As a very audio-oriented person, there have been a couple of interesting threads on the Max list in the last few weeks.

First, there is a new commercially-available Max external called elastic. It looks and sounds really superb! It is based on the élastique time stretching algorithm published by Zplane.

• SoundMagic Spectral—this is a set of AudioUnit plug-ins, for which an au host external is also provided.
• The standard-bearer for spectral processing in MSP, which probably doesn’t need mentioning (but I include for completeness) are the FFTease objects from Eric Lyon.
• Some newer spectral objects are the VB-Objects which use Apple’s FFT implementation in order to do things that are otherwise cumbersome in Max.
• Finally, the thread actually started with some new work done on a staticresynth object which takes a buffer of audio and performs a huge FFT on it to process the entire buffer (in non-real-time). The source code for this object is here. It is using the FFTW library to perform the FFT. It is also using some random number generators from this page.

The third thread of interest has been running much longer. Mattijs Kneppers has produced a nice sounding granular-based pitch-shifter and time-stretcher.