Max started its life as a Mac-only program back in the 1980s.
#CYCLING 74 MAX MSP CODE#
It is so brilliantly designed it makes us write better code just to interact with it. I don’t really know how this is even possible, but it works! We use JUCE as a modular structure to organize our low-level work as well as a way to abstract platform dependencies. Everything acts as a Component and plays together. This lets users build interfaces that combine web technology and our more traditional JUCE-based interface elements. For example, in our new version Max 7, we’ve created a CEF container to display web content inside a Component. Sometimes we use JUCE as a kind of glue to put our own lower-level stuff into the rest of the application. I suspect someone familiar with JUCE could look at Max and figure out what classes all of these secret objects use. There are many Max objects wrapping other parts of JUCE that we use to build the actual UI of the software. This object is actually a subclass of a JUCE TableListBox. There’s an object in Max called jit.cellblock, for example, that lets you display data in a spreadsheet-like form. We used this layer to rebuild our user interface, but at a higher level we made Max objects out of pieces of JUCE.
#CYCLING 74 MAX MSP SOFTWARE#
To do this, we had to build a layer on top of JUCE that talked to the part of our software we couldn’t change. We used JUCE to rewrite large parts of Max from its old and clunky OS-specific style. Unlike most software that has been written with JUCE, we didn’t start from scratch. To me, the reasons for choosing JUCE are less important than our experiences over the past nine years that have made us so happy with JUCE. Yet at the same time, people expect Max to do as much stuff as they can in software that is not so spontaneous and interactive. But in Max, anything could happen at any time you can’t predict what someone will do to an interactive piece. With a traditional DAW you can compute a lot of what happens in advance because you’re playing a set sequence of events. They are also about balancing responsiveness with processing power. Our performance problems are not just about the absolute time it takes to do something. The underlying world keeps evolving, yet the model we present to users needs to stay relatively stable.Īnother difficult challenge is that performance problems are almost impossible to anticipate, as they arise from what users do. Inevitably this leads to tricky compatibility issues. In other words, what isn’t a challenge?īut more seriously, we have to understand the nature of a wide variety of disciplines and technologies well enough to figure out ways to make them easy for artists but still broadly programmable. We share the challenges of any complex software application written over decades with millions of lines of code. Max for Live could also be thought of as Live for Max, in that whatever you make with Max you can use Live to automate or compose with. Third, we’ve worked with Ableton on “Max for Live,” which is a way to extend Ableton Live – their DAW – in all sorts of cool ways. They might use Max to build an installation or a system for live performance with the software. Our users are also individual practicing artists and musicians who develop their work in the software.
Max started in music, but it’s increasingly used in art and architecture programs. Max is taught in universities all over the world. We have three main customer groups starting with universities. This lets you control audio parameters with a user interface, an LFO, data from the internet, or even another program you write in one of many languages.
But to the Max user it’s just numbers going from one place to another. What’s happening under the hood can be very complex with protocols, operating system drivers, or hard math. When everything is a stream of numbers, it means any kind of media or controller can talk to any other kind of media or controller.
But we try to maintain a simple idea: everything can be controlled with a simple stream of numbers. Max is now a complex environment with hundreds of different types of objects covering a wide variety of applications. It was a way to remove the limitations of traditional music software without forcing musicians to learn to code. Max was born out of the desire to give musicians and artists the ability to create software using intuitive interactive tools. “It’s so brilliantly designed it makes us write better code just to interact with it,” David says. In an interview with the JUCE team, David tells us about Max, his next steps for this highly sophisticated cross-platform interactive software, and the integral role of JUCE in facilitating it. For nearly ten years David has used JUCE to build and commercialize Max. David Zicarelli is founder and CEO of Cycling’74, a software company developing Max, the digital signal processing software environment.
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