Max 9 abl.dsp objects

Leonard Zajdek's icon

Well the [abl.dsp.whatever~] objects turn Max / MSP into a whole different ballgame - I am impressed - recreated the [abl.device.drift~] in the userguide and wow - pretty nifty - and all those objects - the Help files are v entertaining - looks like its going to be late night for me - Excellent work Cycling '74

Iain Duncan's icon

I am so damn excited for these. The lack of easy, prebuilt, great sounding virtual analog has long been a significant reason people choose other platforms (Reaktor, VCV, Bitwig, etc). I've been hoping this would happen for over a decade!

This, combined with all the attention to scripting, is (IMHO) going to be a major driver for Max adoption and take Max and Max for Live into all kinds of studios where it's never been enough of a problem solver.

I'm super excited to drive these with Scheme for Max and hook them up in hybrid work flows of Max, Gen, and Csound. Sure hope I can get the REPL to play nicely with Scheme for Max too...

Massive Kudos on the release everyone! Can't wait for the Max 9 version of M4L and the SDK. :-)

Roman Thilenius's icon

no idea what complete effects are doing in a programming language... which originally was a tool to create such effects? :)

live4max?

Iain Duncan's icon

Miller Puckette has stated in interviews and papers that he orginally created Max at IRCAM to make an environment for composers so that they didn't need programmers. Max is simply not a programming language. It doesn't even exist outside of a running program - when we patch, we connect instantiations of objects in a running program. It is a programming environment, but not a programming language.

Nor was it originally a tool to create such effects, Max had no audio processing at all until after Miller added that to PureData, which was then copied into Max and first released as MSP. When I first used Max in 1996, we had to pipe out to external synthesis sources. Manipulating, orchestrating, and sending messages to prebuilt synthesizers and fx was the entire point!

And finally, this approach is not new to Max. The default library has had complete fx and synthesis objects for ages, including the Beap library since 2013.

Roman Thilenius's icon

love that quote, but tend to disagree. max and pd were clearly more "programming" than making music back in the nineties. it is already difficult to import and export files compared to normal music programs.

haha, well, when MSP started out there was no such thing as premade effects. the only thing which came at one point were those three bandlimited oscillators. and now that we have gen~ and hundreds of third party effects and thousands of vst plug-ins we have an ableton delay object in addition? what makes it special?

list view and synthax highlighting is great, but leave me alone with modulation effects.

you can literaly smell a wave of new youtube tutorials coming out about "how to make a delay" (= by using one object). feels like end time.
before you had at least to find and copy the simpleFM help patch to make simpleFM, now you have an simpleFM external which does the same, except that you do not really know what it does.^^

(today is ignorance day in 110 land, that´s obvious.)

Michael Bräuninger's icon

I also look forward to try these new features. whatever it is.... The good thing is if you are experienced enough you can go the "i patch it myself" route and maybe use these new features/effects as a addon to create something new and exciting. My personal approach is not to limit myself by conventions or habits, personal barriers like a "how things should be" mentality.

It´s funny there are these limitations by people coming up in every creative area here and there. Wether it´s djing with the sync button debate (aka vinyl vs cd´s in the late 90´s), or the "is it more real" to use synths only, or just sample packs or even program your whole environment in music production. I really couldn´t care less about these questions...At the end it does not matter at all how you achieved something.

If it´s important to you what others think of you, then i guess it might be important to you to let everyone know how you achieved something. fair enough.

I embrace change and i try new things to my benefit first before i question them wether these changes fit into my "agenda" or not. I also try to give others the feeling that there are no rules when being creative. I produce music, so for me the outcome is the most important thing, the path to that should be a journey in a fun environment without limitations to get the most out of it.

vichug's icon

yeah as others here, have been dreaming of live4max for some time, so happy to see that it is real now :))

Jan M's icon

@110_Land:

Get your point. Great thing though is: no one is forced to use them :)

For educational purposes it could have been nice to release those as a gen~ abstraction package. My guess is that there are some copyright issues with that approach.

personally I am very happy to have more choices now to go down the “get to a result fast” or “dig deeper and learn the basics “

Iain Duncan's icon

My understanding is we are getting the actual DSP code (compiled into black box objects) that is used in Ableton devices. They are, of course, not building things in Gen, so rebuilding them in Gen would be a lot of work for them, would performe worse (I can't imagine they are using only single sample processing), and would result in sharing code that is part of their competitive differentiation. So while I agree that it would be super cool to see under the hood, I'm not surprised they didn't.

I'm super excited to combine these with Csound and Gen objects on a block-by-block basis, that's going to be amazing. Csound and Gen are both good for some really cool stuff that can be outputed over MSP cables, but virtual analog is its own hugely complex rabbit hole and I honestly don't have any need to figure out how to make great band-limited VA oscillators and filters from scratch.

The thing that is, IMHO, super cool here is that we get these VA building blocks in a non-midi context. We can control them in much more sophisticated ways than is possible in Live (other than in Max for Live) or in VST instruments, allowing things like look-ahead-glide and true monophonic envelope behaviour. Sure it's been done to death, but I look forward to the tsunami of 303 emulators, because the 303 glide SOUNDS GREAT. :-)

Jan M's icon

I hope I didn't sound negative I really like these new objets and the release.

Iain Duncan's icon

I really feel for C74 sometimes, no matter what they put in, there is an avalance of online complaining. In this release they have catered to the entire spectrum of Max users: coding is better, so is lashing together prebuilt things, so is jitter, so is the workflow, UI, integration, the whole nine yards. They hit it out of the park on this one, and I'm hugely impressed that the Ableton-Max partnership is now giving us additions to Max as well. Making good VA components is a ton of work. For people like me who enjoy coding at the lowest level but also just want to hear a great filter getting dirty sometimes, Max 9 as a platform is far and away the most productive option.

Mitch Triplett's icon

"...Instant music, subtlety later..."

- Perry Cook

For many, many, many people, the abl objects will make it possible for them to "make sound immediately, simply and reliably."

That's good thing IMHO.

tyler mazaika's icon

I've been programming in Max for so long, but it's been 99% Max and 1% MSP. Having pre-built, good-sounding (and more efficient) building blocks is pretty appealing…

Wil's icon
For many, many, many people, the abl objects will make it possible for them to "make sound immediately, simply and reliably."

100% agree

however

[mc.device.abl.iscurrentlyunable]

thinking it through they are heavily designed to take advantage of stereo mixing

so it might not make sense to have @chans 25 (each chan mono)

unless the internal algorithm was designed adapt to chan number

or mc.abl.device.multichannel.mix that auto adapts to number of channels of device coming in

with mc.target or mc.list attributes that allow different amounts of reverb, delay, feedback etc for each channel (pingpong would be interesting in mc!)

a lot of updates coming to 9!

thanks for the new stuffs!


Tikoda's icon

Excited to have good reliable oscillators and filters that sound nice that I can make multi channel with ease!

Time to make my dream poly synth woop woop