More Detail on the Max 7.1 Release

In case you haven’t heard, there are two major additions to Max found in the 7.1 release: Full-patch Snapshots and the incredible new Package Manager. But as with all Max releases there are a number of smaller enhancements that may actually brighten your day as well. Here are a few highlights:

One of the Support Department’s most-suggested ideas for installation designers is to build in restart functionality into their Max patches. Restarting Max gives systems the opportunity to refresh internal storage caches, and also allows for the reload of updated content and external resources. But in the past, automated restarts of Max required a forced ‘crash’ that wasn’t always ideal.

Now, you can send a ‘relaunchmax’ message to Max and the system will restart. No crashes, no attempts to reload edits - it’s about as pleasant as a restart could be!

Massively-multichannel enthusiasts will love this one: the hard limit on channel count for the buffer~ object has been removed. This means that you can have as many buffer~ channels as you desire - and they will be supported by all of buffer~’s friends: waveform~, index~, poke~, peek~, jit.buffer~, record~. Let the craziness begin!

As Javascript becomes a more important part of the Max landscape, the Javascript documentation becomes ever more important as well. Our design team put some effort into formatting the Javascript documentation to be easier to use, easier to search and generally closer to the level of docs we prefer. Oh, and they also added a bunch more information on the new APIs available from within Javascript for controlling object painting, snapshots and SQLite.

Mac users are very aware of the AVF engine - the media engine that allows for better performance (as well as 64-bit use of media at all). A number of fixes have been applied to the jit.movie object that addresses many of the issues that have hit AVF framework users; file read, playback and texture output issues have all been addressed in this release.

These are just four of the many updates to Max found in the 7.1 release. If you’d like to see the entire list of new features and bug fixes, you can check out the release notes here. We hope that this update bring you much joy for the holidays!