Max Msp Day 1 - Installation

After finally getting through to Marlon -- "So you want the Max Msp discount eh" -- I got all the emailed instructions from Cycling 74 about how to start my mystical journey into the program that is spoken of in revered tones throughout the academic electronic music world.What will be interesting to readers of these posts is the fact that I actually have ADD which wasn't diagnosed until I was 45 - 11 years ago - and my mind constantly branches off. I just looked out my window and saw the first of many groups of 20-40 somethings that jog up and down my street each day -- all dressed in matching spandex -- while the city actually blocked off the street to work on a small bridge that they worked on last summer. I'm thinking that maybe I will someday be able to write a max msp patch that will actually fix the damn bridge or a patch that will change the colors on all the joggers matching spandex outfits. During the course of the last sentence the joggers took off then returned to the starting point for the first of many water breaks. Another thought bubble -- can I make a patch that moves the lot of them more than 40 feet at a time. Now they're back again.I know that in my mind Max Msp is the program that can data stream bits and bytes to do anything. Someone once told me you could run a factory with it. I was once on a concert bill with someone who wrote a Max Msp patch that triggered various hardware in a suitcase through a wireless feed from his Mac. The sounds that resulted were voices that said "Let me out of here" and various crashes and knocks. His portion of the academic computer music festival almost didn't happen cause his Mac crashed. I later heard he also got a gig teaching electronic music as this was his doctoral project. I used my old PC laptop...ran a bunch of Reaktor modules with customized samples/patches and played over an hour improvising with a keyboardist and midi wind controller guy. Folks told us they loved it cause it was fresh...So now onto my first foray into Max land which will hopefully help anyone who wants to go there. I installed it on a Dell Inspiron 9100 with 1 gig of Ram Pentium 4 CPU 3.00 GHZ 2.99 GHz -- than followed the directions. Rebooted my machine. Opened Max Msp ...authorized it via the internet...all the while in the back of my head was a post that I remember reading by Ernest Meyer about problems with Max and Win XP -- Ernest if I'm wrong sorry but somehow somewhere that is the jist of that thought bubble -- and after setting up my audio cards and midi I ran a patch. NO SOUND. Tried it again. Nothing. Got out of Max and tried Ableton Live...Nothing. However I'm watching the signals work so I know data's happening. All the while I'm going through all my connections...trying different cords...Nothing. Called Max Msp tech support and they said "We've never heard of this problem. It can't be Max, must be your computer." Now before I called I'd gone into the Control Panel and checked through the System, Sounds and Audio devices, and even the internal laptop sound card settings....everything said...this device is running fine. After getting off the phone -- I'd even unplugged and replugged in my power cords -- I decided to uninstall/reinstall the soundcards. So I hit the echo indigo spot...got the latest driver which was already installed...and went to Dell drivers and went to download the soundcard driver from there. Unfortunately at Dell now, instead of getting a specific driver, you get a download manager. So I ran it and got all drivers fine. Went back to the site to get the one driver as it said on the dl manager that if you needed a specific driver after running this app just dl it. Everything on the Dell site for the SigmaTel driver led me to their Download manager. I kept thinking about how far up the tech support chain I'd have to go to get that one driver. Uninstalled Max 5, echo indigo card, cleaned the registry which since I use audio I do on a daily basis, booted down. Booted up ...reinstalled the echo card...no Max5 anywhere on the computer...brought up a program and nothing. We are now hitting hour two. Then I thought the one thing I haven't done is tried headphones. Plugged them in ...ran a reaktor patch and had sound. Thought WTF. So I again test all the chords on my speakers and the power chord....everything looked fine. Tried to run the speakers....nothing. Again phones -- fine. Unplugged for the eighth time the speaker's power chord and at this point....looking carefully at the chord through my trifocals I finally noticed that after five years the wire from the unit had on that day finally come undone. And it had decided to break when I installed MaxMsp as earlier yesterday I worked making samples and patches with no problems. At this point I flashed that somehow someway the curse of the Ernest Meyer thought bubble had occurred.Plugged in my backup speakers, reinstalled Max5 and ran the example patches -- No problems. In future posts I'm going to write about my process of learning this program. I constantly troubleshoot systems for people so I have a mental checklist memorized but a microscopic fray in a chord eluded me.Steve
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