Multimedia Programming Using Max/MSP and TouchDesigner

Very good!!!

There is so much value in this book, I will try to highlight a lot of what I felt shined through for me. This review is more about the audio and synthesis side of this book.The book seems to be aimed at readers with a level of knowledge that stretches from an advanced beginner through intermediate skill levels. Going through Max example patches and the related reference docs has always been the best thing to do as a beginner. The documentation is great and has gotten better over the years. Even so, once one has put the time in with the docs, it is very helpful to have someone who is an experienced patcher to show some of the often unfamiliar visual programming patterns. This book fills that role very well. Though there is a lot of dense technical information, the author clearly elucidates how it all works together. Each chapter brings the reader step by step into the labyrinths of knowledge that is visual programming in Max.The early chapters present an indispensable discussion of foundational information for anyone who needs to get up and running with visual patching paradigms in Max. The author's techniques are not only useful in general, but also inspire the kind of thinking that visual programming really requires. Throughout the rest of the book, the subpatches / abstractions in his examples teach a lot on their own. For a motivated learner, there is a lot of time to be spent learning and understanding these. There is so much detail presented in patcher form alone, I recommend one keeps the chapter projects' windows open in Max as you move through the author's instruction. I know I will be digging through and experimenting with these for some time.There is an in-depth debugging discussion, which rounds out the practical programming methodologies presented for the individual topics. If one comes from a non-visual software background, some software paradigms are related to the patching environment. For instance an MVC approach is covered in the section for designing and scripting interface elements.The sections that deal with audio describe all the parts of a synthesizer and sampler that one might be interested in creating. There is an overview of the essential synthesis foundational information. The author shows everything from feedback, FM, filter theory, polyphony, sample accuracy, loading audio into buffers, and creating advanced samplers.If you are into effects, you don't go home empty handed, the author also shows some mixing and effects creation like tape delays. The techniques shown in the examples for the more advanced and non-user-facing aspects of building instruments are holistic best practices that can simply be used to solve problems without having to get too down and dirty. Along with all the components themselves, the way that they feed into and mix together is shown. This all makes for a concise and refreshingly complete learning path for the budding synthesist. I will now highly recommend this book because of these sections alone.The author speaks about his topics with an emphasis on clarity, but keeps the high level perspective in view throughout. He utilizes the max environment to create a well illustrated and in depth discussion of the various synthesis and sampling techniques.There is also a totally amazing section about reverbs and impulse responses and convolution, does it get any better?! yeah because then advanced fft effects are discussed. I learned a lot here and feel like I have somewhere to go from in order to get into all kinds of audio processing. I think the later parts of the book are where it is really up to the reader to be following along and studying the project patches as they read. This is laborious work, cause the urge to get creative isThere is a high level overview of gen, jitter matrices, and Max for Live. There are some cool examples of how to do things like implement karplus-strong synthesis and creation of filters in Gen. The author moves into some advanced physical modeling and further more advanced acoustics discussions ensue. I see this as part of the great mix of topics that define different levels of challenge for intermediate-level programmers.Some of the information, like the max for live section and the initial intro to jitter, are simply more wordy overviews of what the docs cover. These simpler sections are good for the unfamiliar though fewer compared to the depth of awesome presented everywhere else. The book provides a steady, deep dive into the subject matter with the author's great experience and smooth writing as a guide.

Stylistically, the Max package differs from most procedural languages and even from declarative languages like HTML. Max is a dataflow language. You can or should visualise what happens to your data in each module of processing. It is attuned for audio analysis, where this approach is fruitful. And professionals in this field have been trained in this natural way of thinking.One chapter on basic audio actually demonstrates sophisticated means of wave shaping, that come with Max by default. You do get a lot of powerful maths tools right upfront. The chapter is a quick skimming of how to use these to modulate your audio. Well, the following chapter calls itself advanced audio. Here, the screen captures show complex modules acting on the input audio. Like a compressor. Or how to do reverb easily.Actually, the book is quite advanced. Well suited to an audio engineer or electrical engineer. It gets into topics like Karplus-Strong synthesis (for a plucked string) that were once research level areas not too long ago.The discussion on video (ie. visual) algorithms also encapsulates advanced topics. Shaders are covered, where these are expected to run on the GPU of your machine. The images from the shaders that the book shows are all in black and white. Sorry, but for reasons of cost, the publisher needed to do this. Think of this perhaps as incentive to try the shadings out on your machines, to see the actual colours.

