Vlad Spears, musician, programmer and maker of the Davel.Plugs audio plugins (previously reviewed on CDM) has a write-up about the forthcoming Max/MSP 5. Andrew Benson of Cycling ’74 gave a presentation at the Bay Area Computer Music Technology Meetup and Vlad kindly drew up a report. Most of the features he describes will not be new to those who’ve been awaiting Max 5, with the possible exception of:

– Say goodbye to [prepend set] messages! Message boxes have a right inlet specifically for this function.

– Multiple live views on the same patch, at different magnification levels. As someone who often builds patches which spill beyond the bounds of a screen, this is fantastic. Changes update in all views simultaneously.

– Object name auto-completion. To quote Andrew, “Several of our developers bought iPhones during development and fell in love with auto-completion.” Arrow through the drop-down list of auto-complete object choices and the Clue window shows information and arguments for each.

The grapevine says that the public beta of Max 5 will drop within several weeks. /me twiddles thumbs…

Ed.: Word we got from Cycling ’74 at NAMM was that you’ll have the final version by the end of first quarter. I’m actually wondering if they’ll either forgo public beta — or slim it down in length — but that means you’re still just a few weeks away from the next release of Max.