Good news for MIDI and audio software developers on the Mac. Max is back! The renowned graphical music programming environment finds a new home with developer David Zicarelli and Cycling '74.

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Cycling '74 recently announced the conclusion of an agreement with Gibson Guitar subsidiary Opcode Systems and the French music research institute IRCAM in which Cycling '74 has acquired the publishing rights to MAX, the popular graphical interactive programming environment for real-time music and multimedia.

MAX was originally developed at IRCAM in the late 1980s by Miller Puckette and was licensed to Opcode Systems in 1990, where Cycling '74 founder and President David Zicarelli took the lead on its further development. Since its initial release, MAX has been used extensively around the world in cutting-edge live performance, multimedia development, and electronic music education. Cycling '74 has extended and complemented MAX's MIDI and multimedia support with MSP, a set of synthesis and signal processing extensions. "We've been developing Max and supporting its community of users for quite a while," remarked Zicarelli. "Now we can take the next step and transform MAX and MSP into cross-platform authoring tools." The company has announced plans for a Windows version of MAX to be released later this year.

Since Opcode Systems announced a restructuring in 1999, Cycling '74 has been the sole sales and support channel for MAX. The acquisition of MAX by Cycling '74 formalizes that role, and provides continuity and support for the worldwide MAX user base. "We're excited that we could make this move and believe that it can only strengthen Cycling '74's position and offerings in the marketplace," commented Gibson CEO Henry Juszkiewicz. "Ultimately, we're confident that the artists will be the ones who will benefit most from this deal," he added.

"I've been hoping for years that, somehow, David Zicarelli's company Cycling '74 would acquire Max. It's always best for a piece of software to be controlled by the people who are actually writing it," commented Miller Puckette (currently Professor of Music at the University of California San Diego). "David understands and cares about how his decisions affect the artists who use his work. At the same time he has good survival instincts."

"IRCAM sees a great opportunity to emphasize the current collaboration with Cycling '74 towards porting MAX/MSP to new platforms in order to make IRCAM's cutting edge DSP applications widely accessible and to increase complementarities with IRCAM's Linux/GPL jMax environment," stated Vincent Puig, Director of Marketing at IRCAM.

Cycling '74, headquartered in San Francisco, CA, develops, distributes and supports innovative music software for composers, artists, and producers who dream of life above and beyond traditional sequencing. Cycling '74 products include MSP, the Pluggo collection of MAX/MSP-based audio plug-ins, the M interactive algorithmic composition program, and now MAX. Their website is at http://www.cycling74.com.

'What's Hot' from Doctor Audio is presented by Doc Dosco, Professional Audio Consultant from Los Angeles, California. The Doctor Audio website is a dealer for most Mac and PC Midi/audio products, and is located at http://www.doctoraudio.com

 

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