If you haven’t been following Max 5 updates, the folks at Cycling ‘74 have been aggressively bug squashing. The changelog for 5.0.6 alone is exhaustive. (Via @rekkerd on Twitter, of rekkerd.org.)

Updated: Also new in Max 5, it’s now possible as of 5.0.6 to properly save your patches to a version control repository. Don’t know what that is? Now’s a perfect time to find out — it means it’ll be easier to track changes you make to your own patches, and easier to collaborate with other people. And it’s free. From adamj, on comments:

RE: the diff’ing issue I was talking about above. Timothy Place (one of the Max developers) shared this helpful tidbit:

“Since the change log is a mile long, I’ll point out an obscure new power-user feature in Max 5.0.6.

You can send a new message to Max like this (or put it in an init file):
;max sortpatcherdictonsave 1

This makes it so that the JSON files that are use by Max for saving patches will keep the dictionary in the same order (alphabetized) every time you save. If you are keeping your patches in version control (e.g. SVN, GIT, CVS, etc.) then this should make your diffs a lot more usable.”

See: Version Control and Sharing for Patching: Keep Those Max, Pd Patches in Order with Git

And in other Max news, Expo74 will be a full-blown Max conference in April in San Francisco. You still have a few days to lock in the US$295 intro price (through 3/1). On the menu:

• C74-taught workshops for users: live looping, 3D, Max for Live, new timing objects, etc.
• Workshops for developers: C programming and the Max external API
• Special guest speakers, including Robert Henke — but also Miller Puckette, the creator of the original Max and developer of Cycling ’74’s open-source rival Pd.
• An afternoon on teaching Max
• A “Science Fair” for sharing projects
• Field trips
• A “Relationship Manager” – a sort of conference concierge – plus access to the C74 folks, a bit like the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference

Expo74

It’s good stuff. And the price seems a very reasonable deal for a conference.

You know, it also reminds me that some of the events around the open-source tools could be friendlier than they are. And we like science fairs. I’m not sure that I’ll be able to make it out to California in April (I’ll be there in March for the Game Developer Conference), but eager to hear how this goes.

But speaking of open source, don’t want to spend April at an event for a proprietary tool? Prefer the East Coast to the West Coast? Like code better than patching? Like tools that begin with the letter “S” better than the letter “M”? Want tools that make you think of supermassive black holes? Oh, April in North America has you covered regardless of what you like. One moment while I write up another post…

Many people are asking about what Max for Live can do. That’s a short answer: everything Max/MSP/Jitter can, plus some new stuff to make it work with Ableton Live. It might be better called “Max in Live.” Max for Live has all the objects that Max/MSP and Jitter have – all of them. Right now, I’m gathering a big part of the testing Cycling ‘74 is doing is to try to make anything not work, but so far, it sounds as though everything does. That means Max for Live is an environment for JavaScript and Java. It means you could have Processing sketches, wrapped in Max patches, running in Live.

And it also means you get Jitter, which gives you video playback, processing, and output, plus 3D visuals. You’ll apparently be able to open a window for output, just as in Jitter. So you could have Live sets that trigger video clips, all from within the same tool – or, if that sounds unwieldy on one machine, have a Max patch that communicates with any visual app you like on another machine.

You can’t open Max patches directly, but so long as you own Max 5, you can adapt them to Max for Live into a device.

This also means that whether or not Live 8 supports OSC (it looks as though it doesn’t), you will be able to add that support however you like via Max for Live.

On top of this, you’ll get a collection of new objects that allow Max for Live to use UI elements from Live, interface with the program as Devices, and listen to and control events in the Live interface (like manipulating clips, Devices, warp markers, and whatever else they choose to support). It’s this interface area that’s really new, and that I hope to cover more soon.

The only catch to this is you have to make an investment in software before you get started. If you want to run Max for Live, you need to buy Live 8 and buy Max for Live as an add-on. (Ableton has said it’ll be a separate product, but no word yet on pricing.) If you already own Max 5, you’ll still need to buy Max for Live (though again, no word on discounts). And you will still need to own the standalone Max if you want to use your patches without starting Live.

For more discussion, there’s a thread on the Cycling ‘74 forum:

"Max for Live"?

Jeremy Bernstein of Cycling ‘74 says it best here:

Max for Live is, well, a superset of Max. :) MaxMSPJitter + special features for Live integration
If you want to create a Max Device from a Max patch, you can currently copy and paste the main patcher into an empty device. We’ll probably offer a simple converter at some point, as well.

