How come when I do a craigs list search for audio coding, audio programming, game audio etc absolutley nothing appears for MaxMSP ?

Another thing I’m curious about are the small influx of digital arts colleges now teaching MaxMSP. It seems that C74′ has created a very strong market in the hobbyist and education areas, but there are literally no professional companies using this software for anything beyond “mockups”. Am I missing something here?

Have a look there : http://www.cycling74.com/forums/topic.php?id=28324
and http://cycling74.com/search-results/?q=job%20MaxMSP

As with all of these things, it’s not going to be as easy as Google->’MaxMSP Jobs’. I’ve had the best experience with Max when people are expecting to see some sort of interactive work but don’t know what tools I’ll be using. Be creative, combine it with other tools and make the most of what is a brilliant platform to work on. I’ve been working with various bits of code for the last few days – working with Java and Processing – and sometimes find myself wishing that I could just do some of it in Max.

I think there are people more qualified to talk about this than me anyway, look to people like Luke Woodbury, Julien Bayle, and Andrew Spitz.

If you want to make art or be an “interactive” engineer for live stage shows it seems like a very nice tool to have. If you want to get into programming perse’ using a language that you can learn in it’s entirety and be confident that in the end you will be in-demand and not wasting your time, I don’t see MaxMSP being the smart choice.

Personally, I find Max suitable for a lot of my needs, and it’s sometimes a good mental challenge to push it to its limits. Beyond that, it’s been a great gateway to areas that it can’t reach, giving me the confidence to take some of the principals I’ve learned to try and tackle new languages and environments.

I don’t think Cycling advertise Max as a replacement for programming languages – it was never designed to be, even in its early form – so don’t treat it as such and you can have a great time with it.

Moreover I bet theres a lot of people around, also on this forum including me, that took the step to learn C(++), Java, Javascript, Python, … after spending some time in Max, having created a sense of programming workflow. That’s for me the beautiful thing of it (and I’m still using Max a lot!)

The Max SDK do not have any licence term (at least the max 5 SDK) and I guess no company would deal with a closed-source proprietary audio-engine. You may have a look on “libpd” (pd-everywhere) to embed Pure Data (even if IMHO Pd sources are not really friendly : “A Final Note: Why ZenGarden? – by mhroth” there : https://github.com/mhroth/ZenGarden ). As a student i decided to scrap both and learn deeper C++ as i think it is a more efficient approach to reuse my stuff later.

My 2 cents.

sometimes you just have to make the business yourself, like most people who have done things with max. especially when max & pluggo was a big part in vst/au/rtas creation some years ago [sniff sniff]. a lot of people had good luck with it.
also myself, first started making tools, sold some, got approached by people to build things for them, and now do stuff in computer games, using max. also sound creation for sample packs, which i use max for, or based on midi stuff. i also do jitter visuals for club evenings for high ranking djs but only because i was in the right place at the right time.
though it has taken time and plenty of proving myself.

its a bitch of a road to do something just with max, thats why its better to have other things to help along with the process.
but in general, you have to make the business yourself.

max can make things i have not heard/seen before. its kind of like a small add-on for my sounds sometimes.
though try to keep it as simple as possible, because you can spend more time patching than working ;)

“company” must have been something acceptable in the 80ies, but today it is no longer cool.

-110

@Lewish Edwards, I see. You’re using MaxMSP for sound creation for games, not as an audio engine.

Ok, I’m not going to get into a pissing contest. I’ll just wish you well in using software tools like MaxMSP which are created by a profitable company like cycling’74 which in turn was founded by a university graduate with a doctorate in Hearing & Speech Sciences to help you do your “superior” art while paradoxically making you a brand cheerleader who presumably pays them for their software.

You can believe art is “superior” all you want, but you’re really just setting yourself up to have your own hypocrisy fed back to you.

And I really don’t know what any of this has to do with my initial query which has been answered at this point.

I wouldn’t really use Max for computer game programming. A serious reason for this is that you can’t embed Max in an external software, at least I don’t know of any ways that would let me run Max in the background, without a GUI and menu system and an application icon appearing in the Dock (in other words, you can’t embed Max into a program in the PD-sense). However, if I was a game designer, I would surely use Max in my lab to create the sounds used by that game.

Hope this helps,
Ádám

“contest” and most other forms of competition (as opposed to cooperation) are also out. these models also have failed too often.

about cycling74, i am not really sure if cycling74 employs someone for programming max/msp, except for the potions of max/msp which were made with max/msp. but in case they do: gratulations, because then you just answered your own initial query. :)

@adam and all

hard to tell where the borderline is but i think one could say max makes a perfect programming language for sounddesign and for prototyping stuff you will later rewrite in machine language for 56k.

or does a “real” language need to have something to do with making stable consumer applications? (or with the existence of a job market?)

a language by definition is a system of symbols including how they interact, and how humans (or animals or machines) do aquire and use it to communicate.
these symbols have certain meanings, and languages can be read, written, or spoken in a specific manner and translated into other languages.

now isnt that … maxmsp? :)

-110

For me Max is an environment in which programming can be embedded. And for a long time I would just bounce off the walls, kidding myself that it would be all I’d need to know. Max is great for prototyping, you can build applications in it, but you’re at the mercy of other people’s code when things go wrong, and when you start to get problems that are almost impossible to reproduce reliably, it’s frustrating. I’ve started my programming journey with Javascript, and find myself using it more and more within Max now, because when I’m developing software, it genuinely makes my life easier. Nobody comes to pat you on the back when you’ve solved some headache of a problem in 1 week just using Max, when you could have done it in a day using another language. It’s your time that you waste if you work like that.

