Max4Live is what got me into Ableton, it also got me out of Ableton... As someone who had been using PureData for quite a while the idea of having that kind of

Max4Live is what got me into Ableton, it also got me out of Ableton... As someone who had been using PureData for quite a while the idea of having that kind of development environment integrated into the DAW was super exciting, unfortunately the actual implementation leaves a lot to be desired; personally the final straw was when I realized that the Max process space was global to Ableton so that global variables would leak between devices (no sandboxing)... This may have been addressed in further releases as I was a very early adopter, but all of the other issues pointed out by the other posters still stand. If you're looking for a platform agnostic alternative to Max4Live there is PlugData[0] which is a VST implementation of PureData -- the open-source origin of Max and created by the same authors. And there is the Grid for Bitwig[1] which offers a modular graph based MIDI/DSP programming environment that runs at audio rate and is fully integrated into the DAW as a native solution! The Grid is somewhat limited as it isn't extensible, but it supports >95% of common use cases and is used internally to build Bitwig's native devices. Hopefully in the future Bitwig will extend it's open API surface to include building custom Grid modules -- in the meantime PlugData is perfectly acceptable patch for doing unusual logic calculations and doing left-field things like interfacing with robotics :) [0] https://plugdata.org/ https://plugdata.org/ [1] https://www.bitwig.com/the-grid/ https://www.bitwig.com/the-grid/