What is Max?

What is Max?

A Playground for Invention

Max is an infinitely flexible space to create your own interactive software.

Connect Ideas Together to Create

Each object does something. Max has objects that generate sound waves, represent hardware, or provide a UI for interaction.

Patchcords connect one object to another. This connection lets objects share their output with connected objects.

Connect UI objects like dials and sliders to provide control values or display results. Modulate, map and scale data to get just the right results.

Create Software Built Around You, In the Moment

Drag in your own audio clips and start manipulating them and connecting effects

Map your patcher with MIDI controllers as you go to start playing with your creation while you work

Expanded Ideas

Max patching starts on a blank canvas, free of any structure. This makes it natural to build and explore unique ideas that would be too complex to make elsewhere. The Max patcher automatically expands to fit your work as it grows, no matter how much space you take up.

Explore Sound without Limits

Design a custom synthesizer with as many oscillators and effects as you wish.

Manipulate samples in every way, including timestretch and pitch shifting.

Build up more layered sounds using MC objects to patch multichannel audio.

Make Sound with a Gesture

In Max, you can build classic synths from scratch or get lost hacking together unusual sounds. Try the XY controls below to hear some sounds you could create with Max.

scale 0 127 120. 1000.scale 0 127 120. 5000.tri~lores~ 200. 0.8

You can do a lot with just a single oscillator and a filter.

p scalingsimpleFM~*~*~ 5atan~phasor~>~ 0.3slide~ 150 400

Add some extra modulation and try something a little more wild.

Make Visual Music

Max includes full-featured, expandable video and graphics tools with Jitter. Jitter is optimized for realtime audiovisual work, and is easy to combine with audio, sequencing, and modulation like everything else in Max.

Take Max into the World

Take Max into the World

Max patching starts on a blank canvas, free of any structure. This makes it natural to build and explore unique ideas that would be too complex to make elsewhere. The Max patcher automatically expands to fit your work as it grows, no matter how much space you take up.

Prototype and Evaluate

Flexible access to hardware makes Max a perfect environment for prototyping. Connect your development board to Max and get instant access to sensors, knobs, and switches. Watch the data stream in as you develop the interaction.

Countless commercial products, art installations, and stage shows have relied on Max to glue together all the parts of their process.

Generate Audio, Video, Code

Use Gen to patch together fine-tuned processes for audio, matrix data, or texture processing. Gen lets you combine procedural commands with visual patching to simplify the creation of custom processes.

Gen objects can also output source code to be used elsewhere if needed.

Extended Max

Max’s built-in Package Manager offers immediate access to over 50 add-ons covering everything from computer vision to support for hardware controllers including Novation, Monome and ROLI controllers.

If the feature you want doesn’t exist in Max, chances are someone in the community has created it. And if they haven’t, you can extend Max yourself using C++, NodeJS, Java, or JavaScript.

Try Max for 30 Days

During your free trial period, Max is completely unlocked. That means you can open, edit, save, and create using all parts of Max without restriction. To get started, download Max and create a free account to start your trial.