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rothwell

This is a quick rundown of how the MXJ class loader works, and the implications for class variables (statics).

The first time an MXJ object is instantiated in Max/MSP, a JVM is launched to host the MXJ objects. All MXJ objects are loaded into this JVM by a class loader.

The class loaders is responsible for reading class files from disk and creating Class objects in the JVM, so that actual Java object instances can be created from the classes. Classes are cached: the first time a class is sought, it comes from disk, and on subsequent searches the previously loaded copy is used. Only one Class object will be loaded and used for each class, regardless of how many instances of that class are created. Hence, any class variable (static) will be unique.

MXJ implements automatic reloading of class files: if a class file is modified, then the class will be reloaded. This reloading check is done only when a new MXJ object is created in Max/MSP: it is not a background activity (as in, say, Tomcat).

The reloading is done by discarding the current class loader and building a new one. The existing cache of Class objects is discarded - but the already loaded Class objects, and object instances, are left in place.

The upshot of this behaviour is: when a class file is changed on disk, subsequent MXJ objects will be created with a new class loader (which will cache Class objects), and this class loader will be used for all new MXJ objects up until a new MXJ object has a class file on disk which is newer than the cached Class. At this point a ~~new~~ class loader will be created. And so on.

As a result, class variables behave slightly oddly. Class variables are shared only if they were loaded by the same class loader, and the creation of a new class loader will not impact existing MXJ objects.

Here is an MXJ example to illustrate this behaviour:

package net.loadbang.mxj.demo;

import com.cycling74.max.*;

/** A little test object to show the behaviour of the MXJ
    classloader. */

public class StaticTest extends MaxObject {
    private static int theCounter = 0;

    public StaticTest() {
        theCounter++;

    createInfoOutlet(false);
    declareTypedIO("A","I");        //    bang in, int out
    }

    public void bang() {
        outlet(0, theCounter);
    }
}

Create several MXJ instances over this class, and then bang them: they will all put out the same integer value (which should be the number of MXJ objects created). Each time a new MXJ object is created, every existing one will output the new total.

Now update the class file (by forcing a recompilation) and create some new MXJ objects. These new objects will collectively start counting again from zero. If an existing MJX object is edited, it will join the new group. The old MXJ objects will still share the old total, but no new objects can be added to this group. In effect, there are now two distinct classes called StaticTest, both with instances in Max/MSP, both running, but unable to share data or communicate in the Java heap.

It goes without saying that a new class loader loses the link to ~~all~~ existing classes. Here's a modified version of StaticTest which uses a second class to hold the state:

package net.loadbang.mxj.demo;

import com.cycling74.max.*;

/** A little test object to show the behaviour of the MXJ
    classloader. */

public class StaticTest extends MaxObject {
    private int itsCount;

    public StaticTest() {
        Counter.bump();

    createInfoOutlet(false);
    declareTypedIO("A","I");        //    bang in, int out
    }

    public void bang() {
        outlet(0, Counter.value());
    }
}

When the class file for StaticTest is modified, new MXJ objects start counting afresh. There was no change to the Counter class maintaining the state, but the new class loader brings in a new Class instance for Counter.

(As an aside, updating the class file for Counter has no effect; MXJ is presumably just examining class files for the objects actually instantiated directly by MXJ.)

package net.loadbang.mxj.demo;

import com.cycling74.max.*;

/** A little test object to show the behaviour of the MXJ
    classloader. */

public class StaticTest extends MaxObject {
    private static int theCounter = 0;

    public StaticTest() {
        theCounter++;

	createInfoOutlet(false);
	declareTypedIO("A","I");		//	bang in, int out
    }

    public void bang() {
        outlet(0, theCounter);
    }
}

package net.loadbang.mxj.demo;

import com.cycling74.max.*;

/** A little test object to show the behaviour of the MXJ
    classloader. */

public class StaticTest extends MaxObject {
    private int itsCount;

    public StaticTest() {
        Counter.bump();

	createInfoOutlet(false);
	declareTypedIO("A","I");		//	bang in, int out
    }

    public void bang() {
        outlet(0, Counter.value());
    }
}

mxj-class-loading

MXJ Class Loading

Gregory Taylor

Lilli Wessling Hart

The nature of the booth traffic is visible not only in a relative dearth of exciting action demo photos on my part (I am giving them aforementioned demos, and thus otherwise occupied), but also in my relative lack of trade show mobility. There are a few exceptions.

