Yeah, I know what you mean regarding the audio sync, it can come off a bit too literal sometimes, or become "winamp/itunesey." I guess my comment arises from the "uncanny valley' region of visualizations, where things are almost tightly in sync, but they are being coerced there by my own gestalt. I guess that could be me being lazy then, and not wanting to spend my brain effort correlating the relationships :P

Yeah, I understand what your saying on max front. Its sad though cause you were one of the only people I saw out there doing something really cool that pushed the community forward. We still have Benson though, man have you seen the stuff he is doing? jeez!! Its nuts cause I happened to be experimenting with something very similar upon going to his vimeo page, and was blown away by what he did with it. Using optical flow algorithms to create these fluid effect shaders. Really top stuff, you should check it out. I have it in my favorites and my channel on here. Also if you haven't gotten to yet, Come by my page and check out some of the things Ive been doing. I posted a pretty cool jitter/msp audio/visual test the other day. Thats where Im headed with my work, I want to create really nice tightly syncd A/V instruments for when maxforLive comes out, so that poeple can do fully syncd live AV sets on one computer! woot shaders!

Good luck, keep up the great work whatever software your using!