Ableton Forum

Posted: **Sat Nov 28, 2009 4:40 pm**

adapted from http://forum.ableton.com/viewtopic.php? ... &p=1027677

If you use Ableton Live and thought to yourself at some point that you wish it did something that it didn't do, and that you could see yourself building that functionality yourself if only it was easier to integrate sometihng like Max into the workflow, Max for Live is for you.

If you're an artist working in Max/MSP/Jitter and have thought to yourself that you wish you could leverage sequencing, preset management, and time sync of more standard music applications such as Ableton Live. Max for Live is for you.

If you are bored with the the built-in Live devices and think $300 USD is reasonable to get a handful more, and possibly even a TON more from places like maxforlive.com, Max for Live is for you.

If none of those 3 conditions exist, Max for Live is not for you. The most likely reason is the third example applies to you but $300 is to high of a price to justify it. Check out Reaktor then for only $99.

Posted: **Sat Nov 28, 2009 6:38 pm**

No problems here with my VSTi,s and vst plugins.
Rocksolid.

Posted: **Sat Nov 28, 2009 6:56 pm**

reaktor:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGT1tZT9 ... re=related

Posted: **Sat Nov 28, 2009 7:22 pm**

JAMM wrote:reaktor:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGT1tZT9 ... re=related

WOW !

Posted: **Sat Nov 28, 2009 7:44 pm**

arachnaut wrote: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.

wow, ummm all I asked was if you know how to do the same thing in max. a simple no would have sufficed.

you don't know max4Live, your judgment of it isn't from one of experience. why are you giving advice on it? that's pretty bad.

this is all Reaktor fanboys that don't know max4Live. makes sense, m4L hasn't been out long. there's lots of bad info in this thread like Reaktor is faster than max.

LOL at Reaktor coming at at $100. go buy it, you'll see.

all I can say is tighter integration with Live.

Posted: **Sat Nov 28, 2009 8:32 pm**

Tone Deft wrote: wow, ummm all I asked was if you know how to do the same thing in max. a simple no would have sufficed.

you don't know max4Live, your judgment of it isn't from one of experience. why are you giving advice on it? that's pretty bad.

this is all Reaktor fanboys that don't know max4Live. makes sense, m4L hasn't been out long.

LOL at Reaktor coming at at $100. go buy it, you'll see.

It's not so simple to give a no.

I do not know Max 4 Live as a tool. I have never written a single patch in it. I have played with all the demos in the beta test.

Does that mean I have no experience? Perhaps.

However, I have read a lot of the documentation, looked over many of the patches, watched the tutorials on max4live.info.

Those few weeks of labor at least gives me a little clout. I wouldn't begin to consider myself expert in Max or Max 4 Live unless I had written something considerable and useful to others.

For example, if I knew C pretty well, I can give an opinion on awk or Perl or Java without having written a line of code in those languages.

There's nothing quite like the language syntax of Max that I know of, but I have developed a feel or intuition for the style of the language. I can see how objects get selected and how iterative structures are made.

I do use Reaktor as my main composition tool, does that make me a fanboy? There is a lot in Reaktor that I dislike. I don't see any need to give me a label like that, I do more than just work in Reaktor.

A few weeks ago I downloaded Sonar and tried it out as a DAW because I used to use the older Cakewalk software and I wanted to see how CAL was doing (the scripting language), I also have Logic Pro. I keep coming back to Live as my main DAW, but there is a lot that I dislike about Live. Does that make me a Live fanboy?

I am writing this on a MacBookPro which I despise just as much as my main PC, I'm not a Mac or PC fanboy, I just use them because the tools I like don't run natively on Linux.

As was said in the Prisoner - "I am not a number, I am a free man", or words to that effect. Please don't pin a label on me and dismiss me like that.

On length or brevity of a post. I have found that if I write too little I get misunderstood and if I write too much I get unread.

The only thing that I care about here is that the authors of my tools stay in business and thrive so I don't have waste time to learn new ones. So I say by all means buy Max 4 Live and buy Reaktor (and PCs and Macs). It certainly speaks well of Max that it has been around for so long, I only wish I looked into it 20 years ago.

