Clint

I am working on a project that was given to me by a long time client, it consists of 3 hard drives with a video presentation that was made in Max.

The video presentation was created and edited by someone who is no longer around. My client gave me these drives to figure out how to play / present them. It's a 24 hour span of time looking at a watch, with music and audio clips to be played in sync. He was told he needed 3 macs to play it. He didn't know what software to use, or anything. Also the drives have not been plugged in since 2008, until now. 

When I mounted the drives I found a folder called Cycling 74, and MaxMSPruntime among other settings folders, which led me to find this software. 

Anyone interested or able to help me figure this out? Preferably someone local to NYC? My client spent a lot of resources back then to have this made and it was only presented once. He very much would like to have it working again and I am just grasping at straws to figure this out. 

I am working on a project that was given to me by a long time client, it consists of 3 hard drives with a video presentation that was made...

searching-for-a-developer-to-update-a-max-live-project-from-2008

at that time max could play mp3 audio using movie object

because of quick time.  Max version is most probably 4.6

you have compiled standalone and a patch if I see it right.

That should make it possible to port patch to newer max version

What computer do you want to run this on ?

It would be helpfull to see contents of all 3 HDs

and relation between that 24h long movie(s) and mp3 audio

Patch on that screenshot has only audio playback shown.

a max 4 app is easy to disassemble and modify, and when hopefully the videoplayer is not too weird, it can be replaced with a dozen or so other objects.

but the 32 bit only runtime will not work on systems not newer than 10.14.

quicktime based mp3 movie player will get broke in mac system

I  would wait to see what meda files are.

If that 24 hrs movies are only showing a watch,

one can replace it with animated watch linked to local time

I could understand that at that time one suggested to use 3 Mac units to

Thank you everyone for the replies this is great. More progress than I have had in ages.

Attached below are the contents of the 3 drives. I would love for these to play on a single machine with 3 displays attached, since that would be the easiest path to achieving sync and playback with my limited understanding of how presentation software used to work. It seems the drives are labeled for display orientation in a room. i.e. Front, Rear and "Watch" which is just a video of a watch, with the hands spinning. It's a video shot in Iceland over the course of 24 hours during the daylight season. 

So the sun dips in the sky, almost reaches the horizon and then goes back up, bugs and spiders crawl across the face of the watch, dew condenses, clouds roll in and out. It's kind of incredible based on the RAW footage, I'm not able to get the audio to playback, let alone in the manner of how it was edited. 

I could probably stitch together a pre 10.13 machine on an old Mac if that would help, but ideally this runs on a modern M1 Mac laptop running the latest OS. 

Any thoughts on how best to proceed would be greatly appreciated!

to get what should be played where one would need compiled app

that media files can not be followed remotely just by looking at few screenshots.

I also don't see HD structures of 3 hard drives and also not what was run on each Mac ?

was standalone app running on all 3 at same time ?

but loaded different video and audio files ?

Or was only 1 Mac using max, and others simply played video using quicktime player ?

screenshot of opened max patch shows 5 movie players,

but I suspect they were playing only audio files.

Audio files are mixture of aiff and mp3 files ?

Only stored settings can decipher the situation.

that must be contained in pattr xml files, I suppose ?

and  4 xml files into a folder, zip it and upload here ?

Maybe compiled app has some changes compared to max patch 

you could send it by wetransfer, files.fm or similar file sharing

platform, just take care to compress app before copying or uploading it..

Thank you for the suggestions! Files uploaded and linked below.

To answer your questions, I really don't know, since I wasn't at this particular event showing this presentation. I was just told by this client who is not technically savvy he needed 3 Mac mini's to run the show. How they were sync'd or even if they were sync'd was not clear to me. Perhaps the watch video just ran in a loop and drove the audio and the other two videos were just accessory and didn't need to be in sync? Could Max control 2 other machines via some networking feature?

None of the QuickTime movies highlighted in green will play in Quicktime, only the unedited source materials.  Just says not compatible with QuickTime Player.

FYI The "Music" shortcut/alias in that top level folder points to the 24H_cleanLookWithVolumes app zipped below in the Wetransfer link.

24H_cleanLookWithVolumes app linked here:

thanks, I will take a look at the files on my old macbook which can run the patches

That movie files are not self contained, quicktime movies could

reference parts of a file or several files and play them, which probably is the case with your

let's solve the audio situation first by looking at the patches you uploaded.

Max plays only audio files, reason to use movie players was to be able to load mp3 files.

5 green umenus refer to audio files in 5 folders in ./Sounds folder.

each loads own folder and files get played / triggered by timer and some random

audio gets output from system sound device, there is no dsp in max or audio outputs.

as you can see in externals list, there are no network, midi or any other objects

that coud remotely control video playback.

i woud decode the audio content and use sfplay/play

Standalone app and patch show no differences.

But what surprises me is that in leftovers - means last files selected to play do not exist  in folders where they should.

At least not in 2 folders with visible files.

3 and /mp3omsines/DavidFenechForJadFair3.wav

do not exist in folders shown in the HD screenshot.

Patch is actually badly programmed, each attempt to load a file happens at least 3 times and so on and so on.

that with audio is not a difficult thing,

once reprogrammed to load files correctly, and use original

triggering of files, no matter if converted to AIFF or not should be no big deal.

Actuall difficullty is to restore behaviour of all objects as they worked in max 4.

Again no big deal, but one has to control all.

As max had nothing to do with video payback, after decision about converting mp3

to aiff and using sfplay~ objects, or  to use mp3play~ from

Volker Böhm externals, one could finish this rather fast.

For video part, one needs to analyse source videos, see if they glued together

would make 24 hours long movies, and try to get them into usable form.

quicktime 7 reference movies can not be used in higher quicktime player versions.

must be converted first, (if at all possible) which would take a while with that

Back then, Max was able to play MP3 audio through the Movie object thanks to QuickTime. It seems like Max version 4.6 was likely in use. You've got both a compiled standalone and a patch, if I'm understanding correctly. This should make it easier to adapt the patch to a newer version of Max if needed.

What kind of computer are you planning to use for this? It would be really helpful to take a look at the contents of all three hard drives and understand the relationship between that 24-hour-long movie and the MP3 audio clips.

From the screenshot, it seems like the patch only shows audio playback.

Hmm.. Ok. Well where should I go from here? I could make a copy of these drives if someone wants to take on the project?

I really don't have any concept of how this programmer built these presentations. Hearing it wasn't done well doesn't surprise me, but doesn't make me excited to take the time to untangle this mess either. lol

I have audio part ready to compile as soon as you decide to convert all audio files to wave or aiff

or want to try mp3 with 3rd party external.

converting to uncompressed format would make files  about 10 times the size.

for video part, you really need someone to come and inspect the files.

I guess quicktime 7 app would play them ok, but that app is 32 bit only.

you must sort that with video file format,

either by trying yourself and reporting here for further help,

or have someone that does not need to be max develpoer

I can give you detailed report about audio playback sequence later.

each of 5 audio players has 3 time controls:

1- initial offset time  set in ms - I will change that to float seconds

after initial delay, one audio file gets picked randomly,

When retrigger time elapses, new one gets loaded and the game continues so.

start and stop has 4 seconds fade in / out.

only timers and volume per player are stored.

Searching for a developer to update a Max Live project from 2008