How to post patches to the forum

Max patcher files are in a text-based format, so they are easy to share. You can copy all or part of a patcher to the clipboard, then paste it into a forum post. You can also find patches in the forum posted by other users, copy them to the clipboard, and paste them into Max.

Posting patches
The proper way to paste patches into the forum with Max 5 is with the compressed text format. The text is "unreadable" but will be a small fraction the size of the usual text format.

Select the part of the patch you wish to copy
Choose Copy Compressed from the Edit menu to copy the selected objects to the clipboard
Switch to your browser and paste the contents of the clipboard into your post window.

With Max 4, there is no Copy Compressed option, so choose Edit -> Copy. The rest of the instructions are the same.

Opening patches posted to the forum
Max can create objects from text on the clipboard in the old Max 4 text format, the Max 5 format, or the compressed format.
Because there may be a lot of text involved in the patcher data, the easiest technique for selecting all of the data is select a line at the beginning of the text, then scroll to the end of the message and Shift-click to select the end of the text.

Once all of the text is selected, choose Copy from the Edit menu in your browser. If you are manually selecting all the data, be sure to include the begin_max5_patcher and end_max5_patcher lines in their entirety.

Switch to Max. If you want to create a new patcher window with the patcher data you've received, choose New From Clipboard from the File menu. A new patcher window will appear with the objects from the forum post.

If you want to paste the objects in the forum post into an existing unlocked patcher, choose Paste from the Edit menu.