Getting back into Max after a few years, and, Ive been playing around with Max 5 for the past few weeks. I must say, Ive had more crashes than I really care to mention, stability seems to be in question and couple that with a user interface, while pretty, seems to make simple things like dragging around objects a chore. It seems like the upgrade gives some things, and takes away some things… There is a latency present in everything that just didn’t exist in Max 4 and I’m really having a hard time coming to grips with it.

My ultimate conclusion is that I can do LESS with Max 5 FASTER and PRETTIER than Max 4. Not quite what I was expecting. I would have prefered like a completely rewritten, true multicore engine with a lightning fast openGL interface. Instead, well, its sort of this hack of a multicore solution with a really, really slow canvas.

And, please dont use keycommands or autocomplete as an example that Max 5 is faster. Those help speed things up, but aren’t really apart of the canvas graphical things I’m observing. They’re welcome additions, but, whatever. Presentation mode is cool too but that’s a separate entity all together. All these things would be cooler if we had the speed of Max 4′s canvas.

I might as well mention that that programs like Bidule, Reaktor, Synthedit don’t suffer at all from dragging around hundreds of objects. Bidule especially is noteworthy because it uses a GL canvas, too. No weird graphical lagging or slowness there. So, if the argument is that GL can’t be fast, I Would use Bidule as my primary example to how I think things should feel. Try it, Cycling, see how it’s done.

So, tell me, what’s on the horizon? Can things be sped up? Do most users care? Is this hard coded? Is this an issue for anyone else?

I have a 6 year old G4 tower, and I haven’t experienced anything close to what you’re talking about with Max 5. No crashes, and no slowdowns on the UI that have caused me any headaches.

Maybe it’s because that 50 Hz power over there is too slow. You need to upgrade to 60 Hz. :P

Yeah, 8 cores @ 3.0ghz probably isn’t enough. Maybe I should upgrade my 8800gt to a 280 series card? I have a mac w/ bootcamp running both XP and vista and I perceive the latency on all 3 OS’s. Shucks.

i completely agree with you jim,
max 5 canvas is really slower than the previous version.
for example, the more 3rd party externals i have in my paths, the longer i
need to wait for max to launch, and once it’s “launched”, max needs about 1
minute to be usable. all is very slow during this ‘so long’ minute (when
dragging the max window, the position is updated every 10 seconds…)

then, once i’m able to patch, i noticed that max is really suffering from
its gl interface. moving objects goes really slow into a patch containing a
lot of objects.

what about clearing the max console? is that normal it takes about more than
1 mn to clear 1000+ lines?

i think the graphical interface speed is what we really lost with this new
version.
maybe juce was not a good choice… ?

about the multicore feature, well, i must say i’m quiet desappointed about
it… it often makes my max to crash.

i’m not saying max 5 is crap, but i really would like to know where are
going my cpu & gpu resources :-)

i like the new design (even if the texts are pretty unreadable, i have good
eyes), the modify read-only feature, the textbutton object. but is that
enough to say max 5 is better than max 4 ?

anyway, keep going cycling ! i know you’re working hard. but these points
are really important i think.

cheers

g

2008/10/15

>
> Quote: swieser1 wrote on Tue, 14 October 2008 17:23
> —————————————————-
> > My advice: Get a faster computer.
> >
> > I have a 6 year old G4 tower, and I haven’t experienced anything close to
> what you’re talking about with Max 5. No crashes, and no slowdowns on the
> UI that have caused me any headaches.
> >
> > Maybe it’s because that 50 Hz power over there is too slow. You need to
> upgrade to 60 Hz. :P
> —————————————————-
>
> Yeah, 8 cores @ 3.0ghz probably isn’t enough. Maybe I should upgrade my
> 8800gt to a 280 series card? I have a mac w/ bootcamp running both XP and
> vista and I perceive the latency on all 3 OS’s. Shucks.
>

David Z.

What exactly makes you conclude the multi-processing features we’ve added to Max 5 (and/or Jitter) are a hack? Do you have any alternatives that would be less hack-like in your mind?

David Z.

