Cycling ’74 just updated darn near everything they make:
- New Universal Binaries: Mode, Hipno, and UpMix are all Intel-native. But the big news is that Pluggo, the long-beloved C74 plug-in library, is available — meaning you should also be able to turn your Max compositions into Intel-native plug-ins.
- Max/MSP 4.6.2 / Jitter 1.6.2: Max 4.6/Jitter 1.6 had already brought Intel Mac support, so other than some bugfixes for Mac users, the big news here is for the Windows side: the new features in Max 4.6 and (most significantly) Jitter 1.6 are now available to Windows users. I’m hoping this also means native uyvy video support, but I’ll save that discussion for Create Digital Motion.
If you’re on an old version of 4.5.x, it’s well worth upgrading. Cycling has put in some subtle but significant improvements over the last few “point” releases, and they’re free for anyone who owns Jitter 1.5 / Max 4.5. Cycling also wins points for providing Intel Native support absolutely free of charge; this is one of the only major application developers I can think of that did that with a flagship application.
I’m currently teaching MSP at Brooklyn College, and we get into the first meat of synthesis this week. I have to say, while I admire Pd, I’m happy to have Max so that we can take advantage of a friendlier interface and far more detailed documentation. The two products, however, commercial and open source, continue to benefit from the other’s existence, and I’m even seeing more people running both on the same machine. Mostly I need people to start trailing me with an espresso machine so I can keep up with all the software I’m using.