[linux-audio-dev] OSC for GUI-Engine communication

[Dave Griffiths]

On Tue, 27 Jul 2004 11:31:43 -0400, Dave Robillard wrote
> Hello,
> 
> I'm writing an audio engine that will communicate with the outside world
> exclusively via OSC (and perhaps MIDI, but I digress..)  It's much more
> generic, but for the sake of argument let's say the engine is a synth
> and it needs to talk to a GUI.

Just being thick here, but I'd thought I'd ask anyway....

I've written a system like this myself, where the GUI/audio code passes token
value pairs between them where the tokens are strings (ie "FilterCutoff") and
the values are floats (or strings). It's pretty simple.

The audio engine can be requested a text description of all the tokens it
accepts, and this includes hints such as ranges, which the GUI side uses to
build an interface from.

This interface code is all scripted in python, so you can throw all the
graphics away and run it manually on the commandline. As the text descriptions
are all human readable, they can be used as a help file for what controls are
availible.

Should I be using OSC? What are the advantages? Would it enable my engine to
be accessed by more clients? Are people writing software where the only
interface is via OSC?

cheers,

dave