The preface of the book explains what it is about, and who benefit from it amazingly well.----This book is about the creation of multimedia content with a strong emphasison real-time generation of content. The two software packages, Max/MSP and TouchDesigner, are chosen as specialized tools to make the generation of audioand video material as flexible and intuitive as possible.[...]Both software packages, Max/MSP and TouchDesigner, are well documented. Trying to replace this documentation of two fast-changing pieces of software would be inappropriate.This book relies on you to consult this documentation, and therefore, the content of this book will go a lot further. While the initial chapters will address people who have never worked with the software, at the end of this book, very advanced topics will be covered. The idea is to not only provide a very profound basis to start with multimedia programming, but also to rely on the documentation and integrated help systems of the software packages, thereby covering as much material as possible.----If you end up reading this review on my website, you might be one of the people who did their best to learn Max/MSP/Jitter by reading all through (or most of) its built-in tutorials and realised they do not explain all. I’m just like that. If you’re like me, this book is existing definitely for you.When I read the ‘What this book covers’ description of ‘Chapter 1, Getting Started with Max’, I thought I could skip that chapter. But after reading the first 3 pages of the chapter, I understood I was wrong.The owner of the book can download Max patcher examples, the coloured images of the book and from Packtpub website (the publishing platform).The author is extremely helpful. In the beginning of ‘Max Setup and Basics’ chapter, he explains where the reader can help herself when stuck. He doesn’t finish that just by saying ‘Max has an good built-in help system’, but he mentions about ‘examples’ folder as ‘a slightly hidden help’, and even provide a tip and a manner for posting a question on Cycling ’74 forums. He even designates some other resources which can be useful to learn. The list includes Curtis Roads’ ‘Computer Music Tutorial’, and I guess some of you can make your mind to trust the author by that fact.Thanks to the book, I could get to know MaxToolBox, which is one of the most useful tools available for Max. The tool saves your time tremendously when patching. You can connect all the selected objects with the [shift + c] shortcut for example.https://github.com/natcl/maxtoolboxI’m now on page 71, and the book contains 383 pages (including such as index). This is quite a lot, but there’s no unnecessary verbose sentence. Most of them are prices and easy to understand.[Updated 08/02/15] OK, now I skipped some part and sneaked into the Gen chapter and the Jitter chapter. This is my first book which explains about the mysterious stuff around jit.gl.shader to a complete beginner. I’ve been seeking for such an explanation for a long time. Thanks to the book, I finally understand why we have to even care about that ‘shader’ stuff.[Updated 08/02/15] Now I finished the Max for Live chapter. That was very concise in a ideal way. The author designates where the reader can get useful information provided by Cycling ’74 (the developer of Max), and he covers the aspect where Cycling ’74 doesn’t explain sufficiently. Well done! And I even peeped the TouchDesigner chapter as well although I didn’t have any thought to start using TouchDesigner (because the book is so well written!). And actually, now I am interested in the software quite seriously by the following part of the chapter.----However, why don’t we just stick with Jitter?Jitter is great for many things, and certainly everything we see in the TD-related chapters can somehow also be done in Max/Jitter. However, some things would require us to write a good amount of OpenGL Shading Language (GLSL) code while working solely inside Jitter and trying to achieve these same things. Max came from algorithmic composition and moved towards audio processing. TD, in contrast, genuinely comes from graphics. Naturally, it has some advantages over Max’s Jitter, which I won’t list here since software is an ever-changing development. Even still, there are other languages such as vvvv and Processing. Let’s just say I personally think TD is the most intuitive one, without being less powerful; on the contrary, itis very powerful. Also, besides its bare capabilities, TD encourages experimenting, artistic expression, and technical development in a nearly optimal balance.----Well, I’ll start playing with Processing hard while waiting for TouchDesigner for Mac.[Some points where it could be improved]If you are a Mac user, some information like one about useful software, or about shortcuts can be slightly confusing, as the information tends to be designed for Windows users. Perhaps the author could add a disclaimer.I found some typos but they responded quickly to my reports and the errors would be fixed soon hopefully. [Updated] Actually there are quite a few minor mistakes (e.g. shortcuts). They are not crucial, but it’s becoming tough to report everything.Maybe the TouchDesigner part could be separated as a different book for a marketing reason. I think I would not buy the book if I just see the title and no other information, as I would Google and find out that TouchDesiner is not for me because it doesn’t work on Mac.[Updated 08/02/15] OK, it’s not actually something to be ‘improved’, but I think it’s fair for Jitter enthusiasists to mention that author says the following in Gen chapter. ‘Since this book proposes to use Max/MSP for audio and TouchDesigner for video generation, we will emphasize on the audio side of Gen here.’ Still there is a whole chapter about Jitter, but not deep into the use of Gen with Jitter.[Updated 08/02/15] Some of the naming of the example folders which you can download as compliment, are obscure to guess their content.[Conclusion]Even though the title says about TouchDesigner, this is also a very good book for complete beginners who are looking for a good starting book for Max (as it covers every aspect of Max), for beginners/improvers who found the official Max tutorials not informative enough, and for improvers who want to use Max more efficiently.