goingdeaf

I can't afford Max Msp and I absolutely love it. Does anyone want to buy it for me?

buy-me-max-msp

Max Msp is a great pice of software and realy cheap !

just do one smal job with it, then you are able to buy it.

afterwards you are able to make money with it !!!!

Max Msp is a great pice of software and realy cheap !
just do one smal job with it, then you are able to buy it.
afterwards you are able to make money with it !!!!


what about these 1-year licenses, no option for you?

You can also use PD (PureData) instead, its a free variant for Max, but I doubt its worth the price...;-)

PD is brilliant - It has some clear advantages over MAX. Max is a little easier to use and the GUI is nicer but PD is very strong.

I don't mind PD, but I became so accustomed to the GUI in Max that nothing else does it for me. I can't even afford the cheapest licence at the moment because I have to spend my money on food.

comparing max and pd is ridiculously out of date.

comparing max4 and pd was just about acceptable, comparing max5 and pd was a real stretch but sometimes believable. comparing max6 and pd is completely ridiculous. they are different applications, and max is lightyears ahead. it is not even like comparing matlab and octave. advertising your level of poverty on a forum is silly and immature. and considering what it does max is extremely cheap. besides, max is what debt was made for.

an other solution is work with the demo of max and format your harddisk every month.

@goingdeaf
an other solution is work with the demo of max and format your harddisk every month.


@pid: seems your knowledge about pd is a bit out of date...no need to diss max "not so pretty" sister. she´s still a really smart kid.

for the record: i am trying to live in both worlds and just bought the upgrade to max 6.

but i have to say in terms of interesting topics the pd list is "light years ahead" to the stepsequencer infested max forum.

and lets not have a flame war here, please :-)

@pid: seems your knowledge about pd is a bit out of date...no need to diss max "not so pretty" sister. she´s still a really smart kid.
for the record: i am trying to live in both worlds and just bought the upgrade to max 6.
but i have to say in terms of interesting topics the pd list is "light years ahead" to the stepsequencer infested max forum.
and lets not have a flame war here, please :-)


@kochhw, no flame war needed. i guess i was being deliberately simplistic, as i felt the other posts had been being so. i get annoyed when people suggest pd as an alternative to max. i believe over the years their similarities have become increasingly superficial. my post was pointing out that they are different apps and you might as well go learn app "___x___" instead. that is why i find your "smart kid" / "not so pretty" comments a bit silly though - as if suggesting the difference between the apps is merely cosmetic. that is patently untrue.

although nothing i said was at any point 'dissing' pd; perhaps apart from the "lightyears ahead" phrase, and all i meant by that is 'max6 has Gen, pd does not. period'. and you cannot argue with that.

i still find myself in pd often. there are still things about it i prefer. i have great respect for its creator(s) and maintainers. however, suggesting the programmes are 'equivalent' is plain wrong and deluded. they are distantly related at best.

now the forums - sure, i never mentioned that. that is your dig, although of course i agree with you. it is simply because there are more people on max forums these days, therefore more potential crap. like this thread for example. but of course choosing one's software environment based on the quality of the forums would be a little childish and uncreative, no?

dont call threads crap when you are part of them. :)

sorry roman, i thought that my self-deprecating self-referencial humour would have been obvious. maybe lost in translation. maybe i should stop hijacking this thread and take a hike. i wish the op all the best. as i said above, there is always debt. or another app (;):

The OP initially raised a smile here; not sure if he was expecting to be taken seriously. Maybe he/she should start a F*c*Book petition/fund-raiser?

The Gen addition looks like a 'PD beater' of course; but of how much use would this be to our OP, especially considering the price difference? With hindsight, I wish I'd begun with PD (NB the "loadbang" toot), learning the fundamentals, but I was enticed by Max's relative prettiness AND the generous student discount for the whole package. Still haven't used Jitter once though LOL.

Just a few of the advantages of PD. PD and Max are fundamentally similar so the OP could easily learn the basics in PD and then buy MAX when he can afford it. Knowing PD will not stop you from wanting some of the goodness in Max and it can be argued PD has some advantages - this is not to say it is better but just in some small areas I kind of prefer it.

