David Zicarelli has announced that Cycling ‘74 is discontinuing Max/MSP Pluggo-based products, meaning the company will no longer develop Pluggo, Mode, Hipno, or UpMix. More significantly, this means an end to the use of Max/MSP as a way of developing plug-ins; David writes that there will be “no further development on … their supporting technology.” It’s the supporting technology that Max patchers have relied upon to make their own instruments and effects for VST/AU/RTAS Mac and Windows hosts, and its demise to me is the real news here for the Max community.

The article touts the upcoming availability of Max for Live as an alternative. Now, I think Max for Live is a very exciting technology – I’m finally editing some videos and discussion with Jeremy Bernstein, so we’ll have a preview next week. The flipside is:

Aside from commercial alternatives, the preferred open source audio editor tool is Audacity. Early releases of Audacity were unquestionably rough around the edges, in terms of both stability and features, but thanks to the efforts of the open source community, the software is steadily improving.

Version 1.2.5, released this week, is the new stable version, with Intel Mac support, bug fixes, and now FLAC audio support. (Seems the FLAC support alone is worth keeping it on your hard drive, even if you prefer other tools.)

The 1.3.2 beta is where things start to get more interesting:

1. New selection bar and improved selection tools
2. Dockable toolbars
3. New “Repair” effect, other improved effects
4. Auto-save and automatic crash recovery

Audacity Homepage
New 1.3 Features