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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/
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SaaSHub
SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives
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