Expanding horizons

If you were a music software developer, how would you satisfy millions of clients, each of them, using your software in a very different and personal way?
Well, that the question that has been around for a while now, in the offices of Ableton.
Some time ago, this German company , creators of Ableton Live, announced a new partnership with Cycling 74, a U.S. based company which is know for one of the most open ended multimedia environments available called Max/MSP/Jitter, today this has become a reality with the new tool MaxForLive.

First, let's talk a bit about both programs.
In one hand, Ableton Live, is a musical application mainly designed for live use,but it also includes a range of tools well known by most of music producers, so it is perfectly suitable for the music maker. This application has become bigger and bigger in past few years, mainly because it lets you create music in a live way, this means that you can do pretty much everything on the fly, increasing notably the speed of your workflow.

In the other hand we have Cycling'74's Max/MSP/Jitter, this application is normally defined as a visual programming language created for multimedia purposes. In other words, it is a program that lets you create and run (in real time) your own multimedia tools. As you can tell by it's name, it has got three main parts, Max, which is the collection of tools used for general purposes, number managing and more, MSP which is a suite of sound oriented objets specially known in the word of Sound Design, and the last but not least Jitter, another collection of objects, in this case video-oriented. As I like to say, this is a program with no general aim at all, it is not designed to do this thing or the other, It can go as far as your imagination, and you are only the one that has to give it an aim.

So, what would happen if you include a completely free and customizable environment inside your usual music making tool?

Well, probably the only answer to this is wait and see. Recently, I read an interview with Robert Henke, Co-founder of Ableton, music producer (as Monolake, Henke, and many other aliases) in which he stated that in the first weeks of the MaxForLive beta testing, many people came up with things that the developers did not even think of. This is quite revealing, and for me, it represents the starting of a new era in music making, where the only limits are your own, and the possibilities are unlimited covering a huge range of aspects, from creating your own devices ,interacting with things of the outside world, give a new dimension to your music, adding for example video, or even customizing you work environment,to fit your own requirements, apart from the many other things that I cannot think of.

In definitive, I think this partnership is really positive and beneficial for the whole music scene, and it will bring some creative jewels with it. We will see.