It is worth mentioning at this stage that the arrival of Max For Live as a paid‑for option, and the discontinuation of Pluggo, changes the landscape for developers who want to distribute plug‑ins, and for musicians who want to take advantage of developers' efforts. In short, Max For Live is the new Pluggo: it's Ableton‑only, but much more powerful and better integrated with its host. Pluggo has been discontinued, mainly because of the mounting technical challenges of supporting a large number of incompatible hosts, but the core technology lives on inside Max For Live, and many of the original Pluggo instruments have been included. And, of course, Max also benefits from access to Live's instruments and effects, such as polyphonic, multi‑zoned sample playback (which Max is capable of, but not without a fair degree of pain).įinally, Max For Live provides a home for all the worthwhile bits of Cycling 74's Pluggo, which was both a tool for building VST plug‑ins from Max patchers, and a collection of pre‑built instruments and effects. These are the things that Live brings to the relationship. More seriously, Max has no features supporting time‑based organisation of material: while it's easy to construct timers and calculate beats and bar lines, this falls far short of a linear, multitracked, sequenced, automation‑capable environment. Its support for MIDI and audio file organisation, recording and playback, while perfectly usable, is a little on the primitive side, and session‑based file management is non‑existent. Despite Max's power and flexibility, it has a few shortcomings. It is perhaps less clear what Live brings to Max. The 'edit button' concept also breaks down the idea that built‑in components have to be fixed in their function: if you want to redesign one of Max For Live's instruments or effects, or change what it does and how it works, you can - while the music plays on. Max, however, completely removes Live's limits, making it infinitely extensible. Live has access to a huge number of instruments and effects through Ableton's Suite of instruments and its support for VST plug‑ins, and it is remarkably versatile in its ability to construct instrument racks and macro groupings. It is clear enough what Max brings to Live. The idea behind Max For Live was born, and nearly a decade later, the technology has been developed to actually make it work. The world of Max has always been about altering things on the fly, in real time, without interrupting the creative flow, and in a chance meeting at the time Live 1.0 was launched, Ableton's Robert Henke commented to Cycling 74's David Zicarelli that what Live needed was a similar versatility: a special 'edit button' to allow built‑in effects to be altered and modified directly without stopping the music. But the fact that both are seen on stage so often suggests some common creative outlook, and now we have Max For Live, the result of a close collaboration between the two companies, and a concrete example of how similarly they view the process of musical performance.
The former is MaxMSP, Cycling 74's open‑ended graphical media toolkit for MIDI, audio and video that's been a favourite of narrow‑spectacled sound artists for two decades the latter is Ableton's Live, the sleek, easy‑to‑use, loop‑oriented sequencer that is a favourite of DJs everywhere and is becoming established as a sophisticated, full‑blown audio workstation.Īt first glance, the two packages couldn't be more different: an unruly, academic‑looking laboratory workbench from a bunch of media artists based in San Francisco, versus an exquisitely designed and crafted sequencing platform from Germany. If you peer over the shoulder of a typical laptop musician in the middle of a gig, the chances are that you'll see one of two things: either an incomprehensible, complicated‑looking rat's nest of ragged coloured boxes connected by lines, or a neat, grey spreadsheet‑like grid above a strip of slim, regimented control panels and waveforms. Suddenly your device is displayed as a patcher in the Max editing window for real‑time modification. Max For Live devices act like other Live devices until you click the Edit button. But what if you could mangle the devices themselves?
Ableton Live's 'devices' offer powerful tools for mangling sounds in live performance.
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