Changelog — MaxTracker

Version 1.1 current

18 September 2026

Seven themes, from the settings page: Dark, Light, White, Blue, Midnight Purple, Forest Minimal and Carbon Orange. Dark and Light follow Live’s own Classic Medium colours. Both editions have them, and an editor for building a palette of your own is on the way.
The Generate panel, on Shift+R: Random, Re-pitch, Shuffle and Permute in one place, with the scale, the beats, the density and the octaves beside them. It opens next to your selection and can be dragged out of the way.
Re-pitch is new: every note in the block is given another pitch and keeps its place, its length, its velocity and its command.
Permute trades the rows that carry a note and leaves the others alone, so the rhythm stays put and only the notes move.
Mute and solo are two boxes now, as they are in Live: M says whether the channel is muted, S whether it is soloed, and neither hides the other. A solo is exclusive — hold Cmd (Ctrl on Windows) to solo more than one channel — and a right click no longer solos, it mutes like a left one.
The settings page remembers itself: the keyboard layout, the font size, the line height and the theme you last chose are what the next new tracker opens with.
A channel selected whole lights its name, and a column caption is clicked on its text rather than anywhere under the boxes.
MaxTracker Lite plays one tracker per Set. Extra free trackers still open, keep their patterns and can be edited, but only one of them sounds — a Set built with several Lite trackers will have the others fall silent. The full edition has no such limit.

Version 1.0

3 September 2026

First public release.
A tracker grid for Live: notes, lengths, velocities and effects, typed from the keyboard the way a soundtracker is typed.
Eight channels, each one its own MIDI destination, so a single window drives the whole Set through the MaxTracker Receiver.
Seven commands: arpeggio, glissando, repeat, delay, channel velocity, speed and jump — a letter and three decimal digits.
Export the pattern to a Live clip, exact to the tick: what you hear is what is written.
Random and shuffle that follow the Set’s scale and favour the beats, for finding a phrase rather than making noise.
Its own undo, ten steps deep, and a pattern that travels with the Set — nothing to save beside it.

How it got here

Version 1.0 is the first release, not the first day of work. More than four hundred builds came before it, and a few changed what the device is rather than how well it does it. In order:

The first grid. Eight channels, effects, note lengths, step recording. Everything since has been a consequence of those four.
The engine moves out. The sequencer leaves for a file of its own, one Max does not defer, while the editor keeps the grid, the drawing and the keyboard. What you hear stops depending on what is being drawn.
SYNC. The tracker either follows Live’s transport or runs on a clock of its own — the difference between accompanying a track and working on a pattern while one plays.
Export to a clip, through Live’s API. Recording the tracker in real time sends every note through the audio buffer, which rounds each start and each end separately; durations wobble. Writing the clip directly is exact to the tick, and it is why the EXPORT button exists.
The tracker steps aside for a clip on its own track. Nothing in a stream of MIDI says where it came from, so a clip feeding the device was indistinguishable from a keyboard — and was being written into the pattern while playing over it.
The effect letters settle. Arpeggio becomes A, channel velocity V, jump J. The old digit was a debt inherited from a tracker this one is not compatible with.
The keyboard comes back on its own. Bringing the window forward claims it, and so does the pointer entering the grid. It used to take a click, with nothing on screen saying so.
An undo of its own, ten steps deep. Whole snapshots rather than a journal of changed cells, so undoing during playback is safe — and Live’s own undo stops being the answer to a mistake in the grid.

Two numbers, two uses

The version counts releases, not builds: 1.0 is the first public release, 1.1 the second, whatever each one contains. It is what the tracker window shows, and it tells you how many releases behind you are. Underneath it sits a build number, which moves many times between two releases; it is noted here for each release — this one is build 474 — so support never needs to ask you for it.

What comes next

The roadmap is shaped by what users ask for. If something is missing for the way you work, write and say so — it may well be in the next version.