Max 4 Live runtime: For your advantage (Ableton/Max) & mine

[beats me]

If they had a runtime it might even inspire more people to buy M4L. I have yet to see anything that would make me want to buy M4L, but if I could screw around with an M4L device personally then I might be motivated.

have you been looking?

No, but

A). I haven't really run into any brick walls with Live yet and the wood fences I've run into are more pushing me towards Logic, but that's less of an Ableton situation and more like a 7 year itch situation.

B). I realize there's a specific M4L section on this board and even places off this site, but places like that have never kept anybody from posting amazing things in the general forum. That hasn't happened to my knowledge and what has been posted I didn't find all that interesting or useful to me.

[julienb]

guys... just buy the full
the real way of m4L is to tweak and to build things. not only use the things from the other.
but indeed, leecher are everywhere

[Tone Deft]

If they had a runtime it might even inspire more people to buy M4L. I have yet to see anything that would make me want to buy M4L, but if I could screw around with an M4L device personally then I might be motivated.

have you been looking?

No, but

A). I haven't really run into any brick walls with Live yet and the wood fences I've run into are more pushing me towards Logic, but that's less of an Ableton situation and more like a 7 year itch situation.

B). I realize there's a specific M4L section on this board and even places off this site, but places like that have never kept anybody from posting amazing things in the general forum. That hasn't happened to my knowledge and what has been posted I didn't find all that interesting or useful to me.

edited-
there hasn't been a flood of interesting devices. I think the beauty of what's been released is in the eye of the people that jumped on this early. I'm incredibly impressed at the talent that has shown up in the m4L forum.

A. for me this was literally a 4 year itch, I've wanted max for at least that long. on the flip side I've never considered buying another DAW. everyone has their own view on what's productive for them (productive can be mindless fun.) I've enjoyed seeing widgets and whatnots people have posted.

B. people have posted cool stuff but it falls on deaf ears. check S4Racen's posts as well as julienb. the max4Live forum is very necessary as the topics can be very very specific and not easy to answer. I'm incredibly impressed at some of the new people that have shown up and at the way some of the long time forumites have taken wing to all this.

a separate m4L forum is very necessary, most of those posts are frgging deeeeeep!!

I've been distracted by making music, these things are always an ebb and flow with me, fingers in too many pots. I'm not the best person to lay out what's going on with m4L but to write it off altogether is unfortunate, there are cool things afoot and some incredible people are focusing on this.


I'm not expressing myself very well, had too much over the weekend.

[beats me]

A. there's two ways of looking at that. the journey of making stuff and the ability to push through fences. oh, and it's fun to see weird stuff people put out.

B. people have posted cool stuff but it falls on deaf ears. check S4Racen's posts as well as julienb. the max4Live forum is very necessary as the topics can be very very specific and not easy to answer. I'm incredibly impressed at some of the new people that have shown up and at the way some of the long time forumites have taken wing to all this.

a separate m4L forum is very necessary, most of those posts are frgging deeeeeep!!

I've been distracted by making music, these things are always an ebb and flow with me, fingers in too many pots. I'm not the best person to lay out what's going on with m4L but to write it off altogether is unfortunate, there are cool things afoot and some incredible people are focusing on this.


I'm not expressing myself very well, had too much over the weekend.

Here's a couple things to file under stupid. I'm growing less and less inspired by Live's "elegant simplicity" appearance. No amount of M4Ling is going to change that. Also I'd like to dabble in working in a linear fashion, arrangement view isn't exactly Live's strong selling point, and then there's that pesky tab to session view and suddenly I'm back to working on the never ending loopathon. The fact is I'm productive in session view but when I go to arrange the interest and fun kind of gets sucked out of it for whatever weird reasons.

I'm not saying M4L isn't some next level shit, but it's just not really providing something I'm looking for. It just seems like another way to get the computer to be creative for you or a solution for people who have really elaborate performance needs.

