Max, also known as Max/MSP/Jitter, is a visual programming language for music and multimedia developed and maintained by San Francisco-based software company Cycling '74.

Thus, Max has a large user base of programmers unaffiliated with Cycling '74 who enhance the software with commercial and non-commercial extensions to the program.

Because of this extensible design, which simultaneously represents both the program's structure and its graphical user interface (GUI), Max has been described as the lingua franca for developing interactive music performance software.

[4][5] Originally called The Patcher, this first version provided composers with a graphical interface for creating interactive computer music scores on the Macintosh.

At this point in its development Max couldn't perform its own real-time sound synthesis in software, but instead sent control messages to external hardware synthesizers and samplers using MIDI or a similar protocol.

[8][9] In 1989, IRCAM worked with Joel Chadabe and Ben Austin of Intelligent Computer Music Systems to license the software for commercial sales in the United States.

Meanwhile, Puckette had independently released a fully redesigned open-source composition tool named Pure Data (Pd) in 1996, which, despite some underlying engineering differences from the IRCAM versions, continued in the same tradition.

In 1999, the Netochka Nezvanova collective released NATO.0+55+3d, a suite of externals that added extensive real-time video control to Max.

SoftVNS, another set of extensions for visual processing in Max, was released in 2002 by Canadian media artist David Rokeby.

Max documents (named patchers) can be bundled into stand-alone applications and distributed free or sold commercially.