What is the ONE Max/MSP/Jitter object you could simply not do without; regardless of preferred medium, externals blah blah etc. Which native object do you use regularly and why?

ahem…

object:
[trigger] or [t]

reason:
control flow; I can impose structuring as I need; without it, my patches would be a mess, or would simply not work as I require.

At first glance, perhaps a frivolous post, but my hope is that this thread will give newcomers the gift of prescience………a valuable skill.

Brendan

routing a stream in different directions, or more often, just to turn a stream on and off. I use it a lot when using [print], this way I can control when things are printed using a toggle in a locked patch rather than deleting/recreating the patch cord (not possible in a locked patch without scripting). If you have a ton of things printing very rapidly for a test, you only want a couple sets to print to see what’s going on.

It also lets you narrow down processing bottlenecks by routing streams in and out of processes/FX, you can track your CPU with audio or your FPS for matrices when you allow/restrict the input, like a bypass in a vst. Besides, you probably want the capability to turn a given effect on and off anyway…

though [t] is probably tops :)

So useful to capture the output when a patcher I am working on suddenly produces a ‘Hey-what-an-interesting-sound’.

store ints, floats and lists for later use. very useful, specially for recursive things and to ensure order of operations in more complicated structures…

+1 for [t] though!

I use it for mixers, linked coefficients (e.g. for freqs for an additive synth), midside, controlling the timing and volume of delay arrays with tapout~, feedback matrices, switchable filters (onepole~ plus matrix~ 2 1 0. = lowpass & highpass!) and more. It’s also a great way of doing multiply and add, so I use it in my PM.Scale~ object.

My only gripe is that there’s no setrow or setcolumn message, so a lot of people don’t make full use of this object. I think a lot of people only use it with matrixctrl, and that’s unfortunate, because there’s so much more that this object can do.

also love [pak] and [coll]

There’s also f0.auto_scale which can come in very handy sometimes.

[comment ] – quite often, if I leave something unfinished and come back to it … I don’t understand how it works anymore without reading my little explanatory comments :)

(although ‘bang’ is a teeny bit useful…)

brad

http://music.columbia.edu/~brad

r and s combos are also indispensable.

not the consensus I expected…..but that’s good; keep them coming.

I would’ve also gone for [scale]/[zmap]/[expr]/[zl], which are all one type of object/function, but I’m learning to do all my scaling outside of Max first (Arduino), simply so that Max/CPU has less work to do…

Peter and Brad may have to be a little less reserved :)

Brendan

gets rid of symbol prefix, invaluable for making an abstraction that follows the left index schema, and allows a more advanced use of all jitter object attributes.

And for some reason I still waffle on it’s pronunciation… :P

:)