Vlad Spears, musician, programmer and maker of the Davel.Plugs audio plugins (previously reviewed on CDM) has a write-up about the forthcoming Max/MSP 5. Andrew Benson of Cycling ‘74 gave a presentation at the Bay Area Computer Music Technology Meetup and Vlad kindly drew up a report. Most of the features he describes will not be new to those who’ve been awaiting Max 5, with the possible exception of:

- Say goodbye to [prepend set] messages! Message boxes have a right inlet specifically for this function.

- Multiple live views on the same patch, at different magnification levels. As someone who often builds patches which spill beyond the bounds of a screen, this is fantastic. Changes update in all views simultaneously.

- Object name auto-completion. To quote Andrew, “Several of our developers bought iPhones during development and fell in love with auto-completion.” Arrow through the drop-down list of auto-complete object choices and the Clue window shows information and arguments for each.

The grapevine says that the public beta of Max 5 will drop within several weeks. /me twiddles thumbs…

Ed.: Word we got from Cycling ‘74 at NAMM was that you’ll have the final version by the end of first quarter. I’m actually wondering if they’ll either forgo public beta — or slim it down in length — but that means you’re still just a few weeks away from the next release of Max.

Pd, aka Pure Data, is the free and open-source cousin of Max/MSP/Jitter. It’s powerful — even sometimes having technical advantages over Max — but has suffered from complex installation and dependencies, poor documentation, and an unpolished interface. Enter Pd-extended, a distribution that fills in those gaps. Pd-extended’s maintainer Hans-Christoph writes up what this is all about in an introduction on Create Digital Music, friendly even if you’re new to the Pd world.

Pd, Max’s Free Cousin, Gets Polish and Ease in Extended Build

Visualists should be especially interested in this latest release, because it offers much-improved out-of-the-box support for custom-patched 3D and video — especially if you’re on a Mac, for the PiDiP (though there are Windows and Linux improvements, too, and GEM works even with Windows).

Mac OS improvements:

• Image and video-processing PDP/PiDiP work out-of-box
• Anti-aliasing of boxes and lines in the interface
• New, purty icon

Linux:

• A .deb package for Debian and Ubuntu, with GNOME menu support. (`Bout time! Wonder if this means we’ll see it in the big Ubuntu repositories?)
• New icon

All platforms:

• GEM, the quasi-Jitter-like 3D and pixel library, has working shader support. Ed.: Truly outrageous.
• New libraries: mapping, msd, mrpeach net/OSC, flib
• [comport] is robust on all platforms (can you say Arduino?)
• Font-face and -font-weight command line options
• New font and layout is the exact same size on all platforms to the pixel. (previously you’d see some serious cross-platform glitching)

Pd Extended Release

And lest you have a bad taste in your mouth from the fugly older releases of Pd, Anton (vade) sends along the picture at the top of this story, showing the new UI from the Pd 0.40 dailies running on Mac OS X. Anton is also working on porting some of his brilliant visual patching from Max to Pd — and he’s living proof that even a Max die-hard can find at least some use with Pd, too. (The two environments are really, really close — sometimes confusion switching between them is because they’re so close, the differences can be confusing.)

Mobile, touch control of visual apps? We’ve seen one way to do it; here’s an even more compatible MIDI approach. I think I’d stick to the iPod Touch, personally, just to conserve battery on a phone. But it’s interesting. -PK

Hot on the heels of Mrmr, ArtificialEyes (the Istanbul-based VJ collective) have released i3L MIDI Bridge for the iPhone, which builds on Masayuki Akamatsu’s aka.remote.app, giving those without Max/MSP skills a simple way to bridge their iPhone and audio/video performance software of choice.

i3L (pronounced “i thrill”) is Freeware, and was developed using Max/MSP from Cycling74 and is a support application for aka.remote by Masayuki Akamatsu i3L receives pre-defined UDP messages from aka.remote.app running on the iPhone, scales the values to MIDI, and allows you to configure the sending MIDI channel and control change message number. While this software was developed to work seamlessly with our Real-time 3D VJ software Thrill, you can use this program with any audio or video software which receives midi messages.

If you give i3L a try, let us know how it works out for you in the comments.

artificialeyes.tv
aka.objects by Masayuki Akamatsu — must-have stuff for Max/MSP/Jitter!

Ed.: Does anyone know if multi-touch gestures would be possible in DIY apps? Maybe in February when Apple shares the official SDK? -PK

Though most of what’s new in Max 5 is concentrated in Max and MSP, there will be a few treats for Jitter users. First and foremost is the new Matrix Probe: hover your mouse over a green matrix patchcord and you’ll be presented with a floating preview of the matrix passing through it along with information such as dimensions, planecount and other info. This will be a great timesaver — no longer will you have to drop in four jit.pwindows, four jit.fps’s and jit.unpack to find out whether the video you’re sending is the video you think you’re sending. Gregory Taylor tried to demo the Matrix Probe for me at AES last weekend but it wasn’t working in the build he had on his laptop. Nonetheless, I offer this JPEG as proof:

Other features:

• The ability to drag and drop movies directly into patches will make a big difference for folks developing VJ patches (auto-creating “read foo.mov” messages and such), not to mention the slickness of the new file browser, even though its not yet as integrated as some would like. Ed.: The limitation of the new file browser, as I pointed out on CDMusic, is that you can only use it within a patcher, not in, say, Presentation Mode as a way of browsing files during a performance.
• There will be some performance improvements in Jitter’s matrix operations on the CPU thanks to a recent bug report on jit.rota on the Jitter list.

