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petefordeyesterday at 11:16 PM3 repliesview on HN

I've often felt as though the way to make a DAW that competes with Ableton today would be to build the entire UI around composable scripted modules.

Far too much of Ableton's secret sauce is hidden away behind Max for Live and top-tier pricing only features. This is a great step in the right direction.


Replies

jmoleyesterday at 11:25 PM

There is zero "secret sauce" in max for live.

Ableton and Max are totally separate codebases, and "Max for Live" is just a ~VST interface between them.

I do agree that "scriptable Ableton" would be far better for production and sound design than Max, because they make all the hard parts easy: MIDI, sequencing, mixing, etc.

In Max, you have to build everything from scratch, every time.

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coldteayesterday at 11:43 PM

>Far too much of Ableton's secret sauce is hidden away behind Max for Live

The other way around. Ableton exposes some internal modules to Max for Live as Max for Live modules.

What Ableton gets from Max for Live is not internals, but basically a few Ableton-only Max-built plugins, that could as well use VST underneath.

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dumbdumb125yesterday at 11:25 PM

i could see this being something that AI takes a bite out of in the coming years

i've been making my own vst instruments and effects with faust, and codex knocks it out of the park; it's basically a trivial task

the only problem is that i have to use software that's external to DAWs. it's only a matter of time before this is first class in DAWs