tutorials

With the proliferation of inexpensive home theater sound systems and the easy access to surround sound authoring tools, theater-style mixing has become a viable option for the home studio musician. Although the 5.1 format is designed for the traditional cinema approach, with a center channel for dialogue and a subwoofer for effects, the creative musician or sound artist can also subvert the medium for other purposes. For example, in the past, electronic musicians wanting to compose in four-chanel sound have had to struggle with expensive or hard-to-come-by technology. Now it's a simple matter to author a DVD that can play four channels into a quad concert sound system, and even do a reasonable job in many home systems. With a little ingenuity, the 5.1 format can be used for true six-channel sound or for things like stereo sound with multiple click tracks.

Welcome to the second installment of Stupid JS Tricks. If you missed the previous installment, you can take trip back in time to see us resize our patcher's interface. In this trick we will rise to a brave new challenge: to drag a window around on our screen without using the standard drag-able region provided on that window by the operating system.

It doesn't have quite the same ring as Letterman's "Stupid Pet Tricks" but you get the point... This hopefully periodic new column will attempt to get Max's JavaScript object, JS, to jump through a few hoops and garner our applause. The idea is similar to Andrew Benson's excellent Jitter Recipe's. So let's get started...

Several years ago, I wrote a rather lighthearted piece for the old Pluggo website about how I wrote my very first pluggo plug-in using MSP. That article turned out to have a life of its own I didn't really expect....

The second installment of Jitter Recipe Collection

The following is a collection of simple examples that began as weekly posts to the MaxMSP mailing list. Here you will find some clever solutions, advanced trans-coding techiques, groovy audio/visual toys, and basic building blocks for more complex processing. The majority of these recipes are specific implementations of a more general patching concept. As with any collection of recipes, you will want to take these basic techniques and personalize them for your own uses. I encourage you to take them all apart, add in your own touches and make these your own.

- Andrew Benson

So, you've finished the tutorials, you understand the basics of digital audio, and you can imagine using a jitter matrix for something. Perhaps you are looking for a couple of new recipes to expand your repertoire...

The following is a collection of simple examples that began as weekly posts to the MaxMSP mailing list. Here you will find some clever solutions, advanced trans-coding techiques, groovy audio/visual toys, and basic building blocks for more complex processing. The majority of these recipes are specific implementations of a more general patching concept. As with any collection of recipes, you will want to take these basic techniques and personalize them for your own uses. I encourage you to take them all apart, add in your own touches and make these your own.

- Andrew Benson

In this tutorial, Nick Rothwell will lead us through the process of setting up the powerful Eclipse IDE for creating MXJ objects for Max.

Here we go...

This is a quick rundown of how the MXJ class loader works, and the implications for class variables (statics).

The JazzMutant Lemur is an incredibly versatile control surface for media applications. It allows you to create an interface match your performance needs, and communicates with your computer through an Ethernet connection (using the Open Sound Control messaging system). Unfortunately, there are relatively few software packages that speak OSC natively, so “bridge” software has been required to interface between OSC and the more common MIDI communication path.

Recently, JazzMutant updated their editor software to act as that bridge – taking OSC messages from a connected Lemur and converting them into MIDI messages. This opens a number of options for software and synthesizer control, and makes the Lemur a viable control surface in many new situations.

Xcode is becoming increasing popular as an IDE to develop external objects for Max and MSP (Jitter support for Xcode is not yet supported, but is forthcoming). It offers several benefits over using Code Warrior, not least of which is that Xcode is free. However, if you've gotten used to the comforts of CodeWarrior, then Xcode can seem rather bizarre and alien.

In this article we will take a step-by-step approach on how to write externals from scratch using Apple's latest developer tools. We will not discuss the source code itself very much, as that information is well covered in the MaxMSP Software Development Kits. We will also approach this topic in a tutorial-like style. That means that we will let a few things slip in order to see what some common errors look like and how we can go about solving them.

Update [2006-1-26 8:53:54 by tim]: This article was originally written for Xcode 2.1, it has now been updated for Xcode 2.2. TAP.

Here we go:

The third installment in the inVeSTigations series added effects crossfading to our VST instrument/audio effect hosting possibilities, and demonstrated the use of the disable message that lets us load an effect and save on CPU cycles.

In inVeSTigations part 2, we looked at how we can load VST instruments using the vst~ object to load VST audio plug-ins in Max, and how to format and send MIDI messages to a virtual synth.

In this tutorial, we'll look at a new message to the vst object that lets us load plug-ins without interrupting our audio, and take a look at a novel way to mix the outputs of several VST plug-ins.

One quick way to start having fun with Max is to use the vst~ object to host audio plug-ins or VST instruments; you can load plug-ins you already have (or find some free plug-ins) and get a little experience with using Max to send messages to them while you gather the courage to write your own audio processing patches or virtual synths.

I've written the patch you see below to help you get started. It should let you explore working with audio plug-ins.

One quick way to start having fun with Max is to use the vst~ object to host audio plug-ins or VST instruments; you can load plug-ins you already have (or find some free plug-ins) and get a little experience with using Max to send messages to them while you gather the courage to write your own audio processing patches or virtual synths.

I've written the patch you see below to help you get started. It should let you explore working with audio plug-ins.

As you read the Max list, you'll probably see something that looks like this: