Running Max on Raspberry Pi

Maria Simmons's icon

Hey! I'm wondering if it would be possible to run a Max patch off a Raspberry Pi. All the forum posts I've seen on this topic are quite old and I'm hoping perhaps someone has figured out whether this is possible! Or if there's another small device that would work in the same way. Thanks in advance friends!

L0VECHILD's icon

I would also like to know. Please let us know, thanks!

Anthony Palomba's icon

You can not run Max on a Raspberry PI. But you can run Max on a UDOO X86 ...

UDOO X86 II is an x86 maker board and an Arduino all embedded on the same board. Running Windows 10, 8.1, 7

ygreq's icon

Now with Raspberry Pi 4, did anyone try to run Max somehow?

Simon Blakely's icon

> Now with Raspberry Pi 4, did anyone try to run Max somehow?

How?

It's seriously not possible with anything like real-time performance.
The Raspberry Pi 4 cannot run either Windows or MacOS, and is the wrong architecture (ARM as opposed to x86) to use WINE on Linux to run Windows binaries.
You could use QEMU or Bochs to emulate x86 hardware on an ARM cpu, but the performance would be abysmal.

Pure Data, on the other hand, does run fine on Raspberry PI, and would run extremely well on a Raspberry PI 4. You would just need to rewrite your Max patches for PureData.

ygreq's icon

I just found this, but it seems it is for older Raspberry models.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQBE1oP_lRo

Simon Blakely's icon

Even if you can install and run the ARM Windows 10 install on a Raspberry Pi 4 (which might be an OK level of performance on the 4Gb Pi), there is still no ARM-architecture version of Max to install on it.

ygreq's icon

I understand. Thank you very much for your input!!

yaniki's icon

Of course the ARM CPU architecture is becoming more and more popular (ARM based Windows machines are already available on the market and birds are chirping that Apple will also abandon Intel architecture), so who knows what else we will see?

Robert Smith's icon

there is already PD running on the pi but I prefer max.

ygreq's icon

I tried installing PD on Raspberry Pi a year ago. Didn't go well. Do you have a link to a great tutorial?

Luke Woodbury's icon

I've been using PD on the Pi Zero a lot and it works great, particularly as you can run PD with no GUI (wish Max could do that!), so you can run the Pi headerless and PD non graphically. Saying that, I have only used PD vanilla and been doing fairly simple audio stuff, ish. Its been fairly straightforward installing the latest version of Raspbian and then doing 'sudo apt-get install puredata'. I have used it with simple USB audio devices and digital I2S DACs which are a bit more faff. I am working on something right now that I will put a tutorial up for eventually, just need to finish the thing first...

ygreq's icon

I am into graphics and physical computing. For starters what I wanted to achieve with Max on Raspberry (but in this case it seems PD is the way to go) was to stream a video from another computer using Max and play it on a monitor. Anyways, I will look into PD and try again to install it

ygreq's icon

Waiting on that tutorial, though :)

Ed Fildes's icon

Pretty late to the party but I've been looking for an answer to this same question, it looks like you can now export max patches to Raspi using RNBO for Max
https://cycling74.com/products/rnbo

Jan M's icon

@ED FILDES Yupp, works like a charm :)