Post
by arachnaut » Sat Nov 28, 2009 8:49 am
I don't have Max 4 Live, but when I was demoing it there were quite a few MIDI patches that did stuff like this and it looked quite simple to do. I did look at each of those patches carefully at that time, but I've already forgotten most of the details. I did not mean to imply that this is hard to do - it just seemed that some folk thought you could not do stuff like that in Reaktor.
Why doesn't someone post a similar thing for Max4Live so people can compare some simple structures?
I don't know why we feel like this is a contest between two programs. They are very different. It is something like if I say I like Absynth better than Zebra, or some such thing. It's just an opinion for crying out loud, no need to get personal. People can try demos of each, but there isn't a lot to demo yet in Max 4 Live, at least not in the beta version. The demos I played with did not impress me as much as the demos that come with Reaktor.
Since Max is a programming language and it's extensible, it's a heaven for programmers and is open-ended. Reaktor is not that at all and it probably never will be.
We're not talking about CSound in these forums - it IS a programming language, but still very different from Max - why is Reaktor the tool to compare against? It does run on just about every platform - I used it on the Atari ST.
On the other hand, you can run Reaktor standalone and it can function exactly like an external controller - it can send MIDI to Live that can be MIDI mapped just like one's external controllers. From within Live, neither Reaktor VST nor Max 4 Live can send out midi data without resorting to back door mechanism. For those who like MIDI Learn, this may be a big deal.
But these sorts of things may not matter at all to people. People who know me and have heard my music or my Live racks or Reaktor ensembles know the type of things I like and that I am not a DJ, into beats, or into anything like music in the usual sense.
Knowing that, they can form an opinion of my posts and see my preferences. If it matches their opinions and preferences they may make similar choices.
I know in Max I could probably write software patches which compose musical sounds triggered from whatever types of rules I may wish to make.
Probably I could do the same in Reaktor.
I don't think it would be easy to do in either program.
I worked on things in Reaktor very heavily for over a year and I still only know a small fraction of what it can do. Naturally, I'd do whatever I could in Reaktor rather than trying to learn Max.
There is no need to think Reaktor OR max4live as the thread title suggests, why not make it Reaktor AND Max 4 Live, especially with Reaktor at $99 right now - it's a steal.
There are lots of things in Reaktor that are quite tricky or obscure or frustrating, even after long time study.
I imagine there's a bit of that in Max, too.
Someone once posted something in the Reaktor forums about the number of individual creators that were in the user library. I don't recall the exact number but it was very small. Probably the same thing is true in Max.
If that is true, users will mostly experience Max 4 Live as just another bunch of presets, and maybe they will do some simple tweaks here and there.
If I were to be brutally honest, I would not recommend Reaktor to anyone as a tool, only as a source of lots of musical toys, because I know how frustrating it is to work in that tool.
One danger I can see is that people may hard-code Max patches to work just for them and make it hard for others to extend; whereas if one wrote more generally (or perhaps more correctly) others will benefit, too. Something like when Javascript came out and people did not program using the Javascript object model.
Anyway, we live in such exciting times, don't we? and we have so much to be thankful for.
Last edited by
arachnaut on Sat Nov 28, 2009 8:56 am, edited 1 time in total.
god yeah, its a lot better now actually!