Posted: **Sat Nov 28, 2009 8:39 pm**

wow man, no, you do not know max AT ALL. you've never even written a patch?!?!?!?!?! WOW!!!!

clearly you've used Reaktor.
clearly you've posted many rants against max4Live.
that makes you a fanboy.

Jim... it's OK to say you don't know something, sorry but you don't know jack shit about max if you've never written a patch. no offense, I don't know jack shit about Reaktor, I'll freely admit to that but you don't see me judging Reaktor.

what a crock of shit.

Jim, I don't like to be bullshitted, we're not dumb. I respect that you're not a finger sniffing tarnce making kid but I would NOT say you know max. wow man, walk a mile in the shoes before judging them.

Posted: **Sat Nov 28, 2009 8:56 pm**

Tone Deft wrote:wow man, no, you do not know max AT ALL. you've never even written a patch?!?!?!?!?! WOW!!!!

clearly you've used Reaktor.
clearly you've posted many rants against max4Live.
that makes you a fanboy.

Jim... it's OK to say you don't know something, sorry but you don't know jack shit about max if you've never written a patch. no offense, I don't know jack shit about Reaktor, I'll freely admit to that but you don't see me judging Reaktor.

what a crock of shit. Jim, I don't like to be bullshitted, we're not dumb. I respect that you're not a finger sniffing tarnce making kid but I would NOT say you know max. wow man, walk a mile in the shoes before judging them.

My rants have been against the Live API, what it is and what it isn't - not against Max. I expected more from it.

I haven't written a Max patch, does tweaking count?

Perhaps this is relevant:
http://norvig.com/21-days.html

The magic number is 10,000 hours?

Posted: **Sat Nov 28, 2009 9:11 pm**

as for the API most of us know very little about it. you can still do a LOT with just standard max/msp inside Live. with the Live API you can automate stuff into Live, like autodetect a Launch Pad or APC or other controller, read the bpm from Live, modulate the send on track 4 without an old school midi assignment, all kinds of stuff. I'm starting to think of it as automap for max/msp.

IMO nobody can really judge the Live API yet because the only people I've seen coding with it are Ableton and Cycling 74 developers. the code I have seen from them has been well documented in that they show the user what each part of the patch does. I have no idea how familiar I'll be (for example) with it in a year. I don't know if I'll need to, I think I'll be able to use blocks of Live API code in my own creations without ever really learning the Live API.

it still boils down to basically comparing max/msp/jitter with Reaktor and take into account that this flavor of max/msp/jitter is more tightly coupled to Live. all I see here are Reaktor fanboys spreading lies.

tweaking helps but it's different to browse for the object you need, get the loadbangs in place, debug it and add features you stumble onto. the max, msp and jitter objects are rich, you need to explore those as well. jitter patches are insane, just playing with the help files is a kick in ass. you can get freaky results very easily by using the help files.

maybe when the demo comes out you can try max, msp and jitter without the Live API on your mind. I think that would leave you with a better impression of usability.

my $0.02.

Posted: **Sat Nov 28, 2009 9:19 pm**

arachnaut wrote:Perhaps this is relevant:
http://norvig.com/21-days.html

The magic number is 10,000 hours?

interesting.

I think it's like regular coding, you need a goal in mind, something you want to create. just writing code to write code is pretty pointless, although with max I do enjoy playing with help files. like regular coding you do your first project, by the end you wish you'd done things different in the beginning. by the end of project 2, project 1 is a joke and project 2 pushed you along. one thing about max is that there's 8 ways to do any single task, probably once those ways are apparent to you you can say you're proficient in max. or once you can pretty much make anything someone asks you to. I guess.

$100 for Reaktor is an enticing price, I'm tempted but there's no way in hell I'm going to get max4Live and Reaktor at the same time. that's too much to learn at once. oh, and I've also written a beat this morning.

HA!!

edit - thinking about it more... when I had the max demo a few years ago I did the first 20 or so tutorials, slowly. I'd look up the help for the tutorial topics and play with those and some related objects as well. after doing 20 or so tutorials I felt as if I could guide myself and make my own devices. that's some kind of benchmark. it's not mastery, it's a less green n00b.