By hack I guess I mean not a global solution. I am only aware of poly~ allowing multicore processing, which comes with its own compromise. A true multicore solution would be one where encapsulating to allow multicore wouldn’t be the scenario, but would be available anywhere in the patch.

It’s less of an issue than the GL slowness I get. I can only drag around a certain number of objects before the objects start chasing behind the mouse cursor. Patches are slow to load. Max window seems kinda clunky, too. Kinda freaks me out because I’m so used to modular environments having zero penalties for interacting with the canvas, such as in Bidule, Reaktor, or Synthedit. Of course I can encapsulate and be sensitive to the amount of objects I drag around to minimize the effects but I still feel that latency hovering over me while I patch.

Perhaps this will be addressed in the future whenever more pressing issues (whatever they may be) are sorted?

cheers.

It’s hard for me to agree that these sorts of things are considering acceptable for any program where moving around things is an important part of the creative process. I can understand some people would not be bothered by it but there are probably some people that find it rather an unpleasant side effect of the technology, especially when there are similar offerings which don’t suffer from the problem at all.

All in all, I think while Max is slicker on the surface and certainly looks very sexy, that quickly wore off for me when I started to play with it. To be fair, PD is like this, and Max 4 is like this as well. I have very vivid memories designing my own pluggos back in the day and having problems moving items around across panels or whatever and things grinding to a halt. What’s sad is that threshold of when things start to feel clunky is much smaller now than they were in Max 4. My big wish for Max 5 was to see these sort of graphical problems that I had in Max 4 remedied by offloading the work to the GPU.

The fact that I can drag like 500 object boxes around in Bidule without any degradation in performance also has me perplexed about what could be so fundamentally different about Max that these things seem to appear only in a Max-like program and nowhere else in the modular world. (well, to be fair, Synth Maker has a rather awful canvas that suffers a lot of the same problems with moving around objects as Max does)

http://www.cycling74.com/forums/index.php?t=msg&goto=148877&rid=3975&S=4a7abc041a7a4b991d4016af09be234f#msg_148877

Many, much too many, times during a patching session Max will “unexpectedly quit” on me. Fortunately, this has ingrained in me habitual saving after every edit, but when I do forget to save, it can certainly be frustrating to lose all your work of the last 1/2+ hour.Dragging around objects, not even that many objects (though waiting time does increase with more) can create very intense lag; sometimes, when I just dragged/copied a bunch of objects, I’ll let Max5 do its thing while I go online and check my email. Why not? It’s either do something, or look at the screen blankly for vast periods of time while the program works on catching up.

I never used Max4 with any intensity, but in an Audio Computing course I am currently taking at university, we have all been required to use Max4. At first, I found the lack of hotkeys and OS9 boxiness of it all rather irritating, and was embittered towards my teacher for not yletting us use Max5. But now I see why – Max 5 is not complete. It’s clear that C74 had put lots of effort into Max5, and it probably came to a point where they had to release what they had, for sake of the company’s well being, and just continue with the refinements after the release. But max5 isn’t stable and its performance isn’t where a commercial product’s performance should be.

That being said, I love MaxMSP and think the people at C74 are awesome, and trust that they will fix thes issues in due time. The OP said that other similar programs don’t suffer these same issues, but there really aren’t any other similar programs. You can’t build songs or whole live sets with other modular software. Aside from PD, MaxMSP stands alone in the level of its open endedness and adaptability. But, C74 should know that a lot of their customers are quite disappointed with the instability and slowness of Max 5.

My conclusion – Max 5 is slow and unreliable. If it’s too slow and urneliable for your taste, use Max 4 while C74 (hopefully) works on addressing these very significant issues.

I’m having the same impression… but I have to say I only spent a
really short time with Max5.

Question to C74: is it still possible to buy a Max 4.6 license? I’d need
one for an installation which is intended to run for the next 20 years
(nobody there to hit the reboot knob). Couldn’t find it in the online store.

Olaf

A plea to all those of you who report max 5 suffering, or any suffering.

Please try and isolate your problems and let us know about them in detail.

