With Latent Terrain, crack open AI and explore neural synthesis in Max

“I’m not particularly interested in typing prompts to make stuff, I’m interested in breaking them and dissecting them,” writes Jasper Shuoyang Zheng as he introduces Latent Terrain. Now using an intuitive, elegantly designed open-source Max external and UI, you can play the weird world of neural audio codecs like an instrument, transforming your own sounds into new textures.

maxess screenshots overlaid on one another, showing help pages: maxess.element, maxess.file, maxess.keyboard, and maxess.speech running in Max with help commentary.

Maxess, free externals for Max and Max for Live accessibility, available now

Iftah Gabbai has delivered his Maxess Max/MSP External Collection, a set of tools that interface patches with the native accessibility features of macOS and Windows. They’re a must if you’re making tools with Max and Max for Live – and worth examining for inspiration even if you focus on other platforms.

Peter Kirn - March 13, 2025

Flufs metering running in real-time in two display modes, one with vertical meters and histogram, one with a spectral view, gold on black background.

Flufs, powerful loudness analysis tool, is designed for accessibility

Flufs is the loudness meter and analysis tool for Ableton Live (Max for Live) you’ve always wanted. But more than that, it’s designed to be accessible to blind, low vision, and sighted users alike. And if that’s interesting to you, there are more developer tools on the way.

Peter Kirn - March 5, 2025

Now that Ableton Live is Apple Silicon-native, will your plug-ins and tools still work?

Peter Kirn - September 29, 2021

Mind-Boggling Power, as note~ Adds Timelines, Piano Roll, Notation to Max/MSP

- September 18, 2012

Augmented Reality, Inside Jitter

Peter Kirn - July 1, 2011

elastic~: Pitch, Speed Control Module for Your Max 5 Patch

- October 28, 2008