To delay a single bang message by a certain amount of time, use the delay object. But to delay any other sort of message—a number, a list, even a group of different messages—use pipe. The pipe object dynamically allocates memory as it stores more and more messages, so it can keep track of many messages at once, even if they arrived at different times and have different delay times (unlike the delay object, which can only hold one bang at a time).
There are many objects available for delaying events (i.e., for scheduling events to happen at a specific future moment). For timing and scheduling events, the most common object is the metro object (send bang periodically at a specified time interval), which can be used to trigger events, start/stop entire processes, or trigger a counter to step through a table or a coll or any sort of sequence of things.
The coll object stores an indexed collection of messages. You can trigger those messages to be sent out, just by sending coll the index of the desired message. One way that this can be useful is that you can make an entire musical score in the format of a collection of note messages, each of which contains whatever information you consider vital for describing a note. That’s similar to the way that languages like csound and cmusic read a score file to play notes.
In Max there are many ways to schedule an event to occur at a certain time in the future, using delay, pipe, or timepoint, for example. What if you want to schedule a whole collection of triggers or messages to occur at different specific points in time? Here are a few approaches.