Re: Kyma/max

[Alex Stahl <alex@pixar.com>]

At 9:39 AM -0500 8/28/00, Dennis W. Leas wrote:
>on the LD list as "experts".  Alex in particular is
>doing really cool things with his Max/MSP system.  He could probably 
>answer
>quite pragmatic questions about the system.  (Did I just volunteer you, 
>Alex?
>Hope it's alright!)


Hmm, it seems that you did just volunteer me, but as I was halfway 
through typing an email volunteering myself when I saw this, all I 
can say is thanks for saving me a few keystrokes.

I can probably bore everyone with latency talk, for example. I feel 
that unless you are one of the musicians (whom I totally respect, by 
the way) who can't use monitor speakers because of the time it takes 
sound to travel ten feet from a speaker to your ears, then you can 
probably deal with MSP latency IF you get a brand-new fast machine 
(400Mhz G3 or better) and a sound I/O device with a buffer size of 64 
samples or less.

I use a MOTU 2408 and get latency below 7 milliseconds, which is less 
than the time it takes me to hear the sound from across the room. I 
have head that the Pulsar 2.0 card can achieve this latency as well, 
and this is an interesting combination since the Pulsar is somewhat 
Kyma-like since it has a LOT of onboard DSP hardware.

Someone on the max list is using a Pulsar in a small, portable Magma 
expansion chassis connected to a powerbook. Sounds pretty portable to 
me...

-Alex