I found I learned more about Max by patching in PD. It is strange but there it is. You have to do lower level patching in PD so you really have to actually understand how things work to get it to work at all. In fact knowing how to program in PD really helps me understand GEN. It's not that you can't do the exact same thing in Max - it's just you don't have to and so you never learn how to.

I like how you use arrays for everything (multislider/scope~/waveform/table/buffer~). It makes it easier conceptually and practically for me - rather than having to remember separate objects (and their messages) you have a single object that you can access in a few different ways and everything you can do is all explained on a single page. Of course it is ugly but in a way it is simpler.

Creating abstractions with GUI's is much easier in PD. You can make Vizzie like abstractions no problem. You can do this in Max but I never find it as easy which is a pity as the GUI's are much better. I like in PD how you just create an object type in the name of your abstraction and the GUI appears. It makes it feel more modular. You don't have to open the inspector, browse to the file, fiddle with the box window. I know you can do it in Max but it is not as obvious and so you do not use it as much/ever.

You can do shell scripting in PD which you cannot in Max. No use to me but an advantage.

PD runs on a greater range of devices and os's - linux, android

PD is free. I don't mean cheaper than Max - I mean I can run copies simultaneously on multiple machines for as long as I need. This is good for teaching and installations. I can develop resources that anybody can modify.

This is not a PD Love-In or a flame war I just thought I'd point out some of the things I like about PD. I use both, like both am equally crap in both :(

PD is free. I don't mean cheaper than Max - I mean I can run copies simultaneously on multiple machines for as long as I need. This is good for teaching and installations. I can develop resources that anybody can modify. 

This is not a PD Love-In or a flame war I just thought I'd point out some of the things I like about PD. I use both, like both am equally crap in both :(


@pid: all sensible points and well taken. i guess i was arguing from the point of view of somebody occasionally teaching both and prefering pd for starters over max. the reason is, that with either you "buy" into a paradigm, which is different from e.g. supercollider or processing. and some people find out, that they don´t like this visual approach.

when started with pd, they just go ahead and delete the app. (and no, 30 days is not always enough to find out, generous as it is).

and, as brendan wrote, gen is "in most cases" probably not the reason people get started with max/pd.

now re "pd killers": how about "max killers" like rjdj (pure data patches on your iphone/android), pd-droid party (pd on the android), web pd (run pd patches in firefox), pd-lib (embed pd into whatever) and last but not least pd~ (run pd patches within max) ;-)

equally not suited for absoulte starters.

btw the op used a novel approach instead of just hunting for a crack, even if i am not in the position of buying it form him, i smiled at the bluntness...

now i will stop praising pd on the max list and do something more productive :-)

(i probably got so involved, because last week i read an open call from italy for some electronic works and the terms expressely excluded everything else except max/msp.)

@pid: all sensible points and well taken. i guess i was arguing from the point of view of somebody occasionally teaching both and prefering pd for starters over max. the reason is, that with either you "buy" into a paradigm, which is different from e.g. supercollider or processing. and some people find out, that they don´t like this visual approach.
when started with pd, they just go ahead and delete the app. (and no, 30 days is not always enough to find out, generous as it is).
and, as brendan wrote, gen is "in most cases" probably not the reason people get started with max/pd.

now re "pd killers": how about "max killers" like rjdj (pure data patches on your iphone/android), pd-droid party (pd on the android), web pd (run pd patches in firefox), pd-lib (embed pd into whatever) and last but not least pd~ (run pd patches within max) ;-)
equally not suited for absoulte starters.

now i will stop praising pd on the max list and do something more productive :-)
(i probably got so involved, because last week i read an open call from italy for some electronic works and the terms expressely excluded everything else except max/msp.)

nono, this is not a normal platform war. it is the maxmsp users forum style of humor. you will get into it one day.

but now you're in a better position to choose, yes

https://cycling74.com/forums/best-os-for-programming-maxmsp

and Roman:
https://cycling74.com/forums/best-os-for-programming-maxmsp

Hope I don't step on any feet but I believe the potential artist should be supported, but in a more reasonable fashion, where everyone has something to gain. There should be a quarterly contest where all artist both demo and licensed can compete for a "free" package. The objective of the contest would based on features that cycling would like to showcase and its most creative or innovative uses. All contestant patches would be shareable with the community and that is where we all win, learning value. Both contestants and winners would be showcased although the winner would receive a brief front page showcase, I already own the package but even I would see the value in front page showcase. Just a suggestion and hello to all.

