A question for the Ableton developers (or anyone interested)

[Decepto]

Hi,

A hobby of mine for a long time has been software development. It's always amazed me how Live is able to present the same exact graphical experience on both Mac and Windows. How do you guys do it? Most so-called "cross-platform" graphical libraries don't actually offer the same exact experience on different platforms. At least, not outside the realm of video games.

I have a nitty-gritty question which I hope isn't delving too deeply into trade secrets. What's the final drawing API that you guys use for each operating system? I'm assuming on the Mac side that Core Image is used. How about on the Window's side? Do you guys use GDI/GDI+?

Thanks for any info. I'd love to be able to create a cross-platform GUI library that performs as well as Live's does.

[kristian]

OpenGL

[Decepto]

OpenGL

Can I ask how you know this?

[G.]

hi,

Cycling74 uses the Juce library for Max/MSP 5.
I bet Ableton uses the same library...

http://www.rawmaterialsoftware.com/juce/

cheers.

g

[Trip Downtown]

JUCE and Live are pretty different (I've made programs using Juce before), plus Live came out before Juce no? My bet is something low level that they've written their own gui stuff over. Blatent speculation really tho. Live has hardware accelerated graphics support doesn't it?

[kristian]

easy just investigate one of the crash reports. I'm on the Mac, but opengl rendering calls are always present in the ableton crash logs

[davepermen]

yeah, and it would explain why Aero, UAC and ableton for a long time (and now on win7 again) never really got together well... as this was known with opengl apps, but mostly not a problem as they're normally fullscreen (a.k.a. games).

never thought it could be opengl myself, though. only used it for 3d game development.

[kristian]

OpenGL is used for alot more than games as its the only viable alternative for crossplatform hardware accelerated graphics (there are of course loads of libraries that are built on TOP of OpenGL and I'm not saying that Ableton aren't using these, but at the core, its all OpenGL)

[Decepto]

That's interesting, because I've done a lot of 2D work in OpenGL, and I've never been able to get an interface as clean as theirs. Obviously though, they have talented people at their company.

[timothyallan]

That's interesting, because I've done a lot of 2D work in OpenGL, and I've never been able to get an interface as clean as theirs. Obviously though, they have talented people at their company.

Most of them are robots actually, cyborgs to be specific.

[Anand]

interesting discussion. Curiousity- how long and how difficult is it to learn such stuff, meaning someone lik eme who has no prgraming background and just begining to learn MAX/MSP but very interested in coding software for music/midi. Where do i begin? Help me guys

[timothyallan]

OpenGL for dummies?

Seriously, learn to love math then hit up some beginner books.

[Decepto]

interesting discussion. Curiousity- how long and how difficult is it to learn such stuff, meaning someone lik eme who has no prgraming background and just begining to learn MAX/MSP but very interested in coding software for music/midi. Where do i begin? Help me guys

It's hard to point you in a direction unless I know where you want to go. I say that because the field of programming is so large, that it would take a thousand life times to master each facet.

However, I can say this: Learn python. No matter what field you go into, knowing python (or ruby) will undoubtedly help you. Not only is python a great utility language, it's also very easy to learn and has libraries for any application you can think of.

Audio programming is interesting because it's neither top heavy nor bottom heavy. It's both. At the bottom you have incredibly complex pure mathematics. At the top you have bloated and scattered API's (Vst, AU, Asio, etc) that have to be understood in order to implement anything practical. Needless to say, audio programming is one of the more difficult programming fields. However, it's very rewarding.

[Ed J]

Having used OpenGL extensively at Uni (wanted to go into games for a while, thank god I didn't), I would be very surprised if live was using it for their interface.

[Anand]

Hey decepto thaks for teh advise buddy. Where can I learn python? ANy links you can provide or books? Is it self learnable or I need to go to school? I'm not from a programming background- am an accountant! so is it something easily learnable? ( I know its not a very objective question, sorry)

Also whats your view about learning Max/msp?

thanks very much for the helpful comments.