Do you like Max for Live?

[jasper]

Hey,

Of course there's a possibility that some Abletonian employees will see this post
and give a biassed response (which is perfectly okay with me).

I'm a Reaktor user with some creations at the NI library online.
And a VERY passionate lover of Ableton Live.

Could you tell me your imressions of it?
At this point all I know is Max is related somehow to the Pluggo plugins I've used for a while.

Is max for live useful as in good as in will it expand the music making?

Thanks,
Mike

[Machinate]

I used to be a Reaktor user big-time; my own designs, lots and lots of hours patching stuff up.
When I switched to MaxMSP I felt let down; I had thought it would be really really difficult, and instead it was hella easy.
Making your own abstractions was easy, midi handling... was easy - OSC... *worked*!
And now in MaxForLive it's like a total playground.

"will it expand the music making?" - well, did Reaktor? MaxMSP is the bigger, more flexible cousin that speaks more languages, hehe.

[henke]

cannot resist to give a biased answer:

you can do things with max for live which you can hardly achieve with anything else unless you dive deep into programing. if you need those things is a totally different question and cannot be answered without knowing what you would want to achieve and how you feel limited with your current solutions.

if you realize that there are things max for live can do for you, the next question is, does the result justify the effort. this depends mainly on three factors: a) the complexity of the problem b) the specific issues with Max ( some things are easy to do, others are not so easy, others are not even doable in a perfect way ) and c) your experience.

i personally reached a level, where creating a specific devices for some tasks take less time than researching for other tools that might do the same thing. this is how all the devices here: http://www.monolake.de/technology/m4l.html were created. i think the devices there show clearly where the strength of Max For Live can be.

other examples are complex interactions between hardware controllers and Live. Here, Max is unbeatable. You'll find tons of examples what people do with their Lemurs, Monomes, APC 40,... and Live and Max.

will Max expand your music making? depends on you, but it has the potential, that's for sure. but it is a lot of work too....

Robert

[Gregory Taylor]

I have little to add to Robert's brilliant answer (since I share his bias (although not his good looks, winning charm, and unerring sense of style), but will - as I often do - opt for questions as answers to questions.

I'd first wonder about how the nature of your relationship with and comfort with Reaktor as a way of doing things, and wonder about how entering a new dance of freedom and constraint would be marked by your previous experience and expectations. In my limited experience, the percentage of Reaktor users who've done more with a device than changing a dial to a slider or copy/paste recombination is quite low. If you're NOT one of those people, that becomes a more pressing question. At their lower levels, Reaktor and Max are quite different. The good news is that you get to make lots of idiosyncratic low-level choices, and the bad new is... you get to make lots of idiosyncratic low level choices.

That makes some people really crazy. Are you likely to be one of them?

Although you're not dancing the command-line rhumba, Max *is* a graphic programming environment that you'll need to invest some time in learning. The good news here is that all the documentation is integrated into the program itself as of Max 5, and some really well-done tutorials, example devices, and sample code with the extension into the Live application environment. The bad news is that - like so many other programming environments, it privileges literacy and rewards those willing to spend time making their own mistakes and learning from them. Is that going to be okay with you?

If 1. and 2. are "yes" and you're adept at that whole "Asking Questions the Smart Way" thing (http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html), then it's mostly going to be a question of your time and the old freedom/constraint thing... but that is what my mother calls "good trouble."

And - interestingly enough - there are Max users like you who are asking the same questions about whether or not to use Live - so "'twas ever thus," symmetry rules, etc.

Good luck.

