Sarah Angliss

I've been using Max in live gigs and installations for many years, have a copy of M4L but have been reluctant to use it as I'm wary about introducing anything into my live setup where I'm not confident of its stability. Over the last year or so, however, I've been working more with UK theatre companies. They prefer to use QLab, the cueing system, and a few of them venture into Ableton Live. I'd love to add Max to that setup so I can use sound more dynamically in a theatre setting. To do so, I need to feel confident about stability.

What are the latest thoughts on the stability of M4L? To be good enough for theatre use, I need to feel more than reasonably confident a patch won't crash - my nightmare scenario is a patch crashing during a show, when I'm not there running it. Does anyone using M4L in such a scenario have anything to report? From experience I know Max itself would be fine in that setup - but I'm nervous about M4L.

When I last ventured into M4L, the thing that caused the most headaches was anything involving a poly~ - a function I use extensively in Max itself to get the right kind of naturalistic, multilayered effects. Usually, when I edited anything connected to a poly~ in M4L, I had to cross my fingers that the software wouldn't crash. From memory, it was a 50/50 chance this would happen, using the latest M4L and Albeton 9. Am I missing a trick here?

Hello
I've been using Max in live gigs and installations for many years, have a copy of M4L but have been reluctant to use it as I'm wary about introducing anything into my live setup where I'm not confident of its stability. Over the last year or so, however, I've been working more with UK theatre companies. They prefer to use QLab, the cueing system, and a few of them venture into Ableton Live. I'd love to add Max to that setup so I can use sound more dynamically in a theatre setting. To do so, I need to feel confident about stability.

When I last ventured into M4L, the thing that caused the most headaches was anything involving a poly~ - a function I use extensively in Max itself to get the right kind of naturalistic, multilayered effects. Usually, when I edited anything connected to a poly~ in M4L, I had to cross my fingers that the software wouldn't crash. From memory, it was a 50/50 chance this would happen, using the latest M4L and Albeton 9.  Am I missing a trick here?

m4l-and-poly-vs-max-and-poly-stability

A lot of the Ableton M4L content is also based around poly~-.

I'd consider it quite stable - but as usual, it really depends on the what and how.

Generally it's preferably to stay in signal domain for example and so on.

A lot of the Ableton M4L content is also based around poly~-.
I'd consider it  quite stable - but as usual, it really depends on the what and how.
Generally it's preferably to stay in signal domain for example and so on.

M4L and poly~ vs Max and poly~ stability?