We rounded up the “Jamoma week” with a workshop for a small crowd of power Max users at Ars Longa in Paris today. This time I think we were more successful in explaining that Jamoma is not just a set of ready made patches, it is really mostly about creating a systematic approach to Mac patching, in addition to improving communication in and between Max and similar environments. The week in Albi was to a great extent spent fixing bugs in the Jamoma 0....
Reading this post, and viewing the picture below, I came to think about the dynamics of the Max/MSP community:
The idea behind the current implementation of Jamoma is based on separating GUI from algorithm. Currently this is solved by having the algorithm in a separate file which is included in the module file containing the GUI. This is better than having everything in one patch, but I don’t think that we could say that the GUI is separated enough from the algorithm. We have discussed this a bit over the last couple of days, and I have been trying to think about various ways of dealing with this problem....
I have been thinking a lot about GUIs, namespaces and control parameters over the last couple of days. One of the big challenges we are facing is how to make technology more human-friendly. Often it seems that technology controls us more than we control the technology. Creating a user interface of any kind is very similar how we think about mapping in musical instruments. In essence, any type of control is one, or several, layers of mapping between one set of parameters to another....
{width=“250”}A couple of pictures from the Jamoma workshop which started in Albi today, a lovely little town in Southern France. Most of the day has been spent on getting people up and running with Jamoma and introductions. I hope we will have enough time to also discuss some pressing development issues. Some of the points high up on my lists are: UnitLib. Creating a separate library of units that can handle conversions between various units....
Tim’s post on Version Control Options made me install the SCPlugin which is somehow similar to TortoiseSVN for Windows. The nice thing is that it is integrated with Finder, so that I can do checkouts and commits by right-clicking on a folder. Much simpler than using the command line or svnX.
After a lot of hard work, Jamoma 0.4 has been released. This is a major upgrade from 0.3, the most important being that now all the core objects have been ported to C which makes everything run much faster. Lots of other things have improved as well, the only drawback being that 0.4 breaks compatibility with 0.3. Installers for Mac and Windows are available from the Jamoma page.
Came across the web site of MIT course MAS.960 Principles of Electronic Music Controllers, which has some interesting references and links tovarious resources on NIME development. It is also worth checking out many of the student projects.
I spent a couple of minutes trying to figure out how to create a nice tilde (~) for writing the name of Max/MSP externals in LaTeX (e.g. dac~), so I figured I could post the solution in case anyone else wonders. First I tried using \tilde{} and \widetilde{}, but they didn’t look nice. However, this little thing does the trick: $\sim$ I guess you need the math environment to get this working....
Arne Eigenfeldt has written a Cycling ‘74 blog entry about Managing Complex Patches in Max: One of the beauties of Max is its simplicity: the ability to quickly create a patch that does something artistically interesting. Part of this has to do with its visual programming style - patchcords allow us to see the relationship between graphic objects. However, unless you limit yourself to creating only straightforward patches, your patch can become a spaghetti-like series of connections that confound attempts at debugging....