PS I'd buy M4L right now if it could fix the damn quoting limitation in this forum.

[Tone Deft]

I edited my post a bit to reflect that '7 year itch' thing.

we'll see what happens. I've learned the hard way to not underestimate innovation.

shaken or stirred? dark vs. white meat? coke or pepsi? mac vs apple? arrange view vs session view? in the long run I'd like to force myself to learn arrange view recording but even when I do long takes it's in session view.

agreed on the elegant simplicity thing. enough with plug ins living in clip view, enough with squeezing buttons into small spaces, enough with bland looking interfaces. BUT that can most definitely be changed in max4Live.

but yeah, I can definitely say m4L is not for everyone. people have PM'ed me asking what I think, I've told more than a few people not to bother. I've also ranted a lot on how cool it is and told others to get it so I can use their creations.

[julienb]

m4L is just tool.



(julien is in haiku mode!)

[beats me]

I edited my post a bit to reflect that '7 year itch' thing.

we'll see what happens. I've learned the hard way to not underestimate innovation.

shaken or stirred? dark vs. white meat? coke or pepsi? mac vs apple? arrange view vs session view? in the long run I'd like to force myself to learn arrange view recording but even when I do long takes it's in session view.

agreed on the elegant simplicity thing. enough with plug ins living in clip view, enough with squeezing buttons into small spaces, enough with bland looking interfaces. BUT that can most definitely be changed in max4Live.

but yeah, I can definitely say m4L is not for everyone. people have PM'ed me asking what I think, I've told more than a few people not to bother. I've also ranted a lot on how cool it is and told others to get it so I can use their creations.

Session view can be a great inspiration but also a great distraction. What I'd like to do is come up with songs in arrangement view (or some other DAW) and then convert that to being playable in session instead of the other way around.

I don't really like the way the devices all blur together in this long nondescript strip. But what would be nice is if somebody would somewhat barrow that idea and make a pop up window that contained all third party plug-ins in the track chain instead of an individual pop up for every single plug-in. But I know that would probably be near to impossible or annoying because if it resized all plug-ins GUIs to fit one size there would probably be lot of plug-ins with graphically tiny parameters when conformed to that size.

[Tone Deft]

agreed. the people at Ableton use the software, there has to have been discussions over soup on the look of the plug ins.


back to the topic at hand... I don't know how to vote. for me it's whatever would encourage people to make more devices. does that mean teasing them with a taste (I love this device with the rumtime, if only it was blue.) does that mean making people write stuff because "damnit, I spent this money I might as well try." or would it mean more exposure to the things being made, more users would be hitting up the online libraries. also, which decision would result in the most income for Ableton?


I don't see it happening until AFTER the Quality sticky is over and done with. no new product development, don't release any new products, don't put out more products to get slammed on the forum. if 3phase (for example) got a max runtime he'd be here every day ranting how it's broken. m4L can only be as stable as Live.

[Khazul]

There hasnt been a flood of interesting devices probbaly because alot of things that several of us wanted to do with M4L turned out to be crippled by the M4L limitations relative to the real thing.

Yes - great for your bog standard stereo in, stereo out effect, or a device that takes midi in and makes noises - ie the kind of thigs that the market is already flooded with high quality plugins without the CPU overheads.

However, currently it doesnt seem posible to create multi channel in, stereo out devices, ie start doing wierd shit with side chaining, and all the other cool shit you can do with MAX/MSP that is rarely available in common plugins, nor (and this was a real shock) is it even possible to create a simple control interfaces for many hardware synths, because someone thought it would be a great idea in the dim and distant past of Live's MIDI development to completely block sysex, and I guess all midi apart from aftertouch, CCs and notes (with cloks being filtered out and handled deep in the bowels of live).

