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Comment by Intermernet | Hacker News Reader

This is a beautiful interview. I've been a Max/MSP and Pd user for years and I've spent many hours swearing at the creator of both. Now that I feel that I know both the creator, and the mindset behind the programs a little better, I think I'll spend less time swearing and more time discovering.

As an aside, Max4Live needs some serious love. It needs better interaction with the Live world than is currently provided by the LOM. Things like "get the file path of the current Live set" should be native, and there are a bunch of similar things that should be simple, but are impossible without horrible hacks. Now that Ableton own Cycling74 I hope this situation improves!

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I'm a huge fan of Mr Puckette. I don't particularly like PD or Max (or the limitations of the LOM) either, but I love the fact that he's aware of the criticisms and even agrees with them, and has spent a lot of time thinking about how to solve these problems.

Music turns out to be an incredibly hard problem. It's easy to make superficial but limited tools that do maybe 50% of the job to make boring 50% music. But the kind of general score management he talks about is still an unsolved problem - far more challenging in its way than DSP audio synthesis.

There's a question of goals there.

Is the goal to create tools that make not-boring music? Or is the goal to make tools that enable you (or some other person) make not-boring music? Automating the creation of music seems to have very little upside. Enabling people to more fully expore their own creative has a lot, but that leaves people faced with lots of "incredibly hard" stuff to do by themselves.

Yea, I would've thought that was one of the first things to be done after Ableton bought Cycling74 a couple years ago. I suspect more seamless integration will eventually do be though.

Well, certainly not the best interview I've ever heard. Sure there were more interesting things to ask.

Suggestions welcome! This was only my 3rd interview since taking over the show, and I have a lot to learn.

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