A stopwatch for MaxMSP, written in Clojure

This is a demo of a simple stopwatch for MaxMSP. (It's so simple that it doesn't even stop: it simply reports the time in milliseconds between consecutive bangs.) It was coded as a proof-of-concept that the Clojure system's ability to compile its code into "real" Java class files allows Clojure programs to target MaxMSP directly, without any other machinery.

This distribution is a Leiningen project with a single source file: if you're impatient, you can see the source here.

Usage

To get started, do a Git checkout on this project and install Leiningen according to the README.

The project is linked against max.jar, MaxMSP's library for Java interoperability. In order for Leiningen to find and link against this file, it'll need to be installed into your local Maven repository. On OS X (or Linux) you'd do something like this:

cd /Applications/Max5/Cycling\ \'74/java/lib/

mvn install:install-file \
	-Dfile=max.jar \
	-DgroupId=com.cycling74 \
	-DartifactId=com-cycling74-max \
	-Dversion=5.1.9 \
	-Dpackaging=jar \
	-DgeneratePom=true

This is mostly boilerplate: it creates a com-cycling74-max resource with version 5.1.9 (chosen merely to match the release of MaxMSP).

Once that's done, setup the dependencies and compile everything:

lein deps
lein compile

MaxMSP needs the Clojure system: if you look in the directory lib, you'll see a clojure-x.x.x.jar - copy that to Max's Cycling '74/java/lib directory.

The directory classes contains the compiled class files. You can edit Max's max.java.config.txt to place this directory into the CLASSPATH, but it must be in the system path, not the dynamic one (otherwise the Clojure system won't be able to find the classes belonging to this project). If that all sounds too complicated, just do a

lein jar

to make a JAR file for the project - it'll create a maxmsp-clojure-stopwatch-1.0.0.jar - and put this into Cycling '74/java/lib as well.

That should be it: open the enclosed patcher and push the button.

License

Copyright (C) 2011 Nick Rothwell, [email protected]

Distributed under the Eclipse Public License, the same as Clojure.