Max 8.1 Released

thanks for writing a full reply.

Regarding the multithreaded performance, when PARALLEL has already been set to 1, the problem still occurs. It doesn't matter if the THREADCOUNT attribute has no or inconsistent effects. It seems THREADCOUNT should just be deprecated currently. Whatever the state of the PARALLEL attribute. It's still not possible to use >50% of the available CPU on an i5. When the cpu meter reaches 100%, which is measured for one core without taking burst mode into account, regardless whether Max is set to limit cpu or not, the audio starts stuttering, and it doesn't matter what the PARALLEL attribute is, or how many more cores there are in the system. While I understand this could be an OS issue, rather than a C74 issue, it remains a problem for C74, because, as long as there is no accurate CPU usage reporting, it will never be possible to add parallel processing inside Ableton Live either, which is why I mention it at all after so long. Maybe we are all so used to seeing MacOS report 167% of the CPU is being used, we stopped thinking it might be an obstacle to future progress. These issues have been true at least since 2007, and maybe some things have been true so long, people started just taking them for granted, but that's how it's been for at least 12 years, and now its going to be a problem for C74 moving forward.

And regarding all such issues, the story goes like this. When we say somethings, we are asked to send support an example. But for standalones, we have no example from C74 as a starting point. So now I have to turn the tables and again ask C74 for an example of how we are meant to make standalones with auto restore, and a pattrstorage object that reads files on open, saves user data on app exit, and which work consistently in patches, windows standalones, and Macs standalones, and it would be nice if it worked in M4L too. If it is true that it is merely a problem with permissions, there is no logical reason why the patch just modify itself, which really would make things much simpler for us. Of course I doubt that is such a simple solution.

Whatever be the answer to that, I don't believe a working example of a patch which does have auto restore and a transparent save of preset changes in standalone and M4L is an unreasonable request either. It has ALSO been an ongoing request for users since 2007. C74 first reponded by adding a 'project' feature which moves files around and thus makes it even more difficult to save files. So we stumbled along doing everything for ourselves a new way, without any working example, and discovered really the project file doesn't do anything new at all. So first users shared ways for windows7 and macOs prior to High Sierra. Then users shared how to do it on High Sierra. Now the way which worked on High Sierra doesn't work as before.

I just reached the end of my patience on this problem. I don't understand this thing about missing Windows10 files being a problem for the user to solve because it depends what objects are in the patch. That was meant to be the problem which C74 said it was solving in the first place with its build system a long time ago. Also, the Windows64 build is now as large as the Mac build, I typically get 125MB builds for my apps, which do need C74 resources and gen, but what confuses me is, the Windows build is now 80MB larger than it used to be, but we are still being told to add files manually, and if we object to the file size, prune files out manually too? Isn't that what the build system is meant to do automatically??? Do you have any idea how many people have said exactly the same thing in the past???? It is easily in the dozens, maybe even a hundred times, Ive seen this same statement in the forums, then sometimes the options change, and the build gets smaller for a while...then it gets bigger again and the same things come around again...how many more times will people go through this loop again????? As there is an automated build system, why are we going through it at all??????

That's why I have lost patience. Basically, I don't believe it should be the customer responsibility to figure out new solutions every time a new Max version is paid for, that's all. When we purchase new Max upgrades, we kind of think we are paying for these kind of things to be fixed so we can enjoy the new features. I don't believe that is an unreasonable expectation. The reason I am out of patience is that there is another tier of standalone issues we'd like to get to, like being able to remove 'overdrive' from the menu, or being able to write makefiles, or being able to get accurate window coordinates (that was fixed once, but since the new sliding toolbar thingies were added, I have to measure them manually with another application again). It's pointless even thinking such things could get resolved, because we are still going around in circles on many exact same bigger issues which have been going on for at least a decade now.