Breaking Weekend Update: Mac musicians and other fans of interactive graphical media development products MAX/MSP and Jitter can rejoice today. Cycling ’74 announced it will ship OS X versions of these Mac favorites by the end of 2002. For those of you in LA for the AES audio convention, Cycling ’74 will be onhand demonstrating a pre-release version of the software.
If you’re unfamiliar with MAX/MSP, this visual development environment is perhaps the single most powerful tool ever conceived for interactively manipulating music, live audio, and media in realtime. Geeks and non-programmers alike have used this toolkit to develop their own software by dragging modules and patch cords that represent data manipulation. MAX/MSP is a regular among electronic musicians in clubs and galleries around the world.
OS X promises to alleviate some major headaches of using MAX/MSP in OS 9. For the first time, users will be able to forgo the complications of troubleshooting OS 9 MIDI and audio drivers like OMS and ASIO, and will benefit from OS X’s stability and the ability to use multiple audio I/O interfaces (or for multiple applications to share the same interface without complex software routing).
Cycling ’74 CEO and software guru David Zicarelli says MAX/MSP and Jitter make full use of OS X’s Core Audio, Audio Units (a plug-in format which Emagic and Apple hope will replace VST on the Mac), Quartz, Java, QuickTime 6, symmetric multiprocessing, and hardware support.
Here’s the really insanely good news: OS X versions will be free updates for existing users of the software (Jitter 1.0 or MAX/MSP 4.0 and higher). A public beta will be available at the end of October. I’ll let Max loyalists read those last two sentences a few more times — if you need to contact me, you can reach me jumping up and down near my desk as I shout to the world “We love developers who release free updates to Mac OS X!”