In response to your original question, I do not think that a person can rely solely on Max for employment that pays the bills. There’s probably < 50 people who can call it their main environment, but I'd imagine all of them have extra skills with code and/or hardware knowledge.

I did, 3rd post ;)

For me it’s a (fun and useful) side thing but I know people that make this their main occupation. Don’t limit yourself to Max though. Much better prospects if you can deliver a wide range of skills.

@lessmore
You’ve been on these forums for about 2 weeks, it’s understandable you’ve never seen Roman around here before. Trust me, if you don’t understand what he’s telling you, you’re probably not going to want to find a Max/MSP job, because the kind of people who work in such an industry are alot like him: creative, original, and distrusting-of-capitalistic-authorities. People HAVE to be this way in order to retain their sanity, particularly doing work day in and day out with something as anomalous as Max. Everything he said was absolute truth. And you probably won’t be able to find a Max/MSP job if you’re thinking too formulaically about max/msp(meanwhile max/msp is not a very formulaic way of programming, it is actually one of the most idiosyncratic).

also, 3 weeks ago i posted my latest max/msp job:
http://cycling74.com/forums/topic.php?id=42495
(i do not post to boast, only to inspire… but the inspiration should be taken with a grain of salt which i’m hoping to explain…)
max/msp jobs you’ll find are not the way to go to make the brunt of your living. when you use max/msp in the professional world, rather than in a personal artistic way, you learn real quick exactly what Mike S was saying about efficient use of time.
Max/MSP started out being peddled to academia first and foremost for a reason: it serves best as a pedagogical tool. Max/MSP is like the Alice of the newmedia-programming world. (I know, I know… everyone here wants to think they’re ridiculously smart and special for knowing it well. i’m sorry, no one here is, simply by their max/msp skill alone. the people who are most active on these forums(i’ve been watching you all!), are here so much because they often need to get somewhere else…i’m sure many will try to deny this to themselves, too, much like i did for the longest time ;) but they would have to show by example, how their careers have blossomed. And outside of academia, the only people who could show this with any truly admirable proof, are probably too busy to be here. that’s how the elite get to where they are: NOT just by sharing and borrowing, but by teaching themselves in any cutthroat and competitive way that they can. it’s a bit like the music-industry, except since max/msp is far less lucrative, it is a much uglier slaughter for those who cannot make the grade). This also goes along with what Kurt Ralske was saying: you can find even more work serving free-lance artists, but those artists will constantly lookout for anyone who has more skill and can offer it cheaper than you, forcing you to be careful what you share with others and what you contribute to the artists themselves, and it also forces you most importantly, to put aside your own ideas about creativity and efficiency, just so you can facilitate rather than compete with the artists’ visions themselves. it is often uninspiring, unless you are lucky to work with the best artist of your liking(then you take on the project out of sheer interest: but this is not how most real-world jobs go, even real-world max/msp jobs… employers often hire max developers when those employers are not smart enough to think of a code-based solution, or they know they can pay much less for max development than something more low-level < -in fact, that is the average max developers' most attractive trait to employers: being willing to work for absolute shit pay...).
I am also living proof, out of the past several years, the job i posted above was by far the best, because the designer, Christian Bannister was inspiring and brilliant. But he still worked under a larger umbrella company, who paid me according to the less inspiring criteria i listed above. Even the successes in this world are minute, short-lived, and hard to keep up, let alone grow.
When you finally find a Max/MSP job(i’ve had a few more than this one), it feels pretty unspectacular. You end up realizing that you’ve wasted quite a bit of time learning how to be amateur about development because you could’ve learned a more generally applicable programming language that would make you more enticing to employers mostly because you would share the same coding knowledge and techniques that other people in the real world have: the ability to truly think in terms of object-oriented-programming without having it obscured by a graphical programming environment(the graphical nature makes it hard to show how objects work in terms of classes and how those classes can relate behaviorally, putting priority on ease of data flow and communication, rather than organization). If you learn a ‘real’ language, then you end up being able to collaborate more easily with real people in the real world for this very reason.
But there’s more: you also realize the benefit of code-based object-oriented-programming. Controlling data flow can be much more concise and efficient, because you don’t have to learn all the idiosyncracies of the max graphical programming environment in order to just get something simple. Also, have you ever thought about how difficult it is to share a development project of Max/MSP over a versioning system? (hopefully the new project system will improve on this, but so far, it’s a nightmare…)… Max gets you to think graphically, in a world best served by code. Code is better and more easily organized, it is more efficient, and MOST IMPORTANTLY: is the most concise and efficient set of systems which humans have found so far to implement ‘design patterns’(the conciseness and efficiency varies from language to language but basic coding principles still apply to all code-based languages which, even if they exist in Max, are normally obscured by the graphical nature of max).

if you want to find a job involving max/msp, you should focus on getting better at it for your own artistic purposes and train your mind never to expect a job, then when you finally find a max/msp job, you might actually be pleasantly surprised(because it is more likely to pay you to do what you’ve gained recognition for creatively-AND-technically as opposed to just technically and, for obvious reasons, this would make it more fun), rather than bored and depressed to find that such a beautiful design-experience could turn into something so mundanely dreary.

Be careful what you ask for, and be clear to yourself about where your heart truly lies: money? contentment? creativity? progress? it’s different for everyone.