Ableton Forum

Merry Christmas!

I installed the trial version of Max 7 (within ableton as M4L) being quite excited by the new algorithms for independent pitch and time. Then I tried the example patcher PitchTimePlayer...

Though I have pretty powerful system I get cpu usage of about 70% as soon as I set it to rhythmic or general mode and quality to better. Having formant processing turned on at the same time will lead to over 100%...
However this is only true if it runs in ableton environment. While editing the patcher and thus running in Max-Scheduler it works perfect showing its promising sound!

Cycling74 support answered very quickly (Awesome!) telling me that this is due to the fact that ableton and max/msp environment work differently and that there will be no way to solve the problem.

My question to u guys: Can you reproduce that?
And I want to start a discussion on what is the sense of having those cool new max objects if they will never work in ableton?!

Can't reproduce here, but it does get pretty high on certain settings.

For me it caps out at 46% with the Mode set to General and the Quality set to Better (it won't go to Best with some mode settings).

I'm running a late 2011 MacBook Pro 17" 2.5GHz i7 with 16GB.


My best guess is that we will have to wait until Live 10 comes out before Ableton have had a chance to really integrate Max 7's new features in any deeper way than basic functionality. As far Max 7 compatibility goes I don't recall Ableton ever saying anything official. I've only seen Cycling 74 employees say anything about Max 7 being compatible with Live, and they only indicated that it would work with Live 9.1.6.

Ok, maybe I exaggerated a little! Changed first post accordingly.
I have to point out: I think the new timestretch algorithms sound very good and offer great potential!

I understand that ableton doesn't officially support Max 7.
However Cycling74 explicitly advertises with new M4L devices featuring the new objects and it doesn't seem to work properly...

ring (Simon Slowik) wrote:I understand that ableton doesn't officially support Max 7.
However Cycling74 explicitly advertises with new M4L devices featuring the new objects and it doesn't seem to work properly...

Honestly there has never seemed to be a totally cohesive PR strategy between the two companies when it comes to Max For Live, so this isn't surprising. Part of it is probably due to the differences in development time between Max and Live and the fact that M4L itself is really code that is part of Live and so its development is dependent upon the development of Live. So far a new version of Max has always preceded the next version of Live that includes M4L updates (Max 5–>Live 8/M4Lv1; Max 6–>Live 9/M4Lv2).

So just judging by history its likely that Live 10 will bring full compatibility with Max 7's improvements and features.

when you find something you can do in max that is really hard on the cpu, look for a plugin that does the same thing but better. then use max for live to automate the controls on the plugin. if you must do it in max, use the full version of max in standalone with sound flower to connect to ableton live. you can also use the full version of max with rewire etc.. depending on how you use max, it can be an interpreted language or a more efficient compiled one. this depends on freeze, lock, version, m4l vs max etc..