Max’s strength relies on its myriad of objects and patcher work done by its users all around the world. Collections of ready-made objects, called externals, packages or libraries, or online examples and tutorials on how to combine objects of one library to obtain special effects, processing, algorithms are available all over the internet, starting from the amazing Max website’s Community section.
The best part of a “Maxer’s” work consists of exploring other people’s code, testing it and making personal tweaks to realise your own ideas.
As you are enrolled in an academic course, where it matters to prove what you can do with Max and Sound Design, it might be difficult for assessors and examiners to distinguish your own work from that of others if you don’t take care of this in your Max patchers.
This is no different from referencing in an essay. You use thoughts of other scholars, report them in the text, and reference them into the bibliography.
A similar procedure must be done with a Max Patcher.
Objects colouring
Make use of the extensive colouring features that are available in Max. For each object you can click on the bucket icon on the top bar (in Max 7) or simply access colour info for the object in the object’s inspector (Max 6 and 7).
It is important that with colours you make clear what is your work in the patcher and what is not. For example, for certain algorithms that you have found elsewhere but want to integrate in your patcher, you can make objects borders have a unique colour and reference that in a comment box:
Panels
You can also try dividing your patcher in sections by using panel objects. These can be placed into the background, so that can highlight the areas where external code is used:
Comment boxes
Comment boxes are very useful for labelling sections of your work, leaving operating instructions to users or explaining controls or processes functions. They can be easily customised with colours, text formatting, and even shape (they can be made into bubbles). Adding comment box to act like in-patcher reference bibliography could be very useful for the assessment of your work.
