Sorry for doing progress so infrequently here. Lately, I mainly did Max C-external developement. Some of the results are implemented in the current Random Simpler M4L device version. The 11ffload external is used to load audio files without blocking the current thread. I'm not going into details now, in short, it allows to load+prelisten an audio file very fast. You can download the 64-bit 11ffload external for OSX and Windows for free. (source code included)
Another thing you won't find anywhere else is drag 'n drop of files FROM Max / Max4Live to a target. I can now build a custom file browser based on meta data of audio files and their slices. That is something i wanted to do for years but "drag and drop of files" was the missing building block.