The path from our booth area toward coffee, soda, and the “facilities” runs right but the Moog booth. I normally got to chat a bit with Bob Moog during the AES rather than NAMM, since he was always mobbed in the booth there. The AES this fall was the first time since his passing that I’d gone to a trade show and paused to realize that I’d never see him again. The Moog booth here has a digital “picture frame” with a rotating set of images taken at various points in Bob’s life, and a large poster that passers-by are invited to sign with messages of thanks and condolence (it’s going back to Moog HQ when things are over). It always seems as though there is a small group of one or three people every time I pass by. The booth is doing a brisk business, but the little corner always seems to have people standing quietly, watching the pictures or reading the large sign. It’s really quite touching.

I also finished the second installment of the Buchla 200e review in the current Sound On Sound and decided that the Buchla booth lay somewhat in a straight line to 

toilet/soda machine vector, so I detoured with my Pepsi to check things out. Mr Buchla himself graced a minimally decorated booth.

Hardly minimal, I’d say you could only say “minimally decorated” if you’re churlish enough to not count this as decoration

I got to spend a little quality banana-plug time with the new machine, and it certainly sounds pretty cool. Loads of interesting new features, not the least of which is a Thunder finger-pad control panel. VERY nice. Time to start saving….

Anyway, back to stuff about us. One of the things I’ve never remembered to do in previous shows is to actually photograph the booth as it appears when finished early in the morning before the public arrives. For reasons I don’t entirely understand, I remembered this year. Here, we see David, Tim, Darwin, and Ben conferring during the quiet of a tradeshow morning.

One of the interesting features of this particular NAMM was the presence in major terms of our friend Scott Wardle, who you may all know as Ms. Pinky. May steel wheels were spun, concentric wisdom was dropped, and much currency of cool was thrown down whenever La Pink was in tha house.

And ditto for that Lemur. Our booth was overrun with them, wrangled by Meg. Come to think of it, she wrangled the booth visitors, too. Keeping them in line with hours of demofortitude.

The rest of us helped out in the north end of the booth by demoing the Lemur editor during the interdemo periods. The south end of the booth was given over to places to view and marvel at our new UpMix collection of plug-ins, Octirama, our troika of plug-in collections, and that machine over there in the corner. Here’s just a sampling of the hordes of pictures I could have snapped if I hadn’t been so busy or thought to give the camera to someone who wasn’t.

I also finished the second installment of the Buchla 200e review in the current Sound On Sound and decided that the Buchla booth lay somewhat in a straight line to anothertoilet/soda machine vector, so I detoured with my Pepsi to check things out. Mr Buchla himself graced a minimally decorated booth.

The nature of the booth traffic is visible not only in a relative dearth of exciting action demo photos on my part (I am giving them aforementioned demos, and thus otherwise occupied), but also in my relative lack of trade show mobility. There are a few exceptions. 

om-namma-shiva-part-n-where-n3

Om NAMMa Shiva (Part N where N=3)

We’re behind the Apple booth. This is a good thing in that we are beside and right in the demo audio line of fire of the Sony booth; two such circumstances would probably make anyone mad as a hatter.

The booth is an imposing black cube, more or less. I use the term “more or less” because it might be sort of a squatty cube (though imposing at close range). Anyway, the back is apparently a coveted site for having one’s photo taken. I know this because I have taken numerous photos of strangers, since I was sitting in the UpMix Surround Demo Enclosure and Detention Area, which adjoins the Apple border.

There are two interesting things about this imposing black structure. First, there was this guy during booth setup who was assigned to ascend ladder bearing a Sharpie Marker (no, not your Big Boy Tagger Marker (with aromatic esters!)), but the one you address Jiffy Bags with) and color in all the scuffy bits on the booth. It was a time consuming task, and he um… impressed us all with his diligence.