Oh and to the original poster that would mean you would have to earn it ;)

I do miss the artist profile things from a few years ago. Other than the 'did you know?' and very rare stretta vids, there's not much going on on the front page.

tremor, yes, but not via contests. competition is not the best solution in many situations.

the criteria must be poverty, not talent. sorry if that sounds too political.

i think there are other options for him, some of them cant be discussed here though.

tremor, yes, but not via contests. competition is not the best solution in many situations.
the criteria must be poverty, not talent. sorry if that sounds too political.
i think there are other options for him, some of them cant be discussed here though.


Regarding Petholds advice: just make an image of your windows drive with everything setup as you like it and THEN install Max. After 30 days you just use DriveImage or Norton Ghost or whatever to get your windows back in maximum 10 minutes. You just need 2 partitions. Good thing is to delete your swapfile and clear out C:Documents and SettingsYOURNAMELocal SettingsTemp ... loads of crap in there. Works for me. This sounds horribly evil and shit but like Goingdeaf im dirt broke and really wish that i could support the development of this intoxicating application but such is not meant to be.

Regarding the flame war: PD doesn't even have a multislider.

"an other solution is work with the demo of max and format your harddisk every month."

yeah thats what i do. but if i decide to make money with music one day, i´m gonna buy it. though max 6 is really not my direction anymore.

Allow me to be the first to congratulate you!

Allow me to be the first to ask if you could pay for the upgrade from 5 to 6 for me?

Allow me to be the first to ask if you could pay for the upgrade from 5 to 6 for me?
I already have pd . ..


"i thought that my self-deprecating self-referencial humour would have been obvious."

hahahahahahahahahahahaaaaa, so you've found out how allergic the cycling'74 community is to a sense of humor? welcome to the club.

as for the pd vs. max argument, i've found 100% of the time, anyone who says max is better than pd, is definitely ignorant of pd, and anyone who says pd is better than max, is definitely ignorant of max.

i like pd, max, and supercollider equally, for different reasons.

rodrigo wrote: "I do miss the artist profile things from a few years ago. Other than the 'did you know?' and very rare stretta vids, there's not much going on on the front page. "

...sort of.... the 'did you know?' and stretta vids are not so engaging for me either :p so really that leaves nothing whatsoever going on there...but then again, i never really cared about looking at cycling74's front page at any point in history unless it said something about an update.

Now if Cycling'74 were smart enough to do more articles that read more like the thread linked below, then i'd feel scared that cycling'74 is in the business of reading user's minds and being an absolutely immaculate and perfect gift from a non-denominational god:

https://cycling74.com/forums/gen-patch-a-day

Luckily they are beautifully imperfect and that's just a non-stickied thread like any other.

That thread is some of the greatest help i've ever seen from them(should definitely be a sticky).

pid wrote:
"i thought that my self-deprecating self-referencial humour would have been obvious."

as for the pd vs. max argument, i've found 100% of the time, anyone who says max is better than pd, is definitely ignorant of pd, and anyone who says pd is better than max, is definitely ignorant of max.
i like pd, max, and supercollider equally, for different reasons.

+1
...sort of.... the 'did you know?' and stretta vids are not so engaging for me either :p so really that leaves nothing whatsoever going on there...but then again, i never really cared about looking at cycling74's front page at any point in history unless it said something about an update.
Now if Cycling'74 were smart enough to do more articles that read more like the thread linked below, then i'd feel scared that cycling'74 is in the business of reading user's minds and being an absolutely immaculate and perfect gift from a non-denominational god:
https://cycling74.com/forums/gen-patch-a-day
Luckily they are beautifully imperfect and that's just a non-stickied thread like any other.
That thread is some of the greatest help i've ever seen from them(should definitely be a sticky).


