MaxforLIVE pricing & release dates..

The Ableton site now has release dates & pricing up for MaxforLIVE here – releases November 23 and is US$300 to buy or US$99 if you already own Max 5, which I do so WAHOOO!!!! If you dont want to wait you can download the public beta here

I think this is the most important new feature ever added to LIVE, solely because it makes the software open to developmental experimentation. A long time ago I bought both Max/MSP & Jitter as well as Pluggo and I even managed to make a functioning pluggo which wasn’t too disimilar to the one above in concept – basically a DDL with a LPF in the feedback path… And it worked! And I learned lots in the process of making it but also came to realise you need to be committed to learning MaxMSP to really achieve complex tasks with it. Oh how I wish I was 18 years old, had just got my first laptop & MaxforLIVE! Well almost…

Relatedly I had a revelation about MaxMSP, when I was in Berlin for the Berlinale Talent Campus. One day I left early & went to the photography museum where there was an excellent installation by a well known photographer (I can’t remember his name – i’ll update this when I do) and while the photos were beautiful the installation was just fantastic! It was in a space the size of a tennis court & the photos were projected onto huge canvases, freely hanging from the ceiling. They were arranged in a big slow spiral so you sort of entered this enclosed space… There was an accompanying drone-esque soundtrack but I suddenly noticed that if you went up close to the canvases the soundtrack would change: there were sensors tracking the viewers position!!!

On the way leaving the exhibition I picked up a copy of the brochure about the exhibition & there in the credits was someone tagged as Max/MSP/Jitter developer!!! AHAR!!!!! Until then I had been astonished that a photographer had invested the time & energy to learn & implement such technology, but reading that catalog made me realise it was a collaborative art…. By the time I got back to NZ I was determined to find an experienced MaxMSP programmer to help me develop some ideas I had. I had used MaxMSP enough to know I needed to go away for 3 years & learn it properly to do what I wanted, and 3 spare years I simply do not have. So I put ads in the local online arts forums but sadly it was 12 months before anyone replied & that was from a person living in Amsterdam & while I like the idea of working remotely, there simply is no substitute for talking & brain storming in person, in real time so I didn’t pursue it with them….

Three more years pass & I get an email from a young guy who has just graduated in Design & who lives in Wanganui (a town about 3 hours from me) & who’s final year project was a MaxMSP audio application! And this is total serendipity, he was coming to Wellington that weekend to go to the same concert I was going to (Rhythm & Sound) – perfect! So we met up, I explained my ideas & now six months later we are close to having a finished application! Its been a great experience working on a custom piece of software and especially challenging shifting from the ‘i have a dream’ mode to the necessity of specifying features & implementation… I’ve happily funded Joe, the developers, time although we have probably both learned a lot about realistic time frames; its an evolutionary process.
And no its not an audio progam! But thats about all I’ll say, other than it also will never be realeased – its sole purpose is to enable a way of working for me on an art project that currently is either impossible or incredibly, painstakingly labour intensive, to the point of psychological RSI! You wont ever get to use my little program, but you will definitely get to experience the results of it, sooner or later…. But enough about me, here’s a demo of Joe’s graduation project, one little taste of what will be possible with MaxforLIVE… And I will also say this: whoever makes a quad or 5.1 panner for ableton LIVE using MaxforLIVE I am happy to reward however they see fit, within reason!

Joe Salmon, UI/IU