Obfuscated Max for Live devices

distantnoise's icon

Hello Max/MSP community. I'm about to deepen my knowledge of Max/MSP (using Max for Live). I understand the overall structure and big parts of the Live API, however I'm still at the beginning of my journey.

Quite often, I open max for live devices from other persons to see how a certain problem / task is solved. Lately I stumbled over of "locked" devices. Some example of this locking: (1) I can't enter the edit mode. (2) Sometimes the Max window collapse after trying to open the device. (3) the objects in a patch are arranged in one place, making it hard to see how things are connected.

I found this in free as well as in commercial products. Is there a way to overcome this?

Thanks

sousastep's icon

most of the obfuscation is done with thispatcher, so if you open the maxpat in a texteditor and replace thispatcher with hahahah then you may be able to get in.

if the objects are arranged in one place then you'll have to manually reorganize it. select all, then menubar > arrange > distribute can help with that.

some crafty folks have even figured out how to convert the json to binary, but you can just drag n drop the patch into another patch and save, which converts the binary back to json

Source Audio's icon

If creator of the patch - standalone or m4l device decided

to try to keep it unaccessible for others, then one should respect that.

If yoo try to eliminate stuff like loadbang, loadmess, thispatcher,

js scripts - (which are used to scramble objects when one tries to exit presentation mode,

or unlock patcher), atoi/itoa tricks etc ... be aware that mxf files have a checksum,

so don't change number of bytes in the file.

replacing thispatcher (11 chars) with hahahah ( 7 chars)

will make the file unusable.

distantnoise's icon

Thank you for the replies. I will not waste my time to further investigating this topic. I'd rather focus on learning, Max. And there are always enough devices to learn from (free and commercial). And just for the record, in case someone else is interested in this topic, I've found a more detailed discussion here: https://cycling74.com/forums/how-to-prevent-m4l-device-from-being-edited#reply-58ed21496908cf22c8394716