Commander: a paper about a Max For Live object in Javascript

[TomSwirly]

Hello!

I wrote a paper on my new idea for organizing patches for live performance, visible at http://swirly.com/commander/commander.pdf

The idea is to organize your musical commands (like navigation between songs and sets) in nested cycles. It's quite intuitive, and very fast and practice for live performance.

It's based around a Max For Live object, and you can download the source code at http://swirly.com/commander/

Note that this is NOT productionized - even though the code is documented and there are a lot of tests (which I didn't distribute with this version...) This is only a teaser!

I'll be having a full productionized version that lets you trigger "anything" ready in the Spring - but I'm going to release my Max For Live Morse code generator before that (also written almost entirely in Javascript).

Happy Maxing!

[rawore]

argh protection doesn't allow access on pdf?

[TomSwirly]

Bleh. Fixed!

[rawore]

thanks tom.

off to play a bit ( a new guy around here has an interesting problem keeping up!) most fun i've had
for a long time, between the ableton, cycling74, and monome forums, members activity.

[cturner]

Hi Tom-

Thanks for this. Care to publish your: "Rapid Development of Large Reliable Music Program in Javascript and Max"?

Sorry for the blast from the past, a bit of a cauchemar: TRANSRebo (or was it TransREBO?)

Good to see you're doing well,

Tad Turner

[TomSwirly]

Tad! How are you?! I can hear your voice - after (gah) more than a decade - is it even two decades?!

The JS article is about half done. It turned out to be a lot longer than I thought and I needed to get something in for the ICMC this year. I might release it as a bunch of essays on a website.

I have a huge amount of JS code lying around I've developed in the last four months... including

• a unittest framework
• a templating framework to translate .maxpat files into data that you can then instantiate from inside a Javascript program.
• workarounds for various Max/Javascript feature deficiencies
• a Morse code generator for Max For Live

Just for laffs, I tarred up the whole kit and kaboodle and put it here.

This is NOT productionized and is just a snapshot of my current work environment on a whim. That said, the code is quite neat, literate and even commented, and has decent unit test coverage. I make pretty heavy use of classes, closures, anonymous functions and that sort of thing - just ask if something's obscure.

Over the next couple of months I'm going to be writing all of this up and making it useful to people. Please let me know which parts you're interested in.

[cturner]

Over the next couple of months I'm going to be writing all of this up and making it useful to people. Please let me know which parts you're interested in.

Wow! An embarrassment of riches! You are so kind to share this with us (me).

Well, I'm very interested in nested cycles as a way of sequencing sounds since about 2005, but what little time I've had to spend on programming, I've dedicated to dsp-related things.

Also Javascript seems to be getting faster and faster, so with Max there's an argument to give up Python/Ruby for scripting. I saw some of your posts a while back on the Max Javascript forum, but I really should study what-all you've accomplished. (EDIT- re: your recent posts on the C74 forums, I forgot what a lame language Javascript is.)

Tad! How are you?! I can hear your voice - after (gah) more than a decade - is it even two decades?!

I believe it's 15-16 years, or however old Wired Magazine is. I've got some responsibilities relating to my Xenakis dissertation that will have me tied up until February, but after that I should come by your thing at Lucky Cheng's. I've got some very funny stories I'm sure you'll enjoy...

Best, T