Who is gen~ for?

I feel like somebody's use of gen really depends on their background and their interests, and what sort of sound manipulation or coding environments they're used to. I'm still a bit of a novice in Max (probably about 6 months deep) but had I not spend a few months with regular Max I don't know how easily I would have been able to grasp how to use gen~ effectively.

Anyway, I'll just give a personal example of my own gen~ use and maybe that will help answer your question.

I originally bought Max for the purpose of designing different brands of stutter effects and had no previous experience in these sorts of effects before, but had a little experience in visual and nonvisual coding. I spent a couple months learning the ropes and designing different interfaces using some of MSP's objects for buffer playing (record~, play~, groove~, and eventually peek~, poke~, etc.). The last two objects started to give me a bit of difficulty when trying to built them into the rather complex interfaces I had made for the record~/groove~ effects, but the record~/groove objects lacked the precision that i needed for the types of really interesting effects i wanted. At this point I felt like I kind of hit a wall and ended up taking a break to start working with jitter (which interestingly ended up being my primary and most practical use for Max)

Enter Max 6. When the beta came out the first thing I investigated was gen~ and I immediately took a crack at some of my old abandoned stutter/buffer juggling effect designs. All the really precise data controlling that seems overly complex/convoluted using some old Max objects and impossible using others, came together in a couple days using gen~. Controlling very precisely on a sample level where the buffer was being played through and how in response to the interface controls was greatly aided by gen's very basic logic operations, codebox, and general simplicity. Now, I'm having trouble building half of the entire patch in a gen object.

So basically, after some experience with other max objects I needed something simpler and more precise to be able to work with data on a more basic level and gen~ fit the bill. In my case, I would not have needed these things or gen~ had I not been introduced to those sorts of needs or to the Max interface through a few months of regular Max/MSP patching. I have a feeling that next when I try do to some more direct and basic video image processing for live visuals I'll experience the same thing, but I haven't felt the need to just yet because so far the jitter objects have been serving my purposes just fine. I'm finally starting to encounter things that I wish I could do more directly and precisely, and once that builds up a bit I'll start looking towards jit.gen.

Like I said, this is just my particular experience and I'm sure it'll be different for each different person/background/purpose. If you have no need for precision at a basic level in your application or no interest in the sort of coding it entails, then this will not happen to you. Conversely, if all you want to do is basic signal processing level stuff, then you probably won't be able to help but jump right into gen~.

Hope this helps.