I have finished my first Processing patch, and I'm very happy with this environment.  Thx 4 all the great work everyone contributed to Processing and its libraries!

Initially I coded the application using Max/Jitter on MacOSX -- this was for a music installation.  I ran into trouble with the limitations imposed on Max, and the surprising slow response in painting the screen on MacOSX.  (The net effect is that it can't respond fast enough, the drawing update was often skipped due to "lazy" updates, and even the music playback was slowed occasionally...)  I switched to Processing on a hunch, and it worked perfectly -- no delays, with plenty of horsepower to spare (CPU utilization <50%, typically only half of that).

I want to continue music installations using this environment in the future.  However, Max/MSP is fairly rich in its support of music-related stuff.  (That is probably why it is sort of the "standard", and why it is so expensive.)  Is there any coherent idea to provide the equivalent capabilities in Processing?

I did a quick search, and it appears jMusic may be fairly close in richness of support of musical stuff (compared with Max).  (I did a quick test, and my tests appear to work under jm-etude with minor changes.)  Unfortunately there was no maintenance or even forum activity after 2004, so it is fairly old code.  jm-etude seems to have covered all of it, but unfortunately there seems to be no activity to support or maintain it recently.

So, my questions:
1) Are there rich general-purpose music support libraries available, equivalent to Max/MSP?  (Jitter would be equivalent to Processing.)  I don't want to miss out on Minim, ESS, or any of the Processing libraries out there.  Beads seem interesting.  What are your thoughts/recommendations?
2) If in case jMusic is still the closest, what would you suggest the approach to continue from here?  The idea for jm-etude was great, unfortunately it encapsulated only a small portion of jMusic.  Can we use jMusic fully via translation of the differing data structures when necessary, versus full encapsulation employed in jm-etude?

Thanks in advance for your ideas!