Comment by fnordlord
2 days ago
I really hope that Max becomes fully accessible in a text based format one day. It's so cool and I've spent a few months randomly through the years building neat plugins for Ableton but, for me, it would be so much stickier if it was code. Especially now with AI assistance, Claude can still be helpful but it hallucinates a lot harder when trying to describe visual code.
Max is basically a programming language already: message passing, scheduling, state, abstraction, even metaprogramming
you can get the LLM to output max patches in JSON and copy paste directly into max. it was pretty decent at it when I tried and would probably be even better with relevant recent documentation in context.
Would love to see this, as someone who has been heavily using Live since 2006 and is finally getting into proper coding in middle-age. Having a way to augment Live in a text-based coding format would be greatly welcome.
While I'm not holding my breath, Ableton the company are transitioning into a steward-ownership model in which the stewards will have decision rights over the company. So I have hope that it will continue to grow in ways that are less affected by market considerations and that are a little more opinionated and specialized. Not to mention that Ableton own Cycling 74 (creators of Max/MSP).
So it's not out of the realm of possibility.
you can use Javascript with Max. It's a bit unwielding in its handling of multi-JS-file projects, but it can be done.
Not everything in Max is exposed to your code, but you really can do a lot from the JS side of things.
I had no idea! And I'm learning Javascript, so that's a nice coincidence.
I was deep into Max/MSP around 2010 and made a personal vow to leave it alone. The potential to reinvent the wheel and build tools instead of completing records was too much.
Now I'm in a more mature place, so I could see myself diving back into it eventually.