The thing that impressed me the most about Max4Live (haven't tried it, just seen some videos) is that you can receive parameter changes of Live's controls within Max and you can send parameter changes to just about everything from Max to Live.  So, you can have one automation control another, or have resizing one sample trigger a different control, etc.  Sequencers don't have to control midi in the Max patch, they can control anything you route it to.

I tried doing this many different ways using Pd/Ardour, but I always found it too cumbersome and just recorded audio instead of automation.  This is very limiting if you want to re-use automation recordings.  It is of course possible with Pd/Ardour and Midi, just very cumbersome and bug-prone.

I suppose having Pd directly in Live would only be slightly easier than directing Pd through Jack and into Live (by the way, where did the Jack-VST plug-in go?? I've been looking for this and it is not included in the jackosx package) and you wouldn't get all the interface controls that Ableton gave to Max.  I do remember hearing about a Live/python SDK, so if you could make a patch that gave access to those controls, I can see it being just as powerful, but without all the nice GUI objects that Max has.

Rich

On Sat, Nov 14, 2009 at 4:41 AM, Justin Glenn Smith <noisesmith@gmail.com> wrote:
Jeffrey Concepcion wrote:
...

> To justin:
> Can ardour be customized as a performance tool (which is abletons key
> feature IMO)
>

No need for customization to use it that way, actually. It does not have
the range of features that ableton live has, but I have used it successfuly
as a source of realtime tweaked automations  / a virtual mixing board / loop
recorder and player.

One thing it has that in my knowledge actually exceeds what ableton offers
is the versatility of the way buses / tracks can be inter-routed. Any number
of tracks and buses can be mixed into the input of any others (each track and
bus of course having configurable pre / post effects), without the artificial
limits that I have seen with ableton live.

I made a set of ladspa plugins a while back to allow controling puredata
parameters from ardour automations, it has some definite limitations usability
wise but it is available from http://code.google.com/p/noisesmith-linux-audio/
or direct download my last (but not very recent) version from
http://noisesmith-linux-audio.googlecode.com/files/ladosc.tar.bz2

It uses osc to send the parameter data so the ardour and pd processes can be
running on two different machines.

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