Max (software) - History

History

Max was originally written by Miller Puckette as the Patcher editor for the Macintosh at IRCAM in the mid-1980s to give composers access to an authoring system for interactive computer music. It was first used in a piano and computer piece called Pluton (written by Philippe Manoury in 1988), synchronizing the computer to the piano and controlling a Sogitec 4X, which performed the audio processing.

In 1989, IRCAM developed and maintained a concurrent version of Max ported to the IRCAM Signal Processing Workstation for the NeXT (and later SGI and Linux), called Max/FTS (FTS standing for "Faster Than Sound", and being analogous to a forerunner to MSP enhanced by a hardware DSP board on the computer).

In 1989, it was licensed by IRCAM to Opcode Systems, which sold a commercial version of the program in 1990 called Max (developed and extended by David Zicarelli). As the software was never a perfect fit for Opcode Systems, the company ceased active development on it in the mid-90s. The current commercial version of Max has since been distributed by Zicarelli's company, Cycling '74 (founded in 1997), since 1999.

Puckette released an entirely re-designed free software computer program in 1996 called Pd (short for "Pure Data"), which, despite a number of fundamental differences from the IRCAM original, is superficially very similar and remains an open-source alternative to Max/MSP.

Max has a number of extensions and incarnations; most notably, a set of audio extensions to the software appeared in 1997, derived in part from Puckette's subsequent work in Pure Data. Called MSP (short for either Max Signal Processing or the initials of Miller S. Puckette), this "add-on" package for Max allowed for the manipulation of digital audio signals in real-time, allowing users to create their own synthesizers and effects processors (Max had previously been designed to interface with hardware synthesizers, samplers, etc. as a "control" language using MIDI or some other protocol).

In 1998, a direct descendant of Max/FTS was developed in Java (jMax) and released as open-source.

1999 saw the release of nato.0+55, a suite of externals developed by Netochka Nezvanova that brought to Max extensive control of realtime video. Although nato became increasingly popular among multimedia artists, its development was dropped in 2001. SoftVNS, a third-party package for visual processing in Max was developed by Canadian media artist David Rokeby and released in 2002.

In the meantime, Cycling '74 developed their own set of extensions for video. A major package for Max/MSP called Jitter was released in 2003, providing real-time video, 3-D, and matrix processing capability.

In addition, a number of Max-like programs exist which share the same concept of visual programming in realtime such as Quartz Composer (by Apple) and vvvv which are both focusing on realtime video synthesis and processing. Pure Data also remains in widespread use.

A major update to Max/MSP/Jitter, Max 5, was released in 2008. It included a revamped user interface and new objects.

In November 2011, Cycling '74 released Max 6, a major overhaul with further improvements to the user interface and a new audio engine compatible with 64-bit operative systems. Gen, an add-on for patching and code compiling was also released.