Ableton Forum

Although I bought a couple of Max for Live devices, I still hesitate to go too far with buying commercial Max for Live devices. I'm concerned that they will become unusable after a while—for example, when a developer stops developing and Max/MSP gets updated. How reliable is the backward compatibility of Max/MSP? Will a newly purchased Max for Live device work for years, even without updates?

Thanks for help.

It will depend greatly on the device and the developer unfortunately. There are a LOT of devices that do not work with Push 3 standalone for instance.

Probably not the answer you want to read, but personally I use my own devices ONLY because I know how to fix them if needed. Even the stock devices are usually buggy…
But it takes years to be confident with Max patching.

Max the basis of MaxforLive is generally amazing when I comes to not breaking things with updates as they strive to achieve backwards compatibility.

The challenge is when devices themselves use externals written by the developers themselves.

With these days and the use of Gen and JS within devices much more is achievable than once would've been.

In over 11 years of running Isotonik we've had three developers effectively retire, only one device from one of them was effected by the updates to Live 11.

Cheers
D

Check this Cycling74 articles and .pdf

Most older devices I downloaded from maxforlive.com work just fine, with very few exceptions (basically only Kapetan's MK16-185 Sequencer 1.5, and its older 1.0.1 actually still works just fine, just the 1.5 version has GUI problems).

Ancient devices like the Pluggo ones have been working fine for almost 20 years.

Ancient Max MSP tutorials still work just fine in current Max MSP with no adaptations needed, Live itself had much more tutorial-breaking changes than Max For Live.