Posted: **Sat Nov 28, 2009 9:57 pm**

I wrote that I couldn't recall a language like Max, but I suddenly realized there was one like that that I encountered some time ago.

It's a free package called KeyKit, and it's still available - see here:
http://nosuch.com/keykit/

It's a MIDI generator only, no audio or DSP.

This morning I've been working on a composition for a winter song collaboration and I'm using a nice ensemble from Reaktor that might give an idea of some of the more sophisticated stuff that can be done in Reaktor.

Here's my setup (below) and the Spiral ensemble is generating MIDI notes from a slice of the spirograph figure. The figure spins, mutating over time as the blobs farther from the center move at different speeds from the center ones - so this is a type of rule-based automata.
I don't have it set up to generate the type of music I like, so I won't post a sound example. Maybe later when it's done.

This is the sort of thing that could make a neat YouTube short. I don't have any video software or experience in that area. Does anyone know of a simple free tool that can screen grab a demo and make an uploadable movie file? I don't want to spend any money or a great deal of time on this, so simple-minded is best for an idiot like me.

Posted: **Sat Nov 28, 2009 9:59 pm**

FWIW, If you have a Duet soundcard it can NOT be selected under the Audio/midi setup window. NI's tech support advice in their konowledge base is to setup it up as an Aggregate device......that is directly advised against by Apogee in their Duet Faq at the Apogee website. The Duet has been out for a long time now and I can't even select it as my soundcard.

Setting up my audio devices in Live is a breeze.

That makes my choice easy.

Posted: **Sat Nov 28, 2009 10:25 pm**

gtodd876 wrote:FWIW, If you have a Duet soundcard it can NOT be selected under the Audio/midi setup window. NI's tech support advice in their konowledge base is to setup it up as an Aggregate device......that is directly advised against by Apogee in their Duet Faq at the Apogee website. The Duet has been out for a long time now and I can't even select it as my soundcard.

Setting up my audio devices in Live is a breeze.

That makes my choice easy.

Perhaps I'll come off sounding like a fanboy for trying to help, but if you use Reaktor as a VST in Live - as I nearly always do - Live will be doing the right stuff and Reaktor just sees Live's audio stream and no soundcard.

Reaktor has a simple-minded transport and recorder, but it isn't a DAW by any standards. I only use Reaktor standalone when I am building and testing devices, not during performance, unless I am using MIDI Learn on Reaktor MIDI stuff. That being said, you can still edit inside Reaktor VST, but I rarely do that, so I can't vouch for the long-term stability. I've used Reaktor since 2005, I think, frequently on a daily basis, and I can recall very few crashes.

A long time ago I had a Turtle Beach Pinnacle sound card - it was IDE-based and used a few scarce interrupts and some DMA channels. It was a lovely audiophile device with a Kurzweil sampler, but almost impossible to run. I managed to get it running Cakewalk in Win95. Back then, Turtle Beach had their support on GENIE - a Compuserve-like network run by GE Financial Services with their spare CPU.

Posted: **Sat Nov 28, 2009 10:36 pm**

Here is a Keykit generated MIDI file I made in 2000:
http://www.arachnaut.net/audio/arachnaut.mid

It shows some of the tools capabilities. These notes where generated from text using a character to MIDI mapping along with some heuristics.

These things were built into Keykit at that time. I think I was running on Linux at that time.

Posted: **Sat Nov 28, 2009 10:56 pm**

Ernest Meyer describes his long-time experience with Reaktor building in this interesting article:
http://heavensonearth.com/Godel-5-the-A ... -Here.html

Ableton Forum

Reaktor 5 or max4live

Re: Reaktor 5 or max4live

Re: Reaktor 5 or max4live

Re: Reaktor 5 or max4live

Re: Reaktor 5 or max4live

Re: Reaktor 5 or max4live

Re: Reaktor 5 or max4live

Re: Reaktor 5 or max4live

Re: Reaktor 5 or max4live

Re: Reaktor 5 or max4live

Re: Reaktor 5 or max4live

Re: Reaktor 5 or max4live

Re: Reaktor 5 or max4live

Re: Reaktor 5 or max4live

Re: Reaktor 5 or max4live

Re: Reaktor 5 or max4live