[LAD] OSC Practices

Paul Davis paul at linuxaudiosystems.com
Tue Jun 1 22:51:38 UTC 2010


On Tue, Jun 1, 2010 at 4:01 PM, Olivier Guilyardi <list at samalyse.com> wrote:

> Whereas OSC just looks like a generic RPC mechanism, thus requiring some
> development knowledge or custom-made tools.

this is exactly correct.

there is no established way to send an OSC message to an arbitrary
receiver and reliably accomplish anything at all. there is no standard
message set to ask the receiver to play a note, stop playing a note.
ditto for transport control, and just about everything else you could
imagine. in short there are no standards.

the only thing that does exist is a "meta-standard" to query the OSC
namespace, and arguably another meta-standard to get the current value
of any readable target within the namespace.

as you have surmized, in its current state OSC cannot possibly be
considered as a replacement for MIDI as a generic communication
protocol for musical-related tasks. what