[linux-audio-dev] OSC vs MIDI

[Steve Harris]

On Tue, Aug 31, 2004 at 11:43:16AM +0100, Dave Griffiths wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Ok, so I'm playing with osc (currently doing gui->app communication with it)
> but all my individual apps still talk midi between them. This is quite
> cumbersome, as I want to start having lots of controls that midi doesn't
> support - and I don't really "think" in midi these days anyway.
> 
> Is there a case now to ditch midi support and go with osc for everything? I
> see midi messages are a type within osc anyway - is it fairly straight forward
> to be backwards compatible this way? 

Yes, though the 'm' type is quite limited, its an address byte (MIDI port
number or something) and 3 bytes of MIDI-ness.

No good for SysEx or anything like that and you have to normalise running
status. Good enough for notes, CC's and such though.

The obvious problem you're likly to hit is that you still need to speak
alsa-sequencer or something in order to get events from controllers. You
can go pure-OSC by accepting OSC 'm' types or occam format OSC messages
and writing a simple, external and resuable MIDI->OSC converter.
http://www.mat.ucsb.edu/~c.ramakr/illposed/occam.html

BTW, if you have reasonable OSC covereage I'd be very interested in
compatibility tests between whatever you're using and liblo.

- Steve