USB MIDI Controllers/Interfaces Galore + Max or Not to Max?

I mostly asked people to give to charities and good organizations this year. Lots of people gave to
Doctors Without Borders, a couple to
WAMU, one to the ACLU, and nobody
to the EFF. Minus the last one, that made me really happy.

But other than reading materials and a badass
thermos, my big selfish material gift was an Evolution UC-16
USB MIDI controller. It’s swell: 16 assignable MIDI controller knobs, perfect for
just about any audio app, and totally USB bus-powered (that means no wall wart power
supply, yay!). It’s a great solution, but I still want a USB audio interface with a
headphone out for DJing and Ableton Live work. Turns out M-Audio (formally Midiman) has a marriage
of the knobs with the inputs and outputs I want, with a keyboard in between: the sucessor to the
popular, small, and silver Oxygen, creatively titled the
Ozone does everything I’m looking for and then
some, in about the size of my iBook (the total package would be mad portable). So sorry Evolution,
but I’m all about the Ozone (and yeah, the price is way cheaper than what’s on the M-Audio site).

I’m really digging the demo of the new Ableton Live 2 . Use of
the program is just so natural, and mucking about with samples is downright fun in its elegant
and powerful interface (sorry to sound like an advert, but like Emusic it’s
just one of those products you want to tell everyone about). The one area Live ignores (and quite
rightly, to keep things simple) is synthesis. Through creative VST filtering you can do
quite a bit to transform samples into almost wholey new sounds, but heavy sound generation and
serious bitcrushing is still the realm of other tools.

Were Native Instruments on the OS X ball with
Reaktor, I’d look to them for such software. But for the moment
Cycling74’s Max/MSP, the original graphical programming/sound design
environment, is the only such professional tool that’s Mac OS X ready today (albeit in
beta). There’s just one problem: Max/MSP has a practically vertical learning curve. It’s powerful
software, but about as fluid and intuitive as soldering your own synth together with hardware; not
exactly an instant concept-to-product workflow, like Live. I’m curious if anyone out there knows of
good Max/MSP tutorials, and from there some good ambient/microsound instruments built with it.

Whew! Lots to learn, and such little time in the winter break…