[Tarekith]

It honestly ended up being too much work for me. I see the potential and I can't wait to see what else people create, but it just further cemented my previous feelings that I'm obviously a musician with no interest in programming. I thought I could tough it out and really get into the possibilities, but in the end my eyes still gloss over after 5 minutes anyway and I find myself eyeing my acoustic guitar jealously

[Tone Deft]

I like it because it's fun to play with audio and midi. I enjoy spending hours of quiet time catching a buzz and playing with max. before the Xmas break I was using it a few hours a night, all day on weekends. after Xmas I got completely sucked into making music with Live. it's not an either/or situation in using it, unless you don't take to it to begin with.

it's also nice to have a do-it-all widget where I can make little things to make life easier. the midi monitor shows everything on channel 1 but when I was learning my new FCB1010 it was really handy to have a midi monitor on hand.

so far I've made silly sounds with it and have been working on a LP step sequencer. the help is the best I've seen for any piece of software.

[LOFA]

Yes.

[pid]

like lofa: "yes".

to me, comparing reaktor and max, which seems to be a favorite past-time for years, is completely meaningless. the topic seems to try and have the same credibility as, say, comparing max with pd, or more hilariously comparing microsoft office with open office. but comparing reaktor and max is like comparing a banana with a chair. technically you can eat and sit on both of them, but you wouldn't, would you? this topic is like eating a chair.

i have both reaktor and max. i use max every day, i use reaktor once a month at most. absolutely everything you can do in reaktor you can do in max (apart from, alas no more, use as a plugin. but i've always used iac-bus / osc / jack / soundflower / rea-mote anyway). but this is just a miniscule amount of what max can do / is for. synth making / etc is practically a footnote in the max universe as far as i am concerned (i almost never do it). i am not reaktor-bashing - i like it a lot, really, and maybe reaktor 6 will be more fun. but do not compare the two - you cannot.

as far as m4l goes, seems great to me, and can only get better and better in time, and really does completely redefine what i can do with live in practical and conceptual ways. and i only like live a bit.

if you are someone who wants instant gratification and no time spent investing in completely redefining your creative palate, then do NOT go for max / m4l. but if you are happy learning and consuming possibilities slowly you are guaranteed to not be let down by max. for me it is a no-brainer. the beauty of max is that it is NOT programming - i.e. - it empowers musicians / etc like me, who are useless when it comes to real programming, to be able to have low level access to making art with technology in a way that can be controlled by the user but more importantly suggests creative avenues that would never have been even imagined if i'd stuck with pro tools and reaktor.

i could go on, but i'll spare you all...

[pandakar]

I'd like to reply to your question regarding "Is max for live useful as in good as in will it expand the music making?"

Over the last couple of months I have been the technician for a Stockhausen piece called 'Solo for Melody Instrument and Feedback'. It is a piece for instrument and delay lines, a piece for loops written in 1968! Originally construed for 4 technicians as well as one musician, we embarked on doing it with only one technician to man the effect and delay line manipulation called for throughout the piece. As is usually the case with these sorts of things, I began the treacherous journey of building an enormous max patch to control everything. I got along quite nicely for a couple of months, implementing the strict timing and multiple speaker output controls in max and was ready to roll my own effects when M4L came out. I decided to take a weekend to see if it was worth the effort to start again in M4L. I was blown away. Due to M4L I can use delay lines up to 45 seconds long, something that is a bit harder to do in Live alone. Due to Live, I can easily experiment with effects, which is somewhat harder to do in Max. All things related to timing such as speaker output changes, of which there are many, can be easily automated in Live, also something harder to do in Max. Finally, the timeline/time signature functionality in Live makes it easy to play more traditional pieces. And this is also where M4L really shined: it was much easier for the musician to practice on his own with a Live file and the traditional transport controls than with a unique Max patch. Not to mention the time saved overall. I am just scratching the surface but I believe the integration of these two architectures is gonna change the game. </endRant>

[josquin2000]

