Max for Live runs as part of Live, so it's in a different process to "real" Max. If you open a Max for Live device it's in Max temporarily, but when closed it's back in Live and so can't do send/receive to/from other patchers in Max.

udp should work fine between M4L and Max, though - in fact, I've done it.

Agreed. Use udp for all my m4l to max communication with no problems

I use udp constantly, and it's not without problems, tbh. Mainly it's when opening/closing editors for patches in Live - udpreceive will try to bind to already bound ports, etc.

in fact, does anyone know of a simple solution to this? I should ask in a separate thread, I guess.

Didn't we have this discussion at the Max conference a year ago? Yes, machine-global resources (like IP ports) are a pain to handle when running programs are being thrown between two different processes. There may be a combination of loadbang/closebang/device-ready messages which will make it work, but it won't be pretty...

anyway;

I just open my Max/Live combination with [upd] and now they are happily sending and receiving. let's see what tomorrow brings ...