What is max/msp good for doing?

and is it difficult to learn etc. im not entirely certain what it really does, looked at wiki and its site and didnt really learn a great deal. was just interested, ive heard people talking about it on here for years.

Anything and everything nearly... you build synth modules, interfaces, sequencers... hell it could do elementary algebra homework if you wanted it to.

yep, as the man says you can get it to do just about everything. But in the same token you have to tell it how to do just about everything. I've never managed the learning curve, buzz is about my complexity limit when it comes to audio software....

Pretty much everything if you can accept the learning curve. It's not worth getting into if you are going to be casual about it.

A lot of people use it for visuals for live music. A friend of mine made this visual program in Max where it takes audio from an external source [a patch cable, for instance], measures the time periods between transients, and auto-syncs to the music, so it will always be on beat. He just throws in a dvd, alters to visual parameters and the thing stays in sync the entire night. Pretty cool.

It's a really good tool if you want to seem smart to other geeks.

yep i did some research seems frustrating and difficult, il give it a miss.

  impakt said:

It's a really good tool if you want to seem smart to other geeks.

lol no

FFT's

techno music

I used puredate to program my tx81z with sysex..

6.00225/19.334 kicks

what i would like to buy is a modular synth that is the in between of max msp and karma fx, something that can be easy to operate, flexible and really complex at the same time

some software synths seem complex but yet most of them cant be tweaked mutch like take for instance tassman; you can fiddle with only 127 levels of coarse frequencies X 5 ....big deal karma fx was 1000 times better but yet the interface was a sublime grey or a manic depressibe black and dark blue ..... we should also be able to tweak with time, in real time when constructing a synth that would be smart.

  jubes said:

what i would like to buy is a modular synth that is the in between of max msp and karma fx, something that can be easy to operate, flexible and really complex at the same time

 

some software synths seem complex but yet most of them cant be tweaked mutch like take for instance tassman; you can fiddle with only 127 levels of coarse frequencies X 5 ....big deal karma fx was 1000 times better but yet the interface was a sublime grey or a manic depressibe black and dark blue ..... we should also be able to tweak with time, in real time when constructing a synth that would be smart.

Reaktor

thank you , and i also just installed Buzz but i cannot use it : an unsupported operation was atempted ...... fuck man !

can anybody help ?

I was fortunate enough to take a graduate level music course on it in college even tho my degree was actually in engineering. I think its best at probability and sequential numeric algorithms. Lots of stuff are like "if the input is within these ranges or if the number is this then output a number between this range or output this number" etc. The other thing that I think it is really good at is FFT's and convolution reverbs.

One of my friends however is a genius and managed to rig ableton to max via midiyoke to control crazy ass DSP with it.

  jubes said:

thank you , and i also just installed Buzz but i cannot use it : an unsupported operation was atempted ...... fuck man !

can anybody help ?

Have you downloaded the old version of Buzz or the new version ?

If it's the new one (the one that just is Buzz.exe) you've got to download the old one first (download one of the massive packs from here http://www.buzzmachines.com/getbuzz.php ), then after installing it and running the buzz fixkit, replace the old Buzz.exe with the new one.

  acid1 said:

One of my friends however is a genius and managed to rig ableton to max via midiyoke

a genius?

The program has endless opportunities... This guy I know used it to basically make visualizations for some music. He couldn't connect with MIDI since there were 2 laptops so he was able to get the program to detect the beat just from an audio source, and then he had short loops that had effects that would come and go based on the music...

It was really impressive, but I think he's been working with the program for years, and I don't think I have the patience to learn it. Lol, even in Reaktor, it took me like 15 minutes just to get a simple sinewave making sound...

there are tools and there are toolmakers. max is more of a toolmaker. just like a programming language, you use fundamental objects and logic to build machines which will do exactly what you want them to. it's not really that complicated, it just has a lot of vocabulary. the syntax is as simple as can be. data goes in one end of a given module and out the other. if you know what happens in the middle, and have the creativity to find interesting ways of controlling that process (and/or using it to control other things), you're set. of course not all people think that way naturally.

edit - having only used max for just over a month, i'm still only familiar with a handful of objects, but i've found some great uses for it, mostly using msp objects for interesting looping/delay configurations. a few metronome/counter/select combos controlling stuff like playback speed and loop interval, on a few separate buffers, and you can get some nice rhythmic patterns. i've been using this for most of my drum patterns recently, feeding random sounds into a patch that does something like this, recording the output, and bringing the clips into projects in logic.

i never bother with it. I mean, if you are going to go that low level and make something custom, I'd rather code. I mean, it might be good for prototyping, but... yeah, its probably good for that. Its pretty cool, it does allow for some pretty nice experimentation on a level that musicians normally cannot, but personally I never got into it.

Tried learning it a while back... shit's pretty complicated for me at least. Seen a lot of nice audio/visual installations using it... along with live performances that use pretty much anything, like a WiiMote or something. One day, I'll master it. It's one of my goals in life.

It's a big lot of fun learning it, imo. I understand most of its objects and can build some basic stuff with it. The hard thing actually is knowing the components to what you wanna build. Or just experiment haha. This program also gives you a good view of how things like a sequencer or synthesis path actually function, what parts go where etc.