But the more interesting bit concerns the flash bounceback problem. As an example, consider this photo of a Cycling ’74 employee (cough cough) who apparently desired a photo opportunity with Vernon Reid.

Notice that unsightly flash bounceback? What an eyesore! I soon discovered that not shooting portraits head-on was the secret to a good Apple Back Of Booth Picture Opportunity. But I also discovered that clever camera placement and aiming resulted in the following enjoyable photographic special effect:

These hagiographic studies are, in fact, portraits of my colleagues Andrew Pask and Tim Place, whose aid and demeanor in the course of the show thus far must certainly be considered saintly by any reasonable observer.

We’re behind the Apple booth. This is a good thing in that we are beside and right in the demo audio line of fire of the Sony booth; two such circumstances would probably make anyone mad as a hatter. 

om-namma-shiva-part-n-where-n2

Om NAMMa Shiva (Part N where N=2)

Greetings from the Los Angeles equivalent of a serious cold snap (which equates to an exceptionally nice respite from a Midwestern winter). Yes, it’s NAMM time again….

Reading a copy of David Foster Wallace's new collection of essays "Consider the Lobster" really puts one in the mind of doing something with extensive footnotes. I suspect that my writerly skills are such that I would be lucky to manage a whole article that mustered enough grace and style to fill a mere single Wallace footnote, so I'll hyperlink instead.

While I would love to fill these blog entries with exciting tales of attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion and C-beams glittering in the dark by the Tannhauser Gate, it's a little more day-to-day than that.

I flew into L.A. (no longer the City of Angels - this is Anaheim now, I think) to spend some time with my mate Andrew Pask, generally doing the kind of thing one does when you work in a distributed company and your never actually get to hang out with your workplace buddies. Those piquant New Zealand whites from Trader Joe’s, for example.

 do as easily when you’re not in the same room (in our case, radiaLization). We also had some pre-show tasks to do, too - we made a trip to Ed Shearmur's studio to vist with Brian Carraghan and do a little eyeballing/check out of the latest version of our new UpMix surround plug-ins on a ProTools system.

I was somewhat distracted when I realized that I had a finely restored ARP 2500 at the studio (the one you see in "Close Encounters.") to ooh and aah over.

Fortunately, Andrew’s laser-beam focus saved the day.This business also put me in town in time to pay a visit to a current Culver City hotspot to see Andrew performing with Jeff Kaiser, Stuart Liebig, and Steve Lawson at the 

Andrew's a longtime genius in terms of marrying his horns to MSP was an amazing thing to hear live, and it was interesting to hear Jeff Kaiser's almost brand new MSP-based horn rig – the boy’s a quick study. Wow.High-intensity enhanced free improv is one thing, but BACK TO WORK!. A fortifying breakfast on the Sunset Strip (no rockstar sightings. Too early in the day.), and it was off to Anaheim.

I know you all think that trade shows are exciting fun-filled days of meet and greet punctuated by wild nights of partying. Ah, would that were so. Here are some pictures of the process looks like, (sort of). We arrive to find several forlorn tables

and a whole pile of boxes which must be unpacked

The contents are arranged. Carpet tiles for snappy floor patterns

and the spectacular metal frame and spandex Wave Walls.

It's a day and a half of steady work to produce the apparently simple trade show booth where we spend our NAMMs, filled with software downloading and troubleshooting,

and general craziness. I never remember to actually take a picture of the real booth with real stuff in it before all the people come – I always remember when we’ve got half the boxes packed up at the end of the show. Maybe this year will be different.Here, Jill (or office manager) and an unnamed person attached to a hand) welcomes you to a Cycling ’74 NAMM booth already in progress.

No, that means doing work you can’t do as easily when you’re not in the same room (in our case, radiaLization). We also had some pre-show tasks to do, too - we made a trip to Ed Shearmur's studio to vist with Brian Carraghan and do a little eyeballing/check out of the latest version of our new UpMix surround plug-ins on a ProTools system.

