"J. Scott Hildebrand" schrieb:
i've read a lot about the various incarnations of MAX including jMAX,MAX/MSP, Pd, and all the old stuff like MAX/Opcode, MAX/FTS, Patcher, ISPW stuff, etc.
have any of you tried several different things and have any usefulcomparison info? how are the expansions in jMAX and MAX/MSP comparable to the expansions in Pd like GEM and GriPD?
There are severals pros and cons to all of them.
- jMax seems to have nearly no user base, on the mailing list only seem
to be developers and people with compile problems
- Max/MSP is easy to use and has very good documentation, runs stable
- Pd provides nearly the same functionallity as Max (regarding what you
can do with your audio signals) but to achieve the same results your patches look uglier and some 'missing' objects (mostly GUI ones) make some things more difficult to code / use
So from the user-only standpoint I would prefer Max. The very good documentation (several hundred pages manual) make getting started quite easy.
From the developer standpoint I would prefer Pd. It's easier to
understand how things could be done since you have access to Pd's sources which are - in a way - very good documentation for developers.
In the end it depends what you want to do with it. I haven't compared efficiency but it seems that Max/MSP runs slightly faster on a G3 with OS X than Pd does. The GUI reacts more smoothly and similar patches don't need as much CPU power as in Pd. And I have audio in with my Motu 828... ;-)
best, Olaf