Via our forums, April 22 is the magic release date for Max 5:

Max 5 release date [Create Digital Noise]

And if you’re lucky enough to be near Bellingham, Washington this week, you’ve got pretty good odds on winning the upgrade, plus a 100% chance of checking out some cool stuff. Atomic Afro, CDM regular and maestro of affordable Windows software, will be there.

Max 5 has been a long time coming, and it’s exciting to see the direction the software is taking.

In other news: the cycling74.com site is down possibly not down. So, we’ve learned the entire CDM readership was just sitting at their computers, waiting for the moment that the date got announced. Erm, that or it’s an unrelated bug, but I like the mental image.

As a result, we can’t look at videos of Max 5. We can look at the Monome, however, which runs on Max. What’s Max 5 like? It’s totally like Brian and Kelli’s cat. Just watch the cat. Max is like that now. Softer, more independent. Feline. Four-legged.

Site is back up, so you can check out the sample videos. Thanks, 7oi!

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:

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:

Tommy responds to our call for screen grabs of software with this fascinating Jitter patch:

He writes:

used lloopp and jitter runtime to make this instrument that uses a firewire camera as a source for effecting sound generators. i like this shot because of the video feedback.

What’s lloopp? Glad you asked. It’s a live improvisation / looping / performance tool built in Max/MSP and totally open source. That makes it ideally-suited to use if you’ve found other live performance tools to be overly restrictive on their own.
lloopp

Speaking of free, unusual interfaces, Tommy also sends along this elegant image from ixi software’s spindrum. They have a whole range of free, Mac/Windows tools for music making, all with organic interfaces and strange, floating objects, a bit reminiscent of the design of instruments like ElectroPlankton.

ixi software

It’s all proof that not all music software has to look the same, and the future is bright for innovation in on-screen interfaces. Software has a major interface on traditional instruments, too, which is that the interface for playing, the sense of a musical score, and visualization/imagery for the sounds themselves can all be united in the virtual domain. There have always been echoes of that in instrument design: buxom, carved women on viola da gambas, the way a piano keyboard reflects a system of tuning and pitch relations, and fantastical landscapes painted on virginals and other instruments. But I suspect we’ve only begun to see how this area could be blown up with digital instruments.

The only danger: we’ll have to keep from getting overly distracted by eye candy!

The day the iPhone was announced at Macworld, some of us immediately wanted to use it as a simple multi-touch controller for music. It’s no substitute for a dedicated, large, expressive multi-touch controller like the JazzMutant Lemur. But it’s also far less expensive, useful as a phone/Internet device/media player, and could easily be a simple, multi-touch controller. Basic multi-touch gestures could be a powerful tool for controlling music. Then, the sad news came that development wasn’t going to be open. Hearts sank.

Good news: Masayuki Akamatsu, the brilliant Max/MSP developer who first bridged the popular modular audio and multimedia environment to the Wii remote (see aka.wiiremote), is on the case. It’s still early in development, and for now is an extremely simple implementation: it only routes buttons and text on a Safari webpage to a Max/MSP patch. What’s cool is that it uses the OpenSoundControl (OSC) protocol to do it (with PHP on the Web end), and it works (you can even use it now if you’ve got an iPhone):

aka.iphone Preview
Discussion on the Cycling ‘74 Forums

Let’s talk about what this is not: it’s not multi-touch.

Everything’s coming up soundflowers over at Cycling ‘74:

1. Max/MSP/Jitter Free Upgrades, Now Universal: Max/MSP 4.6 and Jitter 1.6 are available as a free update for Max/MSP 4.5 and Jitter 1.5 users, respectively. (The beta is over; this is the final version.) In addition to various new features and fixes, the software is Mac Intel native. This makes it a must-download for Intel and PowerPC Mac users alike. Download for Max and Jitter, then check out a growing directory of Universal-native external objects.
2. Max/MSP/Jitter for Windows: There are many tasty little improvements in 4.6/1.6 aside from Intel Mac compatibility, so a lot of us are anxiously awaiting the Windows counterparts of these upgrades; Cycling says they’re coming “soon.” If we’re really lucky, they’ll do another public beta. Stay tuned.
3. Soundflower Now Works Right! Many of us — myself included — were disappointed to discover that an update to Cycling’s free Mac sound-routing utility Soundflower, including improved functionality and Intel Mac compatibility, didn’t actually work. Cycling has updated the software, and now it installs and works perfectly (so far; let us know if you experience something different). Go download it; it’s free.

Previously:

1. Re-Route Audio, Record Skype, iTunes on Cell Phones: Soundflower, Now on Intel Macs
2. Max/MSP/Jitter 4.6 Hits Beta, with Intel Native Support
3. Jamie Lidell on Max/MSP, Artists Talk Max Inspiration, Write Musical Odes to Max
4. What’s New and Cool in Jitter 1.6: OpenGL 3D and Video Goodies, More [Create Digital Motion, demonstrating why PowerPC Mac and Windows users should be excited, too]

Tonight here in New York, I’ll be presenting a free workshop on detecting and visualizing motion from camera inputs, which may be of interest not only for those of you eagerly anticipating the new Create Digital Motion site, but also anyone who’d like to use cameras as controllers for music. Full details after the jump.

If you’re not in New York, don’t fret; I plan to organize this stuff and have online examples/tutorials in the near future. But if you are there, say hi! And yes, I finally plan to deliver on my New York CDM get-together promises in June; my schedule will finally allow that.

Still from a recent performance with Eric Dunlap and Mare Hieronimus at Eyewash, the visual performance series in NYC.

Looking for new wisdom and expertise on tools like the insanely deep Max/MSP/Jitter? (If you’re using Max, signs point to yes.) Cycling ‘74 relaunched their site a couple of weeks ago, incorporating a variety of features that make this an indispensible resource for users of Max and other products. Since late last month, the new site has gotten rolling fast. Collective intelligence, meet Max.

VJing and jamming with Pitfall, controlled from MIDI drums? Heck, yes!

Max/MSP/Jitter is a multimedia environment that also happens to be a development tool, the upshot being that you can do bizarre things like emulate the chips of Atari, Sega, Nintendo, and Coleco game systems (covered previously).

Now imagine you could turn those emulations into a playable video/music instrument. Imagine you could map the pixels of the graphics to any object, stretch and warp it to other objects, or even use it to control a giant lighting array. The source could be the game itself, or visualizations of the RAM and ROM memory accesses. You could use any instrument to control gameplay (like a MIDI violin, or a laser beam, or whatever you wanted). That’s exactly what the mmonoplayer gang have done with a free Jitter external:

jit.2600

You’ll need Jitter (try the demo), and you’ll need some ROM files to play the games. I love that the creators describe it as virtual circuit bending — and bending is literally the word, as you warp and stretch video matrices. More features are on the way, too: audio support (yes, please!) and other game systems.

If you do anything interesting with this, do let us know. Via Will Carter at the USC Interactive Media Division and Wallace Winfrey on the great, new Cycling ‘74 forums.