Quaxtrip Update

April 11th, 2021

I’ve made the first major(ish) addition to Quaxtrip since launch. Rather than use a hardware mixer to get my synth setup into the computer, I tend to go directly into my multi-channel audio interface and do the mixing in software. Since Quaxtrip’s release I’ve developed an evolving set of patches to manage my personal integration with Quaxtrip. Figuring that there are likely others who work the same way, I decided to build this functionality into Quaxtrip. When you launch the mixer, you can combine up to eight stereo or mono channels to send to your remote peers as a mono or stereo mix.

There are a few other changes to the patch as well. Two separate mutes — local and remote — were added to the Local Input. This allows you to isolate the remote signals for local monitoring or prevent your signal from being sent to the remote partner(s), respectively. There also were changes to the send and receive objects you can use to hook into Quaxtrip in your own patches. This is a breaking change, so sorry about that, but the old strategy was too confusing.

There was also a minor bug fix or two, so I do recommend all users download this version.

I am planing more features in the coming weeks or months. Here’s some of the stuff I’m thinking about adding:

  • Synced recording of the local input of each performer.
  • Remote clock signal sharing (although it recently dawned on me (duh) that if you have a device with tap tempo, you can pretty much accomplish this manually without fancy clock sharing, but I never met a problem I couldn’t over-engineer…).
  • More robust text chat.

If you think of anything else you’d like to see added to Quaxtrip, don’t be shy. I’d like Quaxtrip to be useful for Max experts and novices alike, so I’ll do as much as I can to make it useful for a wide variety of users.

Find installation instructions and join the conversation over at the lines forum.