Which pretty much leaves only the more obscure useful things I wanted to do with it - plugins to forward automation parameters to my DMX lighting control application - which given that noone else on the planet has that application - there isnt exactly alot of benefit in releasing my efforts to anyone

Yes there are other things I want to do with it eventually (Simulate some aspects of my machine drum so I can sell the MD), but they are low priority next to just simply making music. MIDI crippling and multi-channel audio crippling were the big killers - so ironic when MAX/MSP is pretty free about audio and so is Live, and yet the two of them cant exploit this between them - WTF? Perhaps a future update - I relaly do hope otherwise I should have just written my lighting controller interface plugin directly in C++ and saved my cash. (Actually I wanted M4L for this more for the UI - the C++ part that communicates over UDP is trivial to write in a VST).

Ive seen so many others post similar remarks, that this may be the reason why with a few exacptions to dig deep into the Live integration stuff for Djing etc, we aint seeing a whole lot of mind blowing M4L plugins.

[ethios4]

However, currently it doesnt seem posible to create multi channel in, stereo out devices, ie start doing wierd shit with side chaining, and all the other cool shit you can do with MAX/MSP that is rarely available in common plugins, nor (and this was a real shock) is it even possible to create a simple control interfaces for many hardware synths, because someone thought it would be a great idea in the dim and distant past of Live's MIDI development to completely block sysex, and I guess all midi apart from aftertouch, CCs and notes (with cloks being filtered out and handled deep in the bowels of live).

Wow, didn't know that. Those are most of the things I was hoping M4L would unlock. Yea, hopefully in a future version.

I agree the Quality issue is #1.

I think a runtime would very likely get me to buy the full M4L eventually. Therefore there also needs to be a nice upgrade path! But seriously, that's how I work. I buy/DL some other people's work, push it to its limits, get frustrated that it doesn't do exactly what I wanted, eventually the pressure builds until I end up buying the full version. Max is overwhelming to me. Getting to use other people's creations, and perhaps even take a look at what they did, will make it seem much less intimidating and attractive to me.

[Tone Deft]

and you can only have one midi channel out of a m4L track. THAT bummed me out, or gave me another design challenge. bummer.

[glitchrock-buddha]

Don't forget that you can not access any parameters within a rack. That hurts. That destroyed all chance of more useful drum rack tools like being able to actually assign more performance parameters for drum kits. I would have been much more bummed about that though if I didn't have Maschine and Kore.

[stringtapper]

i can't select both?



why both? because it would be great, and because it was discussed enough times, and hinted from ableton that they do have plans for it, it just takes some time.

It's never been hinted that they have plans for it.

[gusc]

Let's look at this the other way around. Max is a top of the class product, that's been around for 15 years now. It costs a lot because the name is stable and there is a big user-base underneath it, so I'm OK with pricing of the full M4L version.

Now there are plenty of tools similar to Max, for example I bought SynthMaker 2 years ago, just to play around, and I haven't done anything with it. It cost me only 70EUR for the full version (for non-commercial use, so I can not sell my plug-ins). It exports pure VST plug-ins, that I can use in any VST host. There are a lot of plug-ins makers out there that give away their plug-ins for free, even with full schematics, which I could tweak if I wanted to, and even if I hadn't bought it I could still be able to use plug-ins created in SynthMaker. Then there are a lot of synths/efects made with SynthMaker that cost some money, because their creators want to gain some profit to survive.

So why couldn't there be same pattern for M4L. We could have the full version of M4L for plug-in developers (or tweakers) and then there could be M4L runtime wich just let's you play with already built patches. Ableton advertised that Live 8 will have share-and-collaborate features built-in. Where is it? They could make something called a "Marketplace", where enthusiasts could sell their patches. I am an instrument user not a developer.

Summing it all up:
M4L - 249EUR
M4L runtime - 50-70,EUR because it's Max, and you have to pay for it's name
M4L patches - Free or the price set by it's creator

Fare and square, isn't it?

[Khazul]

Ableton advertised that Live 8 will have share-and-collaborate features built-in. Where is it?

Its called soundclound or dropbox