The Edit button
It all starts here. Clicking the Edit button on a Max For Live device launches the Max For Live application itself, as Phelan explains. “This is the little button that opens the gateway to Max For Live. Be warned: you might be stuck in here for the rest of your life! It can get a bit hairy! But that’s good: with great power comes great responsibility, padwan. So let’s hit the Edit button and see what happens.
“Now we’ve actually opened Max. We’re now running a separate piece of software within our setup. We can see from the dropdown menus at the top of the screen that we have a bunch of options, like File, Save As, Open, etc, but we’re actually looking at Max. This is Max 8, inbuilt within Live 10 via the Max For Live package.
“Max For Live is a bridge that links the world of Max into the world of Live. Max as an application has been around since the late 80s, developed at IRCAM in Paris. It’s a graphical programming environment, and Max For Live lets us integrate the Max 8 world inside Live. This is the sexy bit; the bit that lets you build your own devices in your own DAW. What we’re diving into here is running Max and Live at the same time on the same computer, using the Max For Live license to integrate them both. So that’s a powerful, interesting thing for music producers: to have this connectivity between Max and Live.
“You can also buy Max standalone, but I think most producers and computer musicians will want to integrate this into their DAW – ie, Live. So the Max For Live environment allows us that integration of producing a track in Live and adding some of the crazy functionality of Max.”