Well, I'm loving M4L, but I still don't have enough time for it...
BUT, as far as M4L for you...a small life lesson:
I was a "musician only" for 35 years of my life..trumpet player and composer, got PhD, &after teaching at a U.C. campus for two years, I offended the arch-conservative dept. chair (he was big fan of Ezra Pound and Ronald Reagan, I was a devoted lefty pinko intellectual) and I ended up out on my a**, needing to earn a real living, SO,
I programmed for a living...it was not easy, and I cried a lot over my not performing music daily, like i did before 'the job'...but on and on it went.....and on and on and on and on and....
Obj-C, C, C++, Perl, Java, Ruby/Groovy, and a zillion different app frameworks, etc.,etc.,etc.,
the *learning never stops in programming* (main point here!), SO
if you don't want to learn a *very* simple programming language/environment
that gives you immense control on most all aspects of music making, don't bother with MaxMSP and M4L.
If you have the grey matter and patience to learn it, it will reward you in ways that a simple DAW and an acoustic instrument just cannot: dare I say: programming music is the *new* way of composing and playing, and I am thrilled to be part of it's start.

But, you can stick to your guitar, if you like: it's a question of effort / reward, as Robert so clearly says.
You probably don't practice Giuliani or Sor for relaxation, although they are in the core of the guitar's standard rep.:
is this because they are not good music, or because they rewards for you doing so are so small?
again, effort/ rewards.
RE: M4L, I love the effort, I love the tools, I am in great debt to Gerhard, Robert, David, and all the C74 and Ableton developers. Wish I wuz one, but I'm an insurance data programming management geek for now, and I know that the dev world is a young person's world...nevertheless
YES, the program rocks, & those who pass on it...miss out greatly.
cfb aka j2k

[Tarekith]

So the life lesson is to not offend the arch-conservative dept. chair?

[josquin2000]

So the life lesson is to not offend the arch-conservative dept. chair?

Nah, it's:
"YES, the program rocks, & those who pass on it...miss out greatly."
and
"the *learning never stops in programming* " (or music)

l&k,
j2k

[gavspav]

I love it and am frustrated by it at the same time.

Love it because of the possibilities and the freedom, because I love learning and cos it seems to fit my way of creating at the moment.

Frustrated by the workflow - I want to edit patches in real time without having to open another program!, the crashes, the things I can't do.

Its only the first version though so I'm happy. More frustrated by my own organisational skills tbh.

[mescalin]

The Midi stuff in Max for Live truely makes it more useful than Reaktor, but it will be a long time before I make any actual useful instruments, ie stuff I couldn't do with Massive. Still it makes you feel like an audio scientist, digging deep and exploring all those inbetween notes, far superior to all those other musicians who don't even know what tempered tuning is ...does that make you a better muscian, i dunno really, I've heard awsome music made on a gasoline can with some fishing line, but the science (never at the expence of practise on those ivories to though) is my angle and I love it.

Out of the Box though Reaktor's built in instruments are far better than the ones you get with Max for Live, but since I already have Massive and Absynth 5 I don't really care. Oh and it is easier to use with Live because organising Reaktor ensembles is annoying, that's pretty priceless to.

Funnily enough I have found it easier than Reaktor so far but then I was a bit of a noob when I last used that, back in my earliest days where I got it because Trent Reznor said so

[mescalin]

cannot resist to give a biased answer:

you can do things with max for live which you can hardly achieve with anything else unless you dive deep into programing. if you need those things is a totally different question and cannot be answered without knowing what you would want to achieve and how you feel limited with your current solutions.

if you realize that there are things max for live can do for you, the next question is, does the result justify the effort. this depends mainly on three factors: a) the complexity of the problem b) the specific issues with Max ( some things are easy to do, others are not so easy, others are not even doable in a perfect way ) and c) your experience.

i personally reached a level, where creating a specific devices for some tasks take less time than researching for other tools that might do the same thing. this is how all the devices here: http://www.monolake.de/technology/m4l.html were created. i think the devices there show clearly where the strength of Max For Live can be.

other examples are complex interactions between hardware controllers and Live. Here, Max is unbeatable. You'll find tons of examples what people do with their Lemurs, Monomes, APC 40,... and Live and Max.

will Max expand your music making? depends on you, but it has the potential, that's for sure. but it is a lot of work too....

Robert

oh that step sequencer is cool, thanks for sharing, chromatic, just the way i think