I know full well that in the middle of a horrendous patching nightmare with a rehearsal tomorrow it’s really hard to formulate nice bug reports, but if you get a chance to do so, this will really help us help you. As much as we would like to, there’s not much we can do with a report which says, “it’s slow, and it crashes”

-A

I have to disagree, at least on the second part.

I have been using Max since 1990, and it is my preferred software
environment. I use it to make ridiculously huge patches, including ones that
explore aspects of AI. My current patch is over 11 MB, without any audio or
video, and it loads within seconds (on a MacBook Pro, 2.5 GHz, 4MB RAM,
10.5.5).

When Max 5 came out, I was thrilled that it addressed issues of programming,
and brought itself into the new millennia. I have grown accustomed to the
rounded corners. Like others, I have noticed two major issues: the font
aliasing, and the gradual slowing down.

In the former, this is offset by the ability to zoom in without losing
clarity (appreciated as I get older!). I took Tim Place’s suggestion, and I
use Verdana 11 point for my default font. I’ve seen some of the images that
people have posted, comparing 4.6 and 5, and it is clear there is a
difference. But perhaps this says more to user interface design than
anything else.

The latter problem happens after patching for longer periods (say, several
hours), particularly with the Inspector window open. I haven’t had Max crash
on me yet, although I’ve got used to the spinning beachball (formerly an
image of terror, now inconvenience). I’ve also learned to save before
testing the patch (but this is also a habit from working in Max 4.6).

I have Menumeters running on my Mac, which displays memory usage. Whenever
my memory usage goes above 50% (with 4 GB of RAM, with only Max running!),
Max definitely slows down. I can quit Max and restart to reclaim the memory,
but I’ve noticed that this only works a few times. After that, I have to log
out and back in again. Obviously, there is a problem here, but one that I’ve
found a relatively painless workaround.

All in all, I would never go back to 4.6.

My 2 cents, your mileage may vary.

Maybe this is an issue with Intel machines?

Furthermore, how often are you dragging around groups of 200+ objects at the same time? If you’re doing that often, then you may want to re-read the tutorial on encapsulation. I’ve got a reasonably complicated patch (6MB w/o audio or video files), but nowhere in it is there a singular patcher or subpatcher that has over 200 objects in it…

Anyway, I think what David and Andrew from c74 are trying to nicely tell you guys is that this thread is entirely non-productive, from the perspective of trying to fix the problem you are complaining about.

AFAIK Max 5′s patching interface is not done with OpenGL as Bidule’s is.

After adapting my patching style, i am now loving the new interface and miss so many of the new features when i use 4.6 (at work). There are some inevitable problems, but they are getting fixed pretty quickly.

Oli

Well, this is pretttttttty funny.

I said pretty much the same thing about Max 5 a few months back and have decided to give it a year before trying it again because it was so slow and unusable. I could change the way I patch and be all uber careful about the number of objects I want to move around but what’s the fun in that. I have plenty of complex subpatches (well “had” is probably the better word) that acted as isolated functions that had at least 50 objects or more in them.

swieser1, you’re guestimating the speed of moving things around to be at around 10 frames a second…… 10 whole big whopping frames…? You’re saying that 10 frames per second when moving 100 little ovals (with alpha layers at that) is _fine by you_? Well, holy b-jesus, mother have mercy, thank you for having absolutely NO degree of quality standards with the software that you use. You’re the kind of happy-go-lucky customer every company lusts after.

On my computer it’s more like 10 frames a second with 50 objects, and I have plenty of subpatchers and everything’s encapsulated into functions and modules and components, etc.

I loaded up Bidule to try that out and can move around 1000 objects at a solid 60 frames or higher. No slowdown or any chunky bullshit. The point is not necessarily that you would ever move around that many objects, but stress testing the canvas to know that it can handle anything you throw at it.Lame. It speaks volumes about the state of things.

How can you call this a platform for video when the canvas starts throwing out frames when moving 50 or so objects? A platform for interactive performance shouldn’t junk out at all when you interact with it…. at all.

I only use Windows and noticed tons of crashes with 5.04 and the latency that’s already been mentioned. I’ve ditched Max all together. I’m not sticking around with 4.6 because all the little perks that Max 5 added to the table pretty much make 4 seem obsolete, but, the inherent sludginess of Max 5 drives me batshit crazy.

Dude, it’s not gonna get faster. I railed this forum about the same problem and eventually got a few people to spew out the awful truth. No one at Cycling nor some of the Greater Xenophobes Denizens of this forum give a hootin-holler if it feels slow. Either that or a flat out incapacity to perceive the latency, which is probably the more disturbing. LOL.

I was always perplexed how people could use Mackie’s Traktion. That program is pure molasses. It’s the most junky sequencer I think that is available. Yet, people use it, heh. It’s all slow as hell and people still use it. Mind-boggling. Ask them how they feel about how slow the whole thing is and they’ll go “huh, what the hell are you talking about?”. Their senses and ability to perceive time are probably dulled from too much reefer or something.

As for solutions, “Encapsulate and drag less stuff around”. That’s the best you’re gonna get.

Hmm, I was at first going to label this as pessimistic, but maybe you’re right? Could it be that C74 is working to address these issues, or is the slow nature of Max 5 ingrained in it? Will it be like this for “the next 20 years”? Let us ask C74.

To C74 employees – do you currently see this as a problem? Are you currently working to reduce lag time and crashes that occur in Max 5? Do you know of specific instances where crashes seem to be occuring? Do you know why Max 5 slows down significantly after prolonged use?

Also – Max 4.63 was stable, but that was after 63 upgrades (does it work like that, with each upgrade adding +.01 to the version number, or is it like +.1 for a major upgrade, +.01 for a minor upgrade?). Max 5 has had 5. Saying it won’t get faster, EVER, this early in the game is fairly ridiculous.

To me, vuxivil, it seems that you are simply overcome with frustration by the state Max is in and are letting those emotions influence your post.

But, let us not forget, my brother, that there was graphical problems in Max 4. You can get the same latency weirdness in Max 4, it just takes more objects, heh. Not in the other modular programs though.

Think about it. You move a portion of code that has implicit connections (implicit meaning based on wire versus outlet ordering) well, if you cross a certain point, Max needs to know when the ordering, based on the position of the wires, changes, so it must constantly rebuild things while there is something being dragged around.

Damn, this is a really easy theory to test, too. I think I’ll test it now and write back.

When we recieve specific reports of concrete problems, we try as best we can to reproduce them and fix them.

If you are unhappy, please let us know in as much detail as you can what’s going on in your specific case.

support at cycling 74 dot com is your friend.

Cheers

-A

You can see that the graph or whatever the fug the end result of the interpreter doesn’t get updated until the mouse button gets released.

All you gotta do is drag message box “a” to the left of “b”, but hold the mouse button down. You’ll notice that max doesn’t put the “b” before the “a” (in the max window) until the mouse button is released, so my theory is fudge. The pound signs just act as a separator.

#P window setfont “Sans Serif” 10.;
#P window linecount 2;
#P message 216 188 103 196618 ###################;
#P window linecount 1;
#P newex 143 98 70 196618 metro 1000;
#P newex 143 125 27 196618 b;
#P newex 204 278 26 196618 print;
#P window setfont “Sans Serif” 10.;
#P message 163 190 14 9109514 a;
#P window setfont “Sans Serif” 10.;
#P message 143 189 14 196618 b;
#P newex 143 70 53 196618 loadbang;
#P window linecount 6;
#P comment 30 115 100 196618 drag the a to the left of the b , but don’t let go til you’ve seen that a is still perceived as right of the b , then let go;
#P window linecount 5;
#P comment 243 47 100 196618 does max constantly update the scheduler while dragging stuff around? NO.;
#P connect 6 0 3 0;
#P connect 6 0 4 0;
#P connect 6 1 8 0;
#P connect 7 0 6 0;
#P connect 8 0 5 0;
#P connect 3 0 5 0;
#P connect 4 0 5 0;
#P connect 2 0 7 0;
#P window clipboard copycount 9;