Open-source the software!

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Tom Swirly

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Dec 9, 2010, 4:23:01 PM12/9/10

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Hello! Some of you might know me from the Looper's Delight mailing list.

I got a Softstep - just as I ran into a work deadline, so I pulled it out of the box, played with it for a few minutes, and haven't had time to beat it up. I might have avoided some issues, it seems... :-D

Open source the software!

I have a suggestion for the developers, and that's that they open-source the development software. They aren't going to make their money on selling software updates. There are a lot of people, myself included, who know quite a bit about Max/MSP, and would be very willing to help you out. I'm personally very interested in getting this device working...

Max/MSP known to be flakey.

Now, I frankly have found Max/MSP to be a language that results in unreliable programs if they are larger than a certain size. In pure Max, it's extremely difficult to write control logic, and impossible to write tests for your logic.

And yet, writing a consumer digital audio application from scratch is a daunting task (and I can say this with confidence, being about 75% through such an undertaking).

Javascript for Max.

However, all is not yet lost - the solution is Javascript for Max.

The js box is built into Max and is reliable.
All your control logic goes into a single box containing nice, easy-to-understand Javascript
Max/MSP is only used for UI parts and digital audio.
Javascript has real functions! Classes! Associative arrays!
It also handles reading and writing files well, and you can use JSON

I have code samples.

I have a lot of open-source code to help you out, and it's here.

If your Javascript programs are greater than a page or two, it's simplicity itself to use Make to put together multiple functions or classes together like this. I have a unit testing framework for this, here's an example of that.

As a result, I've been running a pretty serious application as a Max for Live patch and have NEVER experienced any failure live, either loss of liveness ("crashing") or incorrect running, and it handled bad things like "pulling out the interface" quite nicely.