One of the historical issues that has affected Max programming was the separation of systems that used to exist: if you wanted to work on visuals, you would purchase Jitter, while audio people would focus on a purchase of MSP. Because of the high prices at the time, people would only choose to purchase the packages they needed - often bypassing interesting functions available in the other packages.

Now that all of the software is combined into a single package, you would think that this would no longer be the case. However, just as the naming conventions (Max, MSP and Jitter) have hung around, so has the assumption that Jitter is only useful for visual media.