We got a whole range of objects for this purpose, and [notein] is just one of them. In the following screenshot, you can see the most common objects in that regard:

In the preceding patcher, getting_data_into_max.maxpat is presenting us with some possibilities if we want to communicate with our patchers. Very often, we will need MIDI, but the use of Open Sound Control (OSC) is increasing for good reasons; it has the potential to be faster, has a higher resolution (no limit of 7-bit messages, that is 0 to 127), and we don't need to remember that we sent the filter cutoff on CC 84 on channel 13 because the message simply might be /synth1/filter/cutoff 1000. For OSC communication over the network or locally between applications, we use [udpsend]. We'll use it later a lot also to communicate between Max and TouchDesigner. The [serial] object is used to do serial communication obviously. While USB stands for Universal Serial Bus, standard USB devices won't work unless...