Right. What he said.

What Might it Mean for Open Source?

You can see that this is good news for:

• Max and patching (a huge boost to DIY software)
• OSC (the open communications protocol, supported – indirectly – for the first time)
• monome (because all those patches can be adapted for Live, which was a popular app to use anyway)

It’s not such fantastic news for the open source world or competing tools, because this is a very proprietary and vendor-specific solution. That’s not a criticism, just an observation – I know fantastic people and friends who are supported by the business model that’s here. But it is worth noting, because I believe healthy software ecosystems incorporate both free and commercial models, and fully open and fully “integrated” (which are sometimes more closed) solutions. There’s no question where this lies. You’ll need the full version of Max to use these patches with even another host – and you’re likely to miss some of the specific solutions here.

That said, I think it’s still an opportunity for open source alternatives to differentiate themselves, and for the two to coexist harmoniously. For starters, open source software will have an easier in when it comes to talking to Live, if there’s a friendly set of Max for Live patches that help communicate with other tools. Also, open source software can be two things this solution is not – lightweight, and free. It’s also an opportunity for open source hardware to interface with this solution (again, see: monome, which I still think has some elegance things like the APC40 lack).

In fact, there’s so much power by the time you put together Live and Max and all your plug-ins (too … much … POWER!!)  that I could see some people finding it refreshing performing with just a simple Processing sketch and turning everything else off.

I might even go so far to say that, by association, Max’s open-source cousin Pd could benefit from this. (I don’t see Pd working in Live any time soon, though.) I do hope that Max patchers release at least some of their work as open source patches for others to use. Flash is a great example of a proprietary tool that has generated fantastic open source tools around it. That means you get Adobe’s support and quality level, but you can still share code – and clearly, the Max world can do some of the same things.

These are ultimately all tools. I’m pretty excited about developments in the open source world, and I believe that most people will use a combination of free and commercial tools. 2009 should be a great year for both, which means you’ll gravitate toward using the right tool for the job, and for your budget. For those who can’t afford all these glitzy new toys, you won’t exactly be suffering. (Next week, I’m going to try to put together a virtual, open-source “NAMM” rounding up some of those developments.)

If you asked me to wish for everything I’d want to come together, for the kinds of things we advocate on CDM, I couldn’t do much better than we’re doing already – and we’re only part of the way through January.

It’s been a long, long wait, but it’s now official: Ableton and Cycling ‘74 have collaborated on Max for Live, which integrates Max/MSP with Ableton Live. There’s tons of information on the Cycling ‘74 site, and I’ll be doing some follow-up interviews for CDM soon with more details, but here’s the overview.

What is Max for Live?

Max is an add-on product for Ableton Live 8, which will be announced in a press conference shortly. Note that it isn’t just Max or just Live – it’s a separate, add-on product. No pricing information yet; availability later in 2009.

What Will You Be Able to Build?

• Step sequencers
• Instruments
• Effects
• Stuff to control Live
• New hardware integration features, with your own instrument / effect / sequencer creations, and with Live itself – think, build your own hardware mappings

What I’ve heard is that via native controls, you’ll be able to control anything you can control in Live with a mouse, down to moving warp markers around. That’s obviously huge, but expect the specifics of these details (and eventually, how to do it) on this site over the coming days and months. I’m also eager to find out if it’ll be possible to use Max for Live with OSC inside Live.

How Integrated is It?

• Native Live API controls: Max now gets a native API for controlling Live, with live.object, live.path, live.observer objects. This is actually arguably the most important part, because it means you could in fact use Max to control Live in place of the Python-based Live API. That raises a bunch of questions and unfortunately, this is the part of Max for Live about which we know the least, but you know this site will be all over the details as soon as we can get hold of them. (The only bad side of this that I can see is that it may mean fewer options for Live users who want to use their own development tools instead of Max, but I’ll investigate.)
• Preview mode: This lets you edit in Max while devices continue processing audio/MIDI as if running inside Live. It updates in-place in Live’s device view. That’s been possible previously using things like Native Instruments’ Reaktor plug-in or the combination of FL Studio and Synthmaker, but it’s certainly new to the Max environment.
• UI controls: You can create Ableton-style interface controls for your patches. This is really extraordinary: you build a patch as normal, and what Max 5 calls its Presentation Mode now looks like an Ableton-standard UI in the program, with full support for color schemes. You even get descriptive text in Info View when you mouse over something, just like the official Ableton stuff.
• Multiple undo: Undo in Live applies to Devices created with Max for Live.
• Tempo sync, sample-accurate automation: I need to get the details of this, but normally syncing tempo is a major pain using MIDI, ReWire, or even plug-ins – this appears to allow more direct integration.
• A step sequencer object: Previous efforts like SynthMaker in FL have made it pretty easy to build instruments and effects, and it’s certainly possible to build sequencers in tools like Reaktor or Pd. But what’s unique about Max in Live is that it provides a sequencer with a Live-style interface that integrates with tempo.
• File/preset integration: This is where it gets really awesome – juggling Reaktor patches, for instance, can be a pain.
• Web collaboration: Ableton Live 8 adds web collaboration options, which extends to Max devices. 

