Max is a graphical environment for music, audio, and multimedia. In use for over twenty years by performers, composers, artists, scientists, teachers, and students, Max is the way to make your computer do things that reflect your individual ideas and dreams.
Max is an infinitely flexible space to create your own interactive software. Connect Ideas Together to Create!
OBJECTS
Each object does something. Max has objects that generate sound waves, represent hardware, or provide a UI for interaction.
PATCHCORDS
Patchcords connect one object to another. This connection lets objects share their output with connected objects.
CONTROL
Connect UI objects like dials and sliders to provide control values or display results. Modulate, map and scale data to get just the right results.
Create Software Built Around You, In the Moment
• Drag in your own audio clips and start manipulating them and connecting effects
• Map your patcher with MIDI controllers as you go to start playing with your creation while you work
Expanded Ideas
Max patching starts on a blank canvas, free of any structure. This makes it natural to build and explore unique ideas that would be too complex to make elsewhere. The Max patcher automatically expands to fit your work as it grows, no matter how much space you take up.
Explore Sound without Limits
• Design a custom synthesizer with as many oscillators and effects as you wish.
• Manipulate samples in every way, including timestretch and pitch shifting.
• Build up more layered sounds using MC objects to patch multichannel audio.
Make Sound with a Gesture
In Max, you can build classic synths from scratch or get lost hacking together unusual sounds. Try the XY controls below to hear some sounds you could create with Max.
• You can do a lot with just a single oscillator and a filter.
• Add some extra modulation and try something a little more wild.
Make Visual Music
Max includes full-featured, expandable video and graphics tools with Jitter. Jitter is optimized for realtime audiovisual work, and is easy to combine with audio, sequencing, and modulation like everything else in Max.
Take Max into the World
Max patching starts on a blank canvas, free of any structure. This makes it natural to build and explore unique ideas that would be too complex to make elsewhere. The Max patcher automatically expands to fit your work as it grows, no matter how much space you take up.
Prototype and Evaluate
Flexible access to hardware makes Max a perfect environment for prototyping. Connect your development board to Max and get instant access to sensors, knobs, and switches. Watch the data stream in as you develop the interaction. Countless commercial products, art installations, and stage shows have relied on Max to glue together all the parts of their process.
Generate Audio, Video, Code
Use Gen to patch together fine-tuned processes for audio, matrix data, or texture processing. Gen lets you combine procedural commands with visual patching to simplify the creation of custom processes. Gen objects can also output source code to be used elsewhere if needed.
Extended Max
Max’s built-in Package Manager offers immediate access to over 50 add-ons covering everything from computer vision to support for hardware controllers including Novation, Monome and ROLI controllers. If the feature you want doesn’t exist in Max, chances are someone in the community has created it. And if they haven’t, you can extend Max yourself using C++, NodeJS, Java, or JavaScript.
→ Introducing RNBO
RNBO is a new patching environment built to export software with the sound of Max.
Create web experiences, hardware music devices, audio plugins, and new Max objects all from the same patch. And when that's not enough, RNBO generates source code that you can use however you want.
This Was Made in RNBO
The example below was patched in RNBO and exported to Web Audio. RNBO Web Export also provides easy access to your patcher's interactive elements and seamlessly integrates with your HTML/Javascript code to add rich sonic experiences.
One Patch, Many Targets
A single RNBO patch can export compiled code that runs in several defined target contexts, and source code you can integrate into any C++ or Web Audio project.
• Build guitar pedals, Eurorack modules and much more with Raspberry Pi export
• Run your patch in any DAW as a VST3 or AudioUnit Plugin
• Compile your own self-contained, shareable Max object
• Increase performance and loading times of your Max for Live devices
• Embed your RNBO sound engine into a website using Web Export
Hear the Code While You Patch
The sound you hear while patching in RNBO is generated and compiled code that updates as you make changes. This running code is identical to the code you export, so your work will sound the same no matter which target you choose.
You'll Feel Right at Home
Although built on new technology, RNBO offers an instantly recognizable patching environment with many familiar objects and practices from Max. If you've used Max before, you'll be up and running in no time.
Inspired by What You Love in Max
• Full Gen integration, with the addition of event support and interactive UI objects
• Every RNBO object has its own help file, just like in Max
• Events and signals can be mixed in the patcher, just like in Max
• Use param, inport, and outport objects to define the controls for your RNBO export
• Mix patching and text-based programming directly in RNBO
• Easily make your patches, subpatches, and abstractions polyphonic with the polyphony attribute
