Max for Live

Max for Live is new add to very popular music software Ableton Live from Cycling 74. In short way ... it is an interface that lets you create your own devices for use in Live. Basically it is an intergration of Cycling 74 Max/MSP program into Live 8. Check out videos to get an idea how it will change the music for another 5 years at least ... 23rd November 2009 ...

Introduction:

What comes with Max for Live:

Buffer Shuffler:

Explanation what MaxForLive is by Robert Henke / Ableton Live

Well, MaxForLive is a version of Max, which runs inside Live. This combines two very different applications into something new and exciting. The benefit of Max which runs in Live is: if you come from a Max perspective, you have access to features which are difficult to realize in Max. Max is really good for things that have nothing to do with a timeline at all. Live is really good in dealing with timeline-based operations, because we have all this stuff there. So if you want to control a Max patch to create a change over a long period of time, and you need a timeline, MaxForLive is a very good answer for that. It frees the Max user to do something that is hard to do in Max. From a Live perspective, MaxForLive opens up the possibility to create your own effects, and to create your own synthesizers. It also allows you control Live in a new way, and therefore extend the functionality of Live, helps to customize Live. We realize that a lot of our customers have very individual ideas how they would like to use Live. The problem is, if you asked 100 people what they want, how we should continue developing Live, you'd get 100 different answers. And we just cannot fulfill every need for every person. It would just be impossible. MaxForLive allows people to solve their very individual problems with a high degree of elegance.

To give an example, you could want that if you play in a live situation, if you played a clip that the color of this clip changes. So that you actually realize, oh, I played this clip before. That's a feature that totally makes sense from a live performer perspective, but it's certainly not a feature we would ever implement in Live ourselves, because it's such a special feature. It's a special request. It's not something that you would want to see in a menu of Live. But with MaxForLive, this is a task that is extremely simple to do. So you play on stage, and all your clips are green, and you play a few clips, and afterwards the clips are orange. You know, OK, I played these clips already. This is a very simple patch in MaxForLive, which enhances the functionality of Live in a totally meaningful way. It's very personal, and it applies only for those few hundred people who like this feature, but for them this feature is extremely important. And that, I think, is a nice example of how a very simple Max patch can solve a problem, which is very essential for a few people. Actually this example is something I did already. I color the LEDs on my MIDI controller, so if I played a clip already, it has a different color. @ Cycling74