What Devices Are Included?

So far, you get a nice set of Devices to use with Max for Live:

• Step Sequencer, with four 16-note sequences, shift, random, MIDI control
• Loop Shifter, with automated mapping and playback, for Max-style looping
• An extension for the new Akai APC40 that turns it into a step-sequencer editor for Live MIDI clips

Now, note, on that last item, you don’t necessarily need to run out and buy Live 8 and Max for Live and a new APC (though there are worse things to happen to someone). The new features should open up new controller integration features and custom software-controller creations for all kinds of hardware. For instance, the monome (site | cdm tag) should greatly benefit from the features in Max for Live. It’s already got a rabid community of Max patchers behind it, and there’s no reason you couldn’t do something wild with Live, Max for Live, and the monome – including additional features you can hack into the monome, like tilt sensors/accelerometers/IR range finders. (Yum.)

And in fact, the monome community is already on it without the aid of Max for Live: Pages, built in Java, is an elaborate app for automating access to some of Live’s power. You can imagine that the availability of Max for Live should mean even more of this sort of thing.

Where to Read Up

I’ll update this as more information comes through, but here’s what to get where:

David’s Tools for Creating Devices in Live is probably the most important read, as it shows how the integration works – already juicy, though we need to find out more about those native controls for actually manipulating Live

David Zicarelli’s "Perspective on Integrating Max and Live" talks about the genesis of the project and what it means to existing Max users

If anyone stops by NAMM booth 6314, we’d love some other perspectives.

What this stuff means:

Max for Live is best understood as Max/MSP/Jitter in Live. Here’s a full explanation, with more details to come on exactly how they integrate:

Max For Live is Max In Live: MSP, Jitter, OSC, and All; The Open Source Side?

And yes, I will be following up on open source alternatives, because they have their own strengths and weaknesses.

Ableton founder and CEO Gerhard Behles explains to Akai in an interview released this morning:

Owners of the APC40 who also own Max for Live can change the way the APC40 controls Live, and completely customize their experience. This means things like step sequencers and drum rack support and other things that only feel right with hardware will now be available for people who own these two great products. The boundaries of what you can do with complete customization and hundreds of LEDs are infinite.

I’m guessing at this point you might like to know what "Max for Live" is. Suffice to say, Cycling ‘74 said that they’d show their collaboration with Ableton at the NAMM show, and there’s an Ableton press conference later today.

My main question on this: how much control do you have? Is there anything special about the APC40, or is what Gerhard really saying that you can make your own weird step sequencers with whatever hardware you want using Max for Live? (For that matter, there’s no reason you can’t do this right now using Reaktor or Pd or a number of other tools that also work with Live.) My sense is actually that this is different, but in terms of what objects are specifically in there that enable it, we’re still waiting to find out (and may actually have more of those specifics after NAMM).

If you’re looking for pitch- and speed-independent warping and other sonic effects, and Max 5 is your modular patching tool of choice, a new tool is now available to add to your arsenal. elastic~ is an object similar that allows high-quality audio warping. The developer claims it uses the “same algorhythm as software giants Cubase, Ableton Live, and Kontakt.” I’m personally still quite happy with granular tools in software like Reaktor — and have recently gotten interested in exploring implementations in the free and open source SuperCollider, but of course there are great advantages to working in Max, and the implementation here seems unusually elegant and easy to use.

The developer writes:

With elastic~ it’s easy to tempo match loops together (either to each other or a global tempo); create a sampler that doesn’t change the speed of your sample as you change pitch; correct out of tune samples; create harmonizers; and just generally loop and bend and warp and stretch and……

elastic~ Product Page

The software is the creation of Simon Adcock and Joe Jarlett.

