Max For Live Sneak Peak from max4live on Vimeo.

Suddenly, I have an image of American Ableton hackers patching on their MacBook over Thanksgiving turkey.

After a long, long wait, a public beta of Max for Live is available. The software incorporates the full version of Max/MSP/Jitter – complete with visual output, video processing, and 3D capabilities – with the Live host. Max patches operate with all their usual capabilities as devices inside Live. User interface elements are available to give Max patches conventional Ableton device interfaces, and there are even pre-built elements for useful functions like frequency displays and MIDI patterns. Via the Live API, Max for Live patches are also able to control most elements of the Live interface.

Because of Max’s networking capabilities, Max for Live devices can also be used to route OpenSoundControl data into Live. That isn’t necessarily with the same ease as you might route MIDI, and there’s still no native support in the Live interface, but it is a step forward.

Our friend Michael at max4live.info has been busy documenting the new software. His overview video is at top, and for OSC coverage, see his tutorial [part 1 | part 2].

Updated: Pricing has now been announced.
Max for Live is not included with Live 8 or even (perhaps surprisingly) Live Suite. It will be a US$299 / EUR249 download, available separately, on top of the cost of Live 8 or Live Suite 8. If you already own Max, you’ll have a set of crossgrades available:
1. You own Live. You can add Max for Live for US$99.
2. You don’t own Live, and want just Live. You can get that and Max for Live for US$449.
3. You don’t own Live, and want the whole Suite. Suite plus Max for Live crossgrade, US$699.

Total cost:
Max owners without Live: US$449-699
Live owners without Max: US$299 + cost of the upgrade to Live 8
Max + Live owners: US$99 + cost of the upgrade to Live 8

I think this could arguably be worth the investment, but given the discontinuation of support for developing VST, RTAS, and AU plug-ins in Max – a feature that was formerly free – I expect some resistance. Also, as previously announced, there is no known Max for Live “runtime,” meaning Max patch developers don’t really have a distribution outlet for work made in Max for Live, other than other Max for Live users.

Sign up for the public beta on Ableton’s site, and you’ll be able to grab the downloads (details below). You must be an Ableton Live 8 owner, though you don’t need to own Max 5:
http://www.ableton.com/maxforlive/beta

As computer music practice – part composition, part instrumental play – spreads, the idea of software interface as performance tool is becoming second nature. Putting those opposable thumbs and sensitive fingertips to work, multitouch controllers are growing in number, variety, and sophistication. Berlin-based artist Marco Kuhn shows off his beautiful creation, the PlayBox multitouch hardware, and its first app, PlayLive. That first software focuses on Ableton Live performance, but Live could be just the beginning – Marco has worked with Pd in the past and promises other apps to come. He’s interested in selling this device in the future, and he shares with us the tools he used to create this work for those of you doing development along similar lines.

The “space bassoon” Eigenharp seems to have landed from another planet. Today, I’ve got good news: it’s bringing alien gifts with it. By next year, both the software and the high-performance protocol the instrument uses will be open source. Taken together with other advancements in the open source community and with protocols like OSC, that could mean we’re at the vanguard of a golden age for more open, more intelligent, more expressive digital instruments.

Genuinely new music controllers made available commercially don’t come along very often. So this week’s news of a strange but wonderful-looking instrument shaped like a bassoon with customizable key controls turned many heads. With high-resolution, high-frequency data and reliance on the computer for everything from sound generation to mapping the keys to different tunings, the computer connection matters. Eigenharp’s chairman, John Lambert, sets the record straight for CDM on the software, the way it talks to your computer and other gear, and how open the tools and protocol will be.

I’ll be talking more with John next week, but I want to bring you this news now. Part of blogging means that you don’t hold back – you share that first reaction and then learn more. I’m pleased to say I was dead wrong on the Eigenharp. What looked on the spec sheet like MIDI-only communication and proprietary software turns out to be just the opposite. Sometimes, being wrong is great. Here are all the details:

Getting handy with the $60 KORG Nano Series controllers and Ableton Live keeps getting more sophisticated. I did a "quick hack" using the text-based MIDI Remote Scripts with the nano as an example, and provided a download. Next, Raymond Weitekamp modified those scripts and added a monome for a full-blown Live performance. But now James Waterworth aka Myralfur takes the whole idea to the next level, with a fully custom set of scripts with control of additional channels, more control over tracks, and most importantly, interactive scene triggers.

I’ve built a custom python script for the nanoKontrol based on the hacked python scripts for the Axiom controller decompyled from live 7. It adds the ability to switch up to controlling channels 9-16 by changing midi channel (or changing up to scene 2 on the nanokontrol, which I had sending out on midi channel 2 instead of 1). It also has track on/off, solo/cue, panning, and also has the bottom row of buttons triggering clips on the relevant track, with forward and reverse skipping up and down scenes, and the loop button triggering the selected scene.

Best of all, you really don’t need to know – ahem – what you’re doing with scripting to make this work. Just follow the instructions below, and you’re ready to play – so you can get back to your set.

Now, James has polished off the script and fixed compatibility with Ableton Live 8, and this is ready for public testing. Give it a go and let us know what you think. I’ll work on a permanent home for all of this stuff, but for now, let’s just use comments for any issues. For some insane sounds, be sure to check out Myralfur’s music and DJ mixes on Soundcloud, too! He’s working on a rig that also incorporates a Sony PlayStation 3 controller.

MSAFluid for processing (Controlled by iPhone) from Memo Akten on Vimeo.

TUIO is a simple but powerful emerging protocol for multitouch control for live music and visuals, as used on the powerful live tangible synth reacTable. Apparently no one told Apple, however. While the App Store rubber-stamps useless toys like fake cigarette lighter flames, they bizarrely rejected a powerful application by a leading digital artist that would enable standardized TUIO control – for free. (More back story below; see an example in action above.)

As a blogger, my reaction is usually to whine and pontificate, for better or worse. The engineering approach would be to find some hack away the problem. That’s what Andrew Turley did with the TUIO protocol. So, Apple won’t allow an app that does the trick? Why not go back to what developers did before the SDK, and just use the iPhone browser?

As Andrew explains it:

After reading the story I started thinking about seeing how far one could push Safari as an application platform, using web apps to get around Apple’s tight control of the app store. Since you would be connecting to another computer anyway to use an OSC application, why not just have the app be a web app running on a web server somewhere on the local network? The web server can then take care of things like sending out OSC messages or playing music or doing whatever it is people want to do.

To that end I created a little system that implements the TUIO protocol. You use an iPhone to run a web app, which in turn talks to the web server, which in turn sends OSC messages.