Max For Live Ready for Live Performance?

[salatspinatra]

Hi,
I know I could do a bit more detective work before posting this, but do you think if I bought Max for Live with this Holiday Promo that I would find enough of the current patches to be as sturdy and stable while budgeting their CPU usage that I would want to incorporate them into my Live performances, not my production workflow?

Back when I started collecting plug-ins, I learned my lesson about trying just anyone's pluggo or SonicBirth creation. Do you think anything's changed in the last 6 years or so? Like is the plug-in container (or whatever you'd call it) or the live device shell, wrapper, (or whatever you'd call it) enough of a "seal of approval" for patchers to comply to a certain expectation of performance?
Cheers,

[madlab]

We don't know what you expect from it : audio treatment ? midi operation ? API calls ? For now, I've used it mainly and intensively for multichannel work (as far as live performance is concerned) and it was really reliable and CPU-wise. You should install the demo and decide by yourself with your real needs...

[salatspinatra]

Who is "we," madlab? So you do multichannel stuff in front of an audience and you don't experience any free falls and crashes? Also, I have a very dated machine. I'm looking forward to the ideas I implement remaining stable on this old lady and then rewarding me with lots of breathing room when I finally swap this laptop out.

I don't really have any limitation on what I want to do with my performances, but if I had to answer your question I'd probably say audio treatment and midi operation. Ah, just checked. There's a problem with my DEMO license that requires customer service. Probably won't have much 1st hand experience with it unless I were to dive in, which is why I'm talking this out now.

I'd see if I can implement something like this, but use the valve combinations on my trumpet, for example.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pl ... gIosccwlA0

And yeah, I hear you, I'll probably start by just downloading stuff and breaking them in, and the dj stuff would clearly appeal to my interests; would be a shame if any of those patches broke my performance template. But as you can see even the max gallery doesn't really limit the approaches you could take.

The only things I typically ask are "can I perform this without grabbing the mouse (or trackpad), typing in values, and squinting at the screen?" , "will I be moving from arrangement view after some editing?" , "in creating this effect, would I need to pre-render a clip?" , "in turning on or using this devise, am I causing a major discrepancy in the CPU metre, or worse yet, is Live crashing." Any of these conditions would be a deal breaker for a performance, in my situation. These are not very mysterious questions, whereas max IS mysterious for someone like myself who would be embarking in it for the first time.

Thanks for getting back,

[madlab]

'We' are the live + M4L users you ask your questions, who all have a different use of that combination of softwares. Max is also mysterious for me as I just start to dive into this infinite possibilities software. That's why your questions are hard to answer : it is surely designed to do all you want to do, that is live performance with audio mutation, midi triggering of functions in Live, video interaction, you name it...
What is your dated machine ?
As far as i'm concerned, I do a lot of theater work with intensive multichannel audio + some midi wizardry, and I don't have a spare laptop to backup and never had a crash. So, yes this is reliable for me. That's all I can say.

[oddstep]

The live shell amxd isn't a guarantee of rock solid performance on any laptop. But that guarantee doesn't exist for anything. I couldn't run collision on my old laptop. The devices that come with live are all reasonably well designed and they steer away from the really intensive functions of max msp. There is not one way of doing things in maxmsp. You won't have to put down your trumpet mid performance, mouse around a bit and render a clip... Unless you decide thats how you want to do it. It takes time and patience to learn though, and it is a form of programming- so you shouldn't expect to get much out of it unless you are willing to think about command syntax and the like.

[salatspinatra]

Mad and Odd,

Those are two very solid positions on my performance concerns with M4L. Thank you!

You know, I do some occasional HTML, and if I'm publishing something for the web, I'd put it through the latest validator. I might have thought that at some point, MAX would use a wrapper as some indication that it had been put through some syntactical seal of approval.

But the fact that it's been stable enough for your theatre works is a good sign. In effect, it's not unlike the paces I put other plug-ins through before they make my green list. As for my computer, it's the 1st Intel chip in the macbook pros, before the Duo or II (I forget which). My set typically IDLEs at 9% CPU busy, before I even touch anything.

As for programming, I've always been better at reading code, and I've some familiarity with OO principles. But very weak at really expressing my curiosity through code. I imagine using M4L mainly to put purchased, commissioned, or public patches to work for me, before I have the legs to rework new approaches to the same problems, much less create something from scratch.

One thing I could gather from the M4L gallery were the solutions that involved numerical entry fields. I'd probably rule those out in a performance context. And I'm not as concerned with using a devise as a standalone sequencer, looper, or rompler. So sifting through the offerings, I did find some stuff that would be fun to try, and could make a judgement on those devices which were probably more suited for installations or production, etc.