Product price is GBP20 — though thanks to the US Dollar surging against the Sterling, that’s not so bad. If you grab this and make stuff with it, let us know. Got an external you prefer, or other tool (a la SuperCollider) for audio warping, let us know that, too. (Warping audio is a personal and intimate process. I can’t imagine you’d share it with just any tool.)

Update: The engine in question is Elastique — quite nice, in fact, to have this “ported” effectively to Max/MSP! (And check out how many places it’s used — fascinating.)

Cycling ‘74 have updated Max 5’s pricing and streamlined a bit in the new release. (That means Max for MIDI and basic data crunching, MSP for audio, synthesis, and signal processing, and Jitter for video, 3D, and advanced data processing.) Since this impacts a number of our readers, it’s worth going over this.

Updated: The story now reflects a clarification from Cycling ‘74 over which Jitter objects work in Max/MSP.

New academic pricing:

• US$250 per student
• US$59 for a 9-month authorization
• US$109.45 for a permanent upgrade from Max/MSP 4

Student discounts

See also education and teacher discounts; 1-4 licenses for either K-12/higher ed faculty or your institution are now US$475.20 for the full Max/MSP/Jitter

Academic pricing is now only for Max + MSP + Jitter — none of the tiered pricing from before for just Max/MSP, etc. And if you bought after October 1, the new version is free. Plus, if you own an academic license that didn’t include Jitter, you get it now with your upgrade.

I recommended the 9-month license for my students ($39 of it gets subtracted from your final order) when I was teaching Max at Brooklyn College, and people were really happy with it.

New full pricing

• US$699 for the full Max 5
• US$495 for Max/MSP + a limited, unsupported set of Jitter objects (see below)
• US$199 upgrade

Pricing details and Max 5 overview

Note that Max 5 at this time doesn’t yet include the ability to export patches as plug-ins via Pluggo. ReWire, etc., still work, but if your main application for Max is building plug-ins for other hosts, you may want to hold off.

This came up in comments, so I’ll say it again — we’re not covering Max because I think it’s the only alternative. On the contrary, Reaktor and Pd are also each cross-platform patching environments with their own unique strengths, to say nothing of other synth environments (ChucK, Csound, SuperCollider). Each of those can work in academic settings, as well. But there’s no question Max 5 is big news on this scene, a major update to the tool that first popularized visual patching as music software

How much Jitter do you get in Max/MSP?

Cycling ‘74 revised their site; while Max/MSP does now include a limited set of Jitter objects, they’re officially unsupported if you haven’t bought Jitter. In other words, you can use them — and this means developers working on patches can share those patches with people who don’t have Jitter within the limited subset — you just don’t get support from C74. I think if you want to use Jitter objects, you should just buy Jitter, but this is still good to know (particularly for teaching environments, I might add). Here’s the list:

jit.alphablend
jit.fill
jit.fpsgui
jit.iter
jit.matrix
jit.op
jit.pack
jit.peek~
jit.poke~
jit.pwindow
jit.qt.movie
jit.spill
jit.unpack
jit.xfade

… Note this doesn’t include the important networking objects, so it’s just FYI.

Max 5 Downloads

Max 5 Product Descriptions [links now working!]

Max Online Documentation, including what’s new

SHORTLY after Radiohead released its album “In Rainbows” online in October, the band misplaced its password for Max/MSP, a geek-oriented music software package that the guitarist Jonny Greenwood uses constantly. It wasn’t the first time it had happened, Mr. Greenwood said over a cup of tea at the venerable Randolph Hotel here. As usual Radiohead contacted Max/MSP’s developers, Cycling ’74, for another password. “They wrote back,” Mr. Greenwood said, “‘Why don’t you pay us what you think it’s worth?’”

It’s a joke, folks, no need to write Cycling ‘74 suggesting you buy Jitter for $5; somehow, don’t think they’ll bite.

The article itself, though, offers a good overview of the issues surrounding Radiohead’s pay-what-you-will album and how it’s been received.

Via The Phoenix; thanks to ggg for the tip!

What’s this new Max about, and why was it such a big deal at the AES trade show? To really understand, let’s turn to gaming for a moment. When Nintendo described their vision for the Wii, they talked about appealing to three groups of customers:

• The “hard-core” gamer; that is, their existing audience, of course
• “Lapsed” gamers: people who had done some gaming at some point but lost interest
• Entirely new gamers, across a variety of demographics

History will have to be the judge of Nintendo’s slim white box and controller-wagging interface, but I heard some similar development goals at the AES audio show this weekend. Nowhere was this more apparent than Cycling ’74’s upcoming Max 5. Substitute the word “patcher” for the word “gamer”, and you’ve got a snapshot of the new Max.

After all, whether you’ve touched Max before or not, you’ve likely got some needs in at least one of these categories. Beginners are easily intimidated by the “visual programming” metaphors of a blank-slate, modular tool like Max. Many others get through a couple of patches, often in a school course, but wind up having difficulty getting beyond that first work later on. And even advanced users (maybe especially advanced users) are always looking for ways of working faster.

The build I saw of Max wasn’t entirely complete, but I will say it’s tremendously promising. I talked to many for whom the chance to see Max 5 was the highlight of the entire AES show. It’s a tool you really need to see in action, so be sure to check out Cycling’s just-posted videos of the program:

A First Look at Max 5 [Cycling '74]

This is not the all-words, no-pictures manifesto we saw recently: now you actually get to see the tool in action. Highlights:

• The interface zooms, scales, and snaps: I knew this was coming, but I was really pleased at how Max-like this is. It still looks like Max, but it’s more usable.
• There’s a patcher inspector: The inspector lets you easily adjust attributes without mucking about with typing things into an object box or sending messages to an object, which was always very confusing. You don’t see much of this in the video, but trust me, this is huge, especially for more-complex Jitter objects. And while this is shades of Quartz Composer, it works much better than the clunky UI implementation in that tool.
• Finding the object you need is much easier: There’s a pretty visual browser which will be a lot of fun, but there’s also auto-complete when you type in a name. (Programmers will recognize that functionality from IDEs like Eclipse; Mac users, think QuickSilver fast-typing goodness.)
• There’s a nifty new file browser: Drawing from iTunes and Ableton Live, this makes it really easy to get access to files in the file system — no more manually entering paths. The bad news is, it sounds as though this may not initially be usable in your own patches, for, say, making a video navigator for a VJ app or sample loader for an instrument; hopefully, that’ll either sneak into the final build or be available soon after. (The Cycling page does mention integration of the database that powers this browser with JavaScript, though, so advanced users may have some new options.)



A new file browser takes cues from iTunes and Ableton Live.
• Debugging and feedback and help everywhere: The old way of working with Max was pretty slow. Add an object. Click the object’s help to figure out what it does. Look up its help page. Go find the tutorial reference in which it’s introduced. Add a print object to watch what data is coming out of it. Go back and try to see why it’s not working. Now, there’s feedback everywhere: pop-up hints for each inlet and outlet, integrated help, the ability to mouse over objects and see what data is moving through them (including Jitter matrices, apparently), and even better-organized data feedback in the Max window. The integrated help is much richer, too, though it wasn’t quite ready for demo when I saw it; I expect we’ll find out more about this soon.
• Presentation mode for performance, and the end to messy patches: This is really the feature that could make you jump for the new Max. Presentation mode lets you select elements in your patch and add them to a performance interface, so that in addition to locking a patch, you can build a custom interface as an additional layer. Let me translate that: you’ll never have to stare at a giant, messy patch while you’re trying to perform again. Now, Reaktor has had something like that for years, but again, the implementation is really Max-like and unique. When you go to presentation mode, you can drag objects where you want them. Switch back to editing mode, and they remain connected to the rest of your patch and automatically move back to their edited locations. (If that didn’t make sense, go watch the video, and expect to see more examples of this soon!)

There are still lots of questions, of course: there’s no solid release date or pricing plan, and we haven’t yet heard what Cycling is cooking up with its new partner Ableton, or how that fits into Max 5. Jitter will be supported with this new release, though, like the internals in Max/MSP, it doesn’t sound like there will be any earth-shaking changes immediately. (I.e., it won’t be Jitter 2.0.) Then again, Jitter patchers should benefit just as much as MSP heads from all these other features, so I wouldn’t underestimate the potential there.

I think there’s no question this will step up the game for custom-patched music and multimedia software. Max isn’t the only game in town by any means, though it is arguably the most extensive tool (especially if you’re counting number of objects). I can’t wait to get my hands on the new Max and share the patching experience, and I’m equally interested to see what happens with the next version of a more specialized tool like Reaktor. As always, stay tuned.

Love it or hate it, there simply is no graphical development environment for musical and multimedia anywhere near as deep as Max. Max remains the most powerful “blank slate”, custom creative software around, and it’s allowed two decades of artists to create their own tools without coding.

