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These are valid criticisms (although parsing max patches is very easy as they are just json files). However, I think you're missing the point. The point of Max
by qmmmur 7y ago
These are valid criticisms (although parsing max patches is very easy as they are just json files). However, I think you're missing the point. The point of Max is to be one notch away from something like Ableton - a language and methodology for programming your own routines, patterns and at the lowesr level DSP algorithms (something that gen~ has facilitated nicely). You might even write your own objects in c++ if the need for functionality grows. I'd say I'm an expert in Max having spent considerable time in it developing applications and doing research and the trade off of not having those 'traditional' software engineering and computing tools is that you can work in an incredibly dirty and ad hoc way. At the end of the day it's a tool designed with creative goals in mind and the idea of unit testing, deploying, etc etc are not paramount to people's practice mostly. They just want to develop ideas fast in fairly stable real-time environment.
- jcelerier 7y ago> The point of Max is to be one notch away from something like Ableton ahaha, when you think that Ableton was born from Max :)
- whiddershins 7y agoThat doesn’t sound right.
- pmoriarty 7y agoThis kind of reinforces my point of the languages being only really suitable for simple patches, as the more complex they get the more they'll need things like sophisticated debugging facilities, testing, tracing, etc to figure out what's going on, why things work the way they do or why they break when they don't. As for them being just JSON files, that doesn't really help because these languages aren't designed to be programmed on the JSON level. They're designed to be programmed visually. Having a JSON file you can edit doesn't help any more than having an XML file of a Word document. You're not going to be editing your Word document using the raw XML. You need a word processor like Word itself or Libreoffice to make sense of it and edit it in any kind of meaningful way. The potential is there, of course, to build text tools around manipulating the raw JSON that would be Max-aware, but that would break Max's visual paradigm and then you might as use a traditional text-oriented language to begin with.
- trynewideas 7y ago> This kind of reinforces my point of the languages being only really suitable for simple patches I can't parse whether or not this is a problem, and if so whether you're arguing that visual programming is bad or just something you don't like.
- qmmmur 7y agoIf you have Max installed I'm happy to send you incredibly complicated DSP and musical problems solved visually and cleanly. Open your mind for a second and realise that musicians needs are almost entirely different to software engineer's in a language.
- TheOtherHobbes 7y agoThe lack of tools isn't the problem. The problem is that Max reimplements basic CS concepts badly, eccentrically, and unintuitively, for no real benefit, while adding a huge extra cognitive load. Max for Live highlights why this is bad. If you can find the unofficial docs, it's much easier to access the LOM using Python - or pretty much any standard language - than to do all the string/list/symbol splitting, prepending, filtering, combining, and so on you're forced to do to make anything non-trivial happen in Max itself. I think there's an open niche between Max, which is just plain weird and difficult in too many ways, and the low-level world of Juce and C++. I'd love to see a scriptable industry standard plug-in architecture with a super-easy "just works" set-up for graphics, DSP, MIDI and timing, based on a modern high-level language, but also fast. WebAudio is somewhere in that niche, but - aside from being browser dependent - it's still too close to the metal for most users. Some of the plug-in construction kits are too high level. Faust is good but still very specialised. I suspect there's a sweet spot between the extremes, and it's not currently been catered to.
- qmmmur 7y agoAgain, you're missing the point. Max and pd were developed for composers and musicians to execute live performances of institutionalised academic music (as well as its long history of connections to IRCAM in Paris). It does that perfectly.
- aikah 7y agoReaktor does it better and is simpler to learn in my opinion. Max tries to be both high level and low level, which makes it more a tool for engineers than artists.