And, unfortunately, that’s about it — too bad Cycling doesn’t have ten more developers working on Jitter full time. Still, the new (dare I say it?) paradigm in Max 5 will bring much to explore even without, um, totally jitter-free playback of HD and SD footage.

Ed.: It’s possible we’ll see some other enhancements between now and Max 5 ship time, but as has happened in the past, Jitter appears to get a different “rotation” in development than Max — so Jitter got a huge 1.5 update while Max/MSP was largely standing still. We’ll certainly keep tabs on development and let you know more details as they arise. There are quite a lot of general improvements that I’m sure Jitter users will love while we wait on these other needed improvements to Jitter itself; see details in discussion in our general Max coverage from Create Digital Music. -PK

Cycling ‘74 Releases Max 5 Details: Bringing Max Out of the 80s, Into the Future
First Max 5 Preview: Music Patching, the Next Generation?

It’s no secret that a major update to Max/MSP/Jitter is coming from Cycling ‘74, with a major overhaul of the underlying code and an entirely new, friendlier interface. What has been secret is just what that upgrade will look like. We still don’t know what it’ll look like visually, but Cycling ‘74 today released some new details about what it is and isn’t.

In short, it promises to be:

• Easier to use: Multiple undo, debugging tools for patches, and a visual catalog for perusing objects.
• Easier to learn: Integrated, rewritten documentation, even including Web links.
• Easier on the eyes: A new, zoomable patching interface with lots of new goodies — that’s not only skin deep, but makes patches easier to navigate.
• Mo cross-platform: A new code foundation should make Max more modern, reliable, easier to support on C74’s part, and better supported across OSes. It even opens the possibility of someday seeing Max/MSP/Jitter on Linux and not just Mac/Windows.
• Not full of gobs of new objects: Normally this is not a feature, but here, it’s a good thing: by introducing only a few objects, the new Max focuses instead on improving existing objects and building a better environment / platform for the future.

I’m meeting with Cycling ‘74 this week at AES, so hope to have more details then, including more on what’s changed for Jitter users. Audio users should note a big caveat — Pluggo support won’t be present in Max 5 at launch, which is critical to using patches as audio effects and instruments in other hosts, though it sounds as though that may be added at an undetermined point in the future. But on the visual side, it looks like it could be a pretty smooth upgrade: most patches and externals should be compatible, with some potential updates needed for tools that have special UI features. (I imagine some patches will look a little odd, too, once they hit the new UI — worth keeping that older Max copy around, just in case.) Overall, looks like good news. Naturally, we want to know more. Lots more. Soon. I’ll keep you posted.

Java and JavaScript support will continue to work. And that means Processing is supported, as well (via mxj), so this could be a great Processing prototyping environment, or a way of coupling Processing with other features. (See jklabs MaxLink. And yeah, it really does work … very cool. Viva Java.)

Cycling ‘74 Releases Max 5 Details: Bringing Max Out of the 80s, into to the Future [Create Digital Music]

Cycling 74 has updated its Jitter 1.6.3 installer, while there are no new features, they’ve worked hard on optimizing speed for Windows users. I don’t have a Windows machine to benchmark, but if you are a Jitter user on Windows, you might want to give this a once over. Jitter 1.6.3

Ed.: I do have a Windows machine; I’ll try to check it out! Of course, this isn’t necessarily the really big Max news at the moment. It’s interesting, given that Cycling is talking about how different the new codebase is for Max 5 — maybe in fact there are still platform-specific optimizations necessary. That’d make sense for video, in particular, which remains very much platform-specific. (OpenGL is obviously not really an issue — not unless you’re a driver developer.) -PK

Yes. You can now VJ from your iPhone, controlling your Max/MSP/Jitter patch via Safari and the new aka.iphone object from Masayuki Akamatsu of aka.wiiremote fame.

The aka.iphone object is a work in progress, but stay tuned, there’s much fun to be had. Can anyone say “pocket Lemur”?

Lightborne writes us:

Hi, first of all I wanted to say I love the site and have been checking it daily for about a year now, as well as createdigitalmusic. I just came across a clip on youtube that really puts what I’ve seen of people abusing Wii remotes so far to shame. This seems to me to be the first case where it’s passed from the experimental to the creative-use phase. It’s freaking awesome and I’d love to know what software he’s using, perhaps a Max patch?

I’m fairly certain that it’s in fact a Jitter patch — the Mac has the terrific aka.wiiremote object. (See also: CDMusic’s Free Mac Looper for Wii Controller, Wii MIDI Hacking Round-up.)

And the creator is none other than Daito Manabe, the awesome Japanese DJ who created the Turntable-Controlled Vibrating Chaise Longue using Ms. Pinky vinyl. (And, as I recall, he uses Pinky as a vinyl control scheme for VJing as well as music.)

Daito’s website

It takes a turntablist to figure out clever ways of using the Wii remote that don’t reinvent the wheel. What I especially like about this is that the whole system becomes self-contained. It definitely pushes me to build a performance system around the Wii controller rather than the other way around. And he gets some nice, expressive controls in there, as well. Thanks to Lightbourne for this!

If you’re using the Wii remote for your live visuals, let us know how it’s going.