Porting Max apps to Max for Live.

[mowsley]

So, i'm an experienced Ableton user.

I recently have been using alot of ported Monome apps in Live, and they are pretty decent. (stretta suite, 7up, mlr, ect....)

But, some Monome apps are only Max patches ( arpshift, ohm) and i'd like to use them inside live.

Nonome option just seems cumbersome now that we have MonomeEmu.


I know diddly squat about the Max environment though. Aside from reading through the well indexed documentation for max, What else is inloved in porting a Max patch to Max for live?

[Gregory Taylor]

Funny you should ask. I'm finishing up a tutorial addition to my LFO series on the Cycling '74 website on this very subject. When we say it's not particularly difficult, the assumption one would make is that you DO know a little bit about how Max works - otherwise, you'll be condemning yourself (and everyone who reads this forum) to what we call "the sequential patch grovel." Assuming that you HAVE spent a little time with the nice integrated Max tutorials and documentation and know your way around a Max patch, I'd say it more or less looks like this:

* Decide what kind of Live device your patch will become (Instrument, Audio effect, etc.) and make the necessary i/o substitutions to work in the Live environment.

* Check to see if there are any non-vanilla Max objects in the patch you got from someone else. If there are, you'll have to include them in your device.

* Replace any UI objects that represent parameters with their live counterparts (dial > live.dial, etc.) or set anything else that doesn't have a counterpart up to function in the Live environment.

* Enable all device parameters and set their initial states.

* Go through and set up the modulation types you wish to use for the UI object

* Use Max's Presentation Mode to set up your user interface within the standard rack space area, and save your patch so that it opens in Presentation mode.

There are other niggly quibbly things that crop up here and there, but that's about it. Some patches are easier to port than others, and some patches may run afoul of things related to the current state of Max and Live integration, but those 6 things you pretty much always do.

[monohusche]

Good you mentioned that as I was about to port LFour ...