutorial. They are great at explaining many of the basics in Max/MSP, and I am very happy he has made the effort to write them up so neatly. However, I can’t help to think about the “old-school” approach to computer music, focusing on pitch classes, harmony, rhythm and MIDI control.
Vegard mentioned QuickTime Broadcaster in a blog entry yesterday. While QT broadcaster is certainly easy to set up and use, I have found it even easier to use some of the video broadcasting solutions in Max/MSP/Jitter. The jit.qt.broadcast object allows for QT streaming, but I have found the jit.broadcast object using RTSP to be somewhat more stable. Using Jitter also opens for all sorts of image manipulation, text overlays etc. as we are used to in the Max/MSP world. ...
Brad Garton has posted an interesting blog entry about how he works with many different computer music languages from within Max/MSP, including RTcmix, Chuck, CSound, Super Collider and Lisp. He could also have used Java, Javascript, Python, etc. I particularly like the idea of using Max as the basis for exposing students to many different types of programming languages and approaches, and will see if I can include some of this in my Max course in the fall.
David Zicarelli has posted an interesting note about a new collaboration between Cycling ‘74 and Ableton. Ableton Live is one of the most popular and easy to use to use live electronics software tools, and Max/MSP is one of the most powerful and flexible, so this sounds very interesting.
Reading this post, and viewing the picture below, I came to think about the dynamics of the Max/MSP community:
I spent a couple of minutes trying to figure out how to create a nice tilde (~) for writing the name of Max/MSP externals in LaTeX (e.g. dac~), so I figured I could post the solution in case anyone else wonders. First I tried using \tilde{} and \widetilde{}, but they didn’t look nice. However, this little thing does the trick: $\sim$ I guess you need the math environment to get this working. I have the following in my preamble: ...
Arne Eigenfeldt has written a Cycling ‘74 blog entry about Managing Complex Patches in Max: One of the beauties of Max is its simplicity: the ability to quickly create a patch that does something artistically interesting. Part of this has to do with its visual programming style - patchcords allow us to see the relationship between graphic objects. However, unless you limit yourself to creating only straightforward patches, your patch can become a spaghetti-like series of connections that confound attempts at debugging. … ...
I had a discussion about which software tools I use for my research, so here is a list of the most important (in no particular order): Firefox: with adblock and mouse gestures. NetNewsWire: for handling all the blogs I am reading. MarsEdit: to write blog entries. Publishes directly to my WordPress driven blog. OmniGraffle: for making diagrams. I even made my last conference poster with this program, works great also with photos. OmniPutliner: for making nested lists of everything BibDesk: for handling all my references + linking all the relevant PDF-files. DevonThink Pro: for storing texts and PDFs of information. I also use the built-in AI-improved search tool for finding relevant stuff in my BibDesk library. TeXshop: for writing my dissertation. Greatly simplifies writing a LaTeX document. TextWrangler: for batch processing of text files. Max/MSP/Jitter: for all my programming needs. And some web services that I couldn’t live without either: ...
Gregory Taylor has made an interview with Tim Place about Hipno. It is interesting how he comments about the Hipnoscope control: The Hipnoscope does something that I’m quite proud of, which is that it allows you to quickly audition a plug-in and some of its possibilities. But at the same time it really rewards those who are patient explorers that spend time really focusing on subtleties offers. I still find myself surprised at the results I get sometimes - the Hipnoscope creates this palette where there is an almost infinite range of subtlety with some of the plug-ins. Many plug-ins would not exist without the scope, because without it they really aren’t anything new. For example, the CrackVerb plug-in is basically a reverb. No one needs another reverb. ...
Vade has posted a system called v001 for Max/MSP: v001 is meant to help bring a structured method for building modular and reusable performance patches for Max/MSP and Jitter - it isnt a complete low level programming system like Jamoma (nor meant to replace it), rather an immediately useful set of pre-made objects and patching methodologies. I have found this architecure invaluable for rapidly creating new modules to expriment and integrate into my existing performance system, as well as being able to drastically alter the functionality of my performance patch while still being able to retain all of the previous effects ive generated, without having to re-code anything. ...