The best place to start is with the tutorials included in Max. There really isn't a short cut. Before you can get into audio and video stuff (with any depth), you have to understand basic Max principles and objects.. particularly when it comes to midi.

Go to help -> Max tutorials and start going through the list. Each tutorial has a sample patcher that you can edit.

You will also find MSP and Jitter tutorials in the same section.

Thanks, Metamax ... I realize there isn't a short cut. What I'm wondering is whether the path will lead me to where I want to go, in other words, is Max/Jitter an appropriate environment for what I'm interested in? I don't want to put in the many hours it would take to become fluent in this technology, only to find that the latency is too big, or some other problem prevents it from doing what I want!

What I've noticed in the examples I've seen - and it's very possible I just haven't found the right examples - is that the video pretty much does its own thing while the music plays. There isn't a sense of immediate connection between the musical notes and what happens in the video. What I'm looking for is something where the beginning of a note happens simultaneously with the appearance of some object (or as close to simultaneous as possible), and the objects hang around for a while being animated in various ways, so that there might be hundreds of such objects on screen at once. I can do this directly in code, but it's a pain (and latency does become an issue at a certain point). My hope is that Max/Jitter can make it easier to do cool things along these lines.

Is this an appropriate use for Max/Jitter, or will latency or other performance issues end up making it unfeasible?

Thanks for any thought!

Bill

You can absolutely do your sphere example in Jitter - no problem. Look at jit.gl.multiple, and the jit.phys objects, if you're uncertain, and then dive in to the tutorials.

But yes, with any realtime environment, lots and lots of objects rendered on screen can reduce your framerate - but any modern machine should be able to deal with a huge mess of objects, no problem.

Thanks Wetterberg! I will dig in to the tutorials.