MusicRadar

Confused? Luckily Max 6 has a great set of help features on hand.

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• Review

At first sight, Cycling '74's epic modular audio/MIDI/video design environment Max looks like a patchable synth construction kit with modules, patch cords and all the rest of it. But dig deeper and you'll see that there's much, much more to it than just that.

The Max part of Max/MSP began life as a MIDIevent and SysEx processor, and it still features a quirky collection of modules devoted to processing numbers, word lists and user interaction. Most modules - even those that process and generate audio - are controlled by text messages and numbers.

Once you've learned how messages work, you can start to build simple MIDI effects such as splitters and velocity scalers. It's not much harder to build more complex toys, such as scale quantisers and chord recognisers.

"Gen enables you to create super-efficient custom modules without having to write code in C/C++"

Potentially, you could build a complete MIDI performance system with auto-generated live support crafted to order - just ask ambient/techno maestro Apparat!

About 15 years ago, audio processing was added to Max in the shape of MSP. It includes a fine selection of sample players, waveform generators, filters, audio delays, envelopes and more.

MSP's built-in spectral processing features also enable the creation of pitchshifters and spectral delays, and if you've got the DSP skills you can even design custom filters from scratch.

In 2003, a table and array processor called Jitter arrived alongside Max 4. Jitter is mostly used for video and graphics - video frames are just number arrays - but it can also be used for any other applications that use tables, including menu tables and statistical analysis. Like MSP, Jitter is still very much part of Max.

Most recently, in 2009, Cycling '74 teamed up with Ableton and released Max for Live, intended to give Live and Max users a bridge between their worlds, bringing timeline-based workflow to Max users, and giving Live users custom-built devices, expanded interface access, and new levels of hardware control.

The power of 6

Max 6, then, is Cycling '74's (long overdue, some might say) attempt to bring all the elements of Max/MSP together and make them more accessible to newcomers. Visually, the interface has been tidied up, with curvy new patch cords and object alignment lines making it easier to create clean-looking, easy-to-follow patches.

Max can still be seriously hard to get into. Even if you're an expert synth programmer, it takes a while to learn the most useful modules and get used to its quirky feature-set.

There are many small idiosyncrasies to remember - patches are called 'patchers', for example - and a few bigger ones, like the fact that events run through modules from top-right to bottom-left.

To ease the pain, Max 6 includes some of the best help features we've ever seen. There is a series of introductory tutorials for Max, MSP and Jitter, and every single module comes with its own demo/help patch - sorry, patcher - that interactively demonstrates its features.