Learn How to Build Your Own Max for Live Devices

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

Our great sponsors
  • InfluxDB - Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale
  • WorkOS - The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS
  • SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews
  • plugdata

    Pure Data as a plugin, with a new GUI

  • 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/

  • score

    ossia score, an interactive sequencer for the intermedia arts

  • InfluxDB

    Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

    InfluxDB logo
  • scheme-for-max

    Max/MSP external for scripting and live coding Max with s7 Scheme Lisp

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

Suggest a related project

Related posts