Today, David Zicarelli, the Big Kahuna at Cycling ‘74 and a driving force behind Max as we now know it, talked publicly for the first time about Max 5. This version looks like the biggest ground-up overhaul of Max, MSP, and Jitter since their creation. It’s a huge article, well worth reading, but here are some highlights. (I get to sit down with C74 Director of Engineering Darwin Grosse next week at AES; not sure how much of that meeting I’ll be able to share right away but will definitely find out.)

The capsule summary (as I understand it)

Max 5 is a complete overhaul that’s all about making patching more pleasurable, with an entirely new, 21st-Century user interface and code base. It’s not about adding a zillion new objects. The idea is to be easier to learn for beginners, and more fun to use for experts. (Interestingly, this is similar to the more modest but philosophically parallel reworking of Logic Studio, another app born in the late 80s.)

It’s not just skin deep, because doing things like building workable UIs for performance and debugging promises to be easier.

Keep in mind, this is all basically hearsay on Max 5 because I haven’t seen it yet; I’m just condensing what I can based on my knowledge of Max and David’s introduction. But I don’t want to make you wait for details, since I know we have plenty of die-hard Max users collected here (and the odd Cycling ‘74 employee, so I hope I’m not too far off.) That said, here’s an overview of what to look for from the new version, with more details to follow:

New features

• Multiple undo. (Whoo! I’ll pay to upgrade right now.)


• All new UI, resolution-independent patching with zoom in / zoom out. (See also: Quartz Composer.)
• Find objects by browsing a visual catalog full of icons.
• Overhauled codebase, built on cross-platform libraries.
• New timing model that’s “more meaningful than milliseconds.” (The timing model was pretty essential to the old Max — it’s the reason original creator Miller Puckette named the program, after computer music pioneer Max Mathews’ timing work. It was also one of Max’s least modern features, arguably. I’ll try to find out what this means, technically speaking.)
• All-new documentation, fully integrated with the interface and the Web, and with friendlier introductory tutorials.
• Separate user interfaces for performance/use, called “Presentation Mode”. Aside from multiple undo, this is the other thing I’m most excited about; I love the ability to do this in Reaktor and loathe the UI building experience in Max 4.
• Host sync for VST plug-ins, making Max into a more usable host.
• File browser with preview
• Multi-processor polyphony

Oh, yeah, and preset saving that actually works the way it should, messages sent to message boxes without prepending anything, pattrstorage editing, localization and Unicode via a new JSON-based file format, and lots of other improvements.

Support and compatibility

So, that’s all well and good. Now, more importantly, what will work, and what will break? You should definitely read David’s story for the details, but since I like birds-eye views, here’s how I understand it:

Platforms:

• Mac and Windows, now identical-ish: Thanks to new, cross-platform libraries, and a window overhaul that will particularly benefit Windows (long second-class systems UI-wise when it came to Max), you’re less likely than ever to care what platform you’re on.
• Someday, Linux? David suggests that a Linux port, while not in the immediate future, is something C74 “wants” to do. It was impossible with the old codebase, but no more.

Works:

• Most patches (patches with specific UI features may require reworking, naturally, because of the new UI)
• Most externals (again, UI is likely to be the issue, but otherwise, if you made it through the Max 4.6 / Intel Mac hurdle, you should be in good shape)
• Java (using mxj)
• JavaScript (using jsui)

So, from a compatibility standpoint, you’re in pretty good shape. But there’s some major bad news:

What about plug-ins?

Pluggo support is completely broken, for now:

• Max 4 Pluggo plug-ins won’t work. They need to be updated to a Max 5 format. Wait a sec … there’s a problem:
• The Max 5 Pluggo won’t be ready with Max 5.

Translation: you won’t be able to take your Max patch and turn it into a plug-in for use with other applications, which for many of us is one of the major selling points of Max. David writes: “this new format is unlikely to be ready when Max 5 is first released. If your life revolves around plug-in development, you’ll probably want to wait to upgrade until we change our plug-in support to work with the new core environment.”

So, the good news is, there will be this functionality eventually. The bad news is, we don’t yet know when that is. If I hear about a timeline, I’ll let you know.

This isn’t necessarily the end of the world, because for some applications, building a standalone Max application, possibly with ReWire support, is a better choice. There’s no mention of standalone or ReWire support in Max 5; again, I’ll keep you posted if I hear specifics.