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Beat Mode
Article
Cycling
74 MAX 4 / MSP 2
What's New in Max 4 and MSP 2
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Mac Software
Max/MSP is
a digital & midi toolkit. The great plugin PLUGGO! was written in
MAX/MSP.
Max/MSP combines
the Max graphical programming environment with MSP audio extensions. Together
you'll have close to 400 objects, the building blocks of a complete audio
application development environment.
Sound Design
Max/MSP is a sound design tool
that lets you experiment with techniques that other hardware and software
have declared to be off-limits. Rather than accept the standard parameter
ranges chosen for you by a synthesizer manufacturer or audio editing program,
you can try any value and change it in any way you see fit.
So what are the new features???
Here is a highlight of what to expect in Cycling 74's MAX 4 MSP 2 software.
What's New
in Max 4 and MSP 2
Version 4 of Max is the first
major upgrade in almost five years, and brings the interactive graphical
programming environment into the new century with hundreds of new features
both big and small.
MSP 2 has an overwhelming number
of new objects and capabilities. The new audio I/O capabilities open up
new uses for Max/MSP in conjunction with other software and hardware.
Plus major new objects such as poly~, waveform~, and filtergraph~ are
the building blocks of incredible audio applications.
Together, Max 4 and MSP 2 provide
you with close to 400 objects, 1500 pages of documentation, and 88 tutorials.
Inspectors
Most dialog boxes
in Max have been replaced with patcher windows that were created with
new and powerful interface-building tools. This means you can use Max
to redesign the interface of Max! Inspectors can be viewed in a floating
window.
Floating-Point
Scheduling
Max's scheduler
is now accurate to the resolution of the timer you're using, and all timing
objects operate in floating-point milliseconds. When synchronized to the
audio processing in MSP, the Max scheduler executes with a precision as
high as two samples.
Scripting
Simple scripting
commands can create, connect, move, hide, and delete objects in a patcher.
Extras
The new Extras
menu lists all patchers dropped into the new extras folder. Max includes
a number of useful tools you'll want to use repeatedly, and we expect
many more to appear as Max users imagine new ways to customize their environment.
Editing Improvements
Color patch cords Audio and
event patch cords can be one of 16 standard colors. Don't like our 16
standard colors? Use the Edit Colors window to choose your own.
Contextual menus
You can control-click on an
object, patch cord, or patcher to set properties such as color, visibility,
and layer. Other contextual menus let you create new objects and set global
patcher properties.
Background layer
Objects can be moved into the
background where they are out of the way of patcher editing. The background
or foreground can be hidden while editing, as well as the object palette
and all patch cords.
Origin control
You can save and restore the
top-left position of the patcher window (very useful when creating bpatchers
or plug-ins).
MSP Performance
Improvements
G4 Velocity Engine (Altivec)
vector optimizations of operators and FFT-based objects
Signal vector size can be as low as 2 samples
512 virtual I/O channels, dynamically remapped to audio device channels
More
info on the new
features of MAX/MSP can be found at Cycling 74's web site.
Check
out our free
Atmospheric Samples
Diary
of a New Computer - making music
on a new Pentium 4
Digital
Audio Multitrack Recording Tips and Tricks
Problems
with Cubase VST 5.0 on the PC - a nightmare story.
Arpeggiators
- info and links.
Motu
24i - 24 bit PCI Card
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