Fortunately, Andrew’s laser-beam focus saved the day.This business also put me in town in time to pay a visit to a current Culver City hotspot to see Andrew performing with Jeff Kaiser, Stuart Liebig, and Steve Lawson at the Club Tropical.

Greetings from the Los Angeles equivalent of a serious cold snap (which equates to an exceptionally nice respite from a Midwestern winter). Yes, it’s NAMM time again…. 

om-namma-shiva-part-n-where-n1

Om NAMMa Shiva (part N where N=1)

David Zicarelli

The first version of MSP was released eight years ago -- December 21, 1997 to be exact. As MSP's age now represents a child old enough to read and understand a few rudimentary swear words, I felt it was appropriate to reflect briefly on MSP's past, present, and future.

The origin of MSP was the signal processing additions to Max that were part of the ISPW project at IRCAM. "Audio Max" as it was known to afficionados was actually an unofficial development by Miller Puckette that eventually became the standard tool for productions at IRCAM during the early to mid 1990s. I was at IRCAM during this time and was strongly impressed by the community of knowledge that had developed around Audio Max. Never having used the system myself, I listened in on conversations and looked at other people's patches. When I first sat down and tried to make something, I remember thinking that this was definitely a system for smart people. My goal then, and now, was to see if there was a way to embody some of the intelligence needed to use Audio Max into the software itself, to make it clearer how things worked (or, more importantly, didn't work). I was also fascinated by the community of applied signal processing knowledge embodied by the people at the core of the project such as Miller, Cort Lippe, Zack Settel, Francois Dechelle, and Les Stuck. I was too busy as a Max developer to ever rise to this level of a Max user, but I hoped I could at least pretend to be helpful to power audio users someday.

The more immediate problem was that special-purpose hardware was necessary to run Audio Max, while I was a Mac programmer and the Mac was still a lowly 68000 machine. I managed to compile the source code (knowing that a faster PowerPC processor was on the horizon) but the machine was only able to produce a sine-wave oscillator. I added a multiply object and the machine choked.

After leaving IRCAM I was part of a synthesis project that used an SGI machine, which was at the time the computer of choice for audio that might be relatively interesting. But this was dedicated software for additive synthesis, not a general-purpose architecture like Audio Max. As newer and faster PowerPC Macs began to appear, I kept getting e-mail from ISPW users such as Paul Doornbusch reminding me of their dream to have an ISPW-like system in their Mac with no special hardware. At this time, the first software that did "native" DSP directly on the processor started to appear, perhaps most notably the VST system from Steinberg. Combined with the introduction of audio cards and hacks to fool the operating system into real-time continuous sound processing, the pieces were starting to come together in late 1996 and early 1997. The PowerPC port of Max itself was released in December of 1996.

My first attempt at Audio Max on the Mac was simply to port the ISPW. Most of the work was interfacing the Mac "sound manager" to the signal processing code. In addition, the Mac would need a different model than the ISPW in which audio and timed events were processed together. On the ISPW, the Next cube's 68000 had a copy of the patch for UI purposes. The patch was duplicated on one or more of the processors of the special-purpose DSP board, which alternated between processing audio samples and timed events. The Mac implementation on a single processor required both the real-time audio and the UI to live together. The Mac OS did not really support multi-threading at the operating system level as OS X does today, so the implementation was largely dependent on audio hardware generating periodic interrupts.

After being unable to reach agreement with IRCAM about licensing their software for a personal computer implementation, I decided to start over and base a new design on Miller Puckette's new Pd software. This turned out to be a better solution in the end as I was able to take advantage of features of the Mac version of Max that were lacking in the Next-machine version used by the ISPW. For instance, this new version added the ability to have user interface objects that processed audio, so we were able to have meters, oscilloscopes, and the all-important button that would turn the audio on and off. Other improvements included the distinctive striped audio patch cords, the "auto-update" mechanism that made the audio reflect changes in patching immediately rather than the next time the audio was switched on, and the ability for objects to run different DSP code if signal patch cords were connected.

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MXJ Class Loading

Om NAMMa Shiva (Part N where N=3)

Om NAMMa Shiva (Part N where N=2)

Om NAMMa Shiva (part N where N=1)

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