can you scrape up $250.00 plus california tax? that's the educational price for Max/MSP. check out this link:

www.cycling74.com/products/discount.html

this does not include jitter, mind you.

other than that there are older pirated versions of the product floating around the web on BBS sites, but none of these will run on OS 10.

that being said, i don't think you would regret having bought the software. the company is not large and they will always give you response codes to challenge codes should you change your machine, or install it on a different machine (they usually allow two challenge responses). while i might copy other larger software, i avoid this w/ Max/MSP, because they are really cool and kinda small, so it hurts their bottom line more.

if you absolutely must have a free or nearly free copy of something, try the program Supercollider by James McCartney. it also does DSP and is actually more efficient than Max/MSP at this, but is based on Smalltalk and is more programming intensive than Max/MSP. since he got a job at apple he opened up the source code and distributed the product free of charge. there's already an OS X port of it available:

supercollider.sourceforge.net/

hope this helps!