Learning Max solely on Max for Live?

Equipment
1

Learning Max would be hard without saving things you make, but I can only save if I make things in Max for Live.

Does that pose any real challenge to learning the amount of Max necessary to program Grids?

2

One suggestion would be to download terms and reverse engineer stuff: http://monome.org/docs/app/terms/

I’d argue that programming the grid itself isn’t amazingly difficult. I keep a cheap and cheerful repository of readymades for the grid : https://github.com/Toddberticus/MaxEngineTemplate which should get you up and running with simple ‘how do I get the lights on and off’ stuff, and none of it should be too challenging to get in M4L.

If you haven’t looked at it, be sure to check : http://monome.org/docs/grid-studies/max/

I don’t think M4L presents any real amazing difficulties on it’s own; you’re handling audio differently, and can’t save as a standalone app, but otherwise, “it’s just Max”.

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3

That’s helpful, thanks!

Reverse engineering is a good idea. That’s how I learned my way around Reaktor.

4

I’m not sure if this is still true and if i should post this, but i noticed in the past that when using M4L, Max was temporally unlocked.

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5

There is not really many differences between Max4Live and Max.

From https://cycling74.com/support/faq-maxforlive/ :

Max for Live requires Live 8.1 (or later) and Max 5.1 (or later).

Max for Live adds the ability for the Max application to be used as an editor for building Live devices. Existing Max users can continue to work with Max as they always have. To work on Live devices, you start by editing an existing device from inside Live.

For users who only own Max for Live, the Max application will have the following limitations:

no built in support for audio and MIDI (Live is used for audio and MIDI I/O)
restrictions on seeing Jitter images in the Max application (Jitter is fully functional inside Live)
no ability to build standalone applications

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6

I believe you can even save max standalone apps, just not run them while building. not very development friendly yeah…

7

I don’t understand this part: [quote=“kisielk, post:5, topic:5282”]
restrictions on seeing Jitter images in the Max application (Jitter is fully functional inside Live)
[/quote]

Anyone has an idea what it means?

8

I think that you can’t view jitter output in the view options germane to standalone Max, although things will probably pop up in Ableton’s video windows (that Ableton provides for e.g. film scoring)

Thanks for the helpful comments y’all

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9

Ah, Thanks! Did not know that Ableton has a video window - always wanted to do some video stuff and already downloaded a plug in some time ago but did not get more into it by now than shortly testing the plug in…