@goingdeaf If you have a remotely creative brain you won't regret it but your loved ones might :P

raja: I don't know whether it was your comment, but I found this thread on the front-page today :P

https://cycling74.com/tutorials/gen-patch-a-day/

raja: I don't know whether it was your comment, but I found this thread on the front-page today :P
https://cycling74.com/tutorials/gen-patch-a-day/


If you have a remotely creative brain you won't regret it but your loved ones might :P

Yeah, I had a girlfriend a while back who was known for saying she didn't like Max–she didn't like Pd just as much ;)

But I don't think this problem has anything to do with Max, but the obsessive drive of a hacker that many people here first discover via Max (I discovered it with C and—mostly—Java in high school and decided programming would be an unhealthy life choice for me. Later in college I realized it was my obsessive and perfectionist nature because the same thing happened with drawing/painting in my studio art dabbling and composing in the music department. So I got over it as I was getting into Pd/Max when I noticed this and eventually Max led me back to Java, being a better JavaScripter (I hate web programming a lot), and eventually C (then Objective-C and a small bit of C++ in the opposit order)).

> Yeah, I had a girlfriend a while back who was known for saying she didn't like Max–she didn't like Pd just as much ;)

Mine's a QuartzComposer patcher. Yes it gets nerdy at the breakfast table ;)

I don't even know ANY female that knows or has heard about either. (except my girlfriend because I rape her with my boring tirades how awesome max is.)...

Pioki, rape is NEVER funny. Can't believe how sexist this thread has become.

Pioki, rape is NEVER funny.  Can't believe how sexist this thread has become.


While I don't disagree with the first sentence (although maybe it is nicer to think he was misusing the other definition), aside from one comment this has not become a sexist thread and Pioki was—albeit with poor word choice—bringing up a legitimate issue. We started off discussing the impact of the hacker lifestyle on your loved ones—in my case my significant others happen to be female. She did not dislike Pd/Max because she was a girl, but because of the amount of time it occupied and I'm sure if I dated men I would have had the same experience at least once.

To answer Pioki's question, not Mars, but Boston, MA where I'm surrounded by academia and this is where I've met most female Maxers I know and those women who have heard of Max (the one ex-girlfriend I was speaking about in my previous post would probably not have heard of Max/Pd if she had not met me just because of her own interests and who most of her other friends seem to be). Even though I know some, Pioki's question was not necessarily a sexist one but an observation of a current situation: the Max community is male dominated (I could be wrong, but I really doubt it). I don't think this is an issue with Max, but an issue with electroacoustic music world in general (certainly in academia, but else where too I believe). I could not find the article, but I seem to remember an interview on the C74 website a few years ago with a woman who described going to the electronic music studio—I think the Columbia-Princeton studio—at night when no one else was around because as a woman she didn't feel like she fit in (or something like that, I wish I could have found the article, but maybe I read this someplace else). From my own anecdotal evidence (and speaking with others who have seen similar things), it seems that while this is more severe in the realm of electroacoustic composition, the general world of academic composers might still be male dominated (whereas the rest of the academic music scene seems to have much more gender equity). This does seem to be changing, but it has not changed completely yet (e.g. the Digital Music Studio at Dartmouth College I believe has had gender equity once—I believe because many more men apply—, or for a more on topic example witness last year's Cycling '74 expo).

Sorry for the long rant, I was planning on posting something along these lines anyway when I saw Pioki's question. While he could have used different language, the point he was bringing up (which was different than the other discussion we are having) is a valid/non-sexist one that we should be aware of and hope that this trend towards a more balanced representation of the sexes in electroacoustic music continues.

While I don't disagree with the first sentence (although maybe it is nicer to think he was misusing the other definition), aside from one comment this has not become a sexist thread and Pioki was—albeit with poor word choice—bringing up a legitimate issue. We started off discussing the impact of the hacker lifestyle on your loved ones—in my case my significant others happen to be female. She did not dislike Pd/Max because she was a girl, but because of the amount of time it occupied and I'm sure if I dated men I would have had the same experience at least once. 

Sorry for the long rant, I was planning on posting something along these lines anyway when I saw Pioki's question. While he could have used different language, the point he was bringing up (which was different than the other discussion we are having) is a valid/non-sexist one that we should be aware of and hope that this trend towards a more balanced representation of the sexes in electroacoustic music continues.


To change the subject and hijack this thread in another direction:As someone who started with Pd before getting into Max (made the switch over 5 years ago I think) I'm curious about some of this non-flame-war Pd vs Max discussion—I've only used Pd here and there to open patches over the past few years.

@pid: seems your knowledge about pd is a bit out of date...

Which Pd were you thinking pid's information was out of date on, Pd? or Pd-extended? Sure there is better documentation than the last time I used it, but I'm unsure of how much has changed in (maybe this VU meter looks new). So I'm curious about what up to date news there is on Pd—having trouble finding any release notes for Miller's version.

Things like this from section 2.9.4 in the Pd docs I'm curious about too:

The "data" facility, although part of the original plan for Pd, has only recently been implemented in its current form, and as (hopefully) the user base grows there will surely be occasions for many further extensions of the data handling primitives and the graphical presentation and editing functions.

So is this actually recently? or has this part of the doc not been updated? If anyone here on the Max list knows (I know Pd list might be a better place to ask about that, I'm thinking of resubscribing—I've always been bad at handling all the stuff that comes as part of being on lists like that).

True, if the person is speaking about every aspect of one program vs every aspect of another. For me, aside from being into open source software, I do find the general goals of Pd when Miller started again interesting (e.g. representing graphic scores and the "data" concept that gives PureData the name). Things like only having floats, no segmented patch cords or patch cord hiding, and differences in how message order works can go either way for me as I see plus sides to both approaches. Things like libpd get me very excited. At the end of the day I use Max a lot because as an IDE Pd comes no where near Max and I don't just mean differences in the GUI (although, just as I found it easier to spend long hours looking at Max5 patches vs Max4, I find many hours in front of Pd even more fatiguing). Many things about the patching workflow (which I can elaborate on if anyone cares, but I think I've ranted enough here) seem to make patching MUCH MUCH faster for me and involve less hand/wrist strain. Because of this, I never find myself using Pd very often (although I've been thinking of bringing some of this up on the pd-list after getting back into that community and maybe help contribute to make it a little better; but I don't really know anything about Tcl).

So the point of all this blah blah blah, is I'm curious more specifically when you guys who chimed in defending Pd choose to use it over Max (if there are situations that extend beyond more platforms, free, libpd etc. as I'm interested in use cases for Pd's different features not the differences in compiled targets).

That's part of the fun with Pd! I remember spending a long time on some slider/bang/toggle interfaces (some that ended up acting like multislider). Back when I used Pd I was using only Miller's version for a while so I was building all sorts of things from scratch. Some buggy externals in Pd-extended at the time (fall 2005) where why I switched to Max: I had a piece to finish and the things I was using Pd-extended for were native to Max and weren't crashing in the 30-day demo. If you can't tell, I really do want to spend some time back in my Pd-roots, but it is so hard since imo it is a lame IDE (maybe I'm picky—I keep thinking of ditching Eclipse because it doesn't even use basic emacs-style cursor movement command-keys and the built in emacs mode seems to break after a few minutes very time I try it).

Due to the dire economic situation in our country, I can not even buy Max 7 at least a month! The dollar is too expensive.

I am developing a program to work with Arduino, etc., mostly signal analysis and work with them on the Arduino, I need to be able to compile ready .exe program + will soon be required to export them under Andriod and iPhone.

License Max 7, I suggest you become the honorary tester, as well as to receive free the following programs are designed by me!

If you are interested, write me here, I will send you an e-mail, etc.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/wavvyaudio/)

Milecon (this is program to controls arrays of LEDs with Arduino).

Now I am doing is the second version of the program, it is much more interesting. If you are interested - please contact me!

My projects:
http://jvlns.org/wavvyaudio (https://sourceforge.net/projects/wavvyaudio/) (MUSIC TO LED LIGHTS v1)

Valery, you resurrected one valuable flame thread.

(nice UI ye, and i like the names of your presets)

Valery, you resurrected one valuable flame thread.
(nice UI ye, and i like the names of your presets)
(i accept donations as well)


Buy me Max Msp?