Great to have you on board.... Have you been bitten by the max4live bug yet?
The short answer is: no.
The long answer:
As we all know, with the pace of development on Reaktor since R5 was released can best be described as "glacial". (there's word from NI that they are doing Reaktor development and there will be a Reaktor 6, but no one knows when it will happen, or what it will look like). I get bored with old software - especially old software that isn't open source and can't be improved. If NI would simply make an API for reaktor so that we could build our own Core cells using C++, or Java, you would see some truly amazing stuff being done with Reaktor - even if they just released an upgrade to R5 that allowed that kind of development. As it is, the software is crippled technically in several areas that make it very frustrating for long time reaktor "programmers" (most of whom, like myself, are familiar with writing software in more "traditional" ways). Most notably you have the new R5 core level which allows us to create algorithms that are optimized at a much lower level and can be compiled into much faster code, so while it doesn't let us actually do anything new (there's nothing you can do in core that you can't do at the "primary" level), it lets us do things that we *wouldn't* have done before because our instruments would have overloaded the CPU. The problem is that core's features are way too limited in terms of:
- interacting with the GUI
- sharing memory from one part of the instrument to the other for things like samples and/or sample libraries
- size of memory allocations for things like samples is *way* too low (I forget the limit, but it's very small; like 2 minutes of audio or something)
- no looping structures in core (i.e. loops where you can run the loop multiple times on one tick of the sample clock, many core structures contain loops, but the loop itself processes only once on each tick of the clock).
...Additionally, while the Reaktor GUI is pretty sexy in itself, doing any sort of GUI by hand, using the mutli-display and mouse-input modules is a very long and painstaking process, and one that I just don't have the patience for anymore. I mean the hoops I had to jump through to get loops to display in beatlookup with the little beat bars overlayed on them and all of that are a perfect example.
...So those are my big beefs with Reaktor, and I can't really do anything about it except wait for the very tight-lipped folks at NI to bless us with a new release which may address these issues or may take the software in a completely new and completely unwanted direction (can you tell I'm a little bitter that they didn't pay much heed to the requests of the beta-testers before coming up with the feature list in R5!)
Given all of that, I downloaded the trial version of Max. I was all excited to try out something new and something I could enhance with C++ and bend it to my will. I have to say, I just didn't have the patience for it. It just feels so much more opaque / impenetrable / abstruse than reaktor.
I'm used to being to download an instrument, play with it, see it do something I like, and say; "oh hey that's cool the way they did that, I wonder how it was done..."
*double-click*
*examine structure*
*read programmer's comments*
"Ahhh... I see... I can do that!"
Maybe I just didn't spend enough time with it, but I didn't get any of that with Max. For software that's obviously very sophisticated I found the UI to be very clumsy. Then there was the community, which, while helpful in general, is definitely tainted by the same thing as Linux; that (minority) of academic types with self-righteous attitudes who have no patience for anyone who wants to do mainstream things in a simple ways. Max felt like something that would be great for under-the-covers plumbing, but that has a huge learning curve for making a real, polished instrument.
So the end of my story - how the hell did I even get on these topics? - is that I'm not really a performer (I was once upon a time, but that was in the days before live techno involved a laptop!), and in fact I hardly ever use Ableton except to just goof around with because it's fun-as-hell and a really brilliant piece of software. My main focus / passion is the building of the instruments and seeing/hearing/enjoying what other people do with them.
So yeah, haven't even gotten Live8 yet, and haven't been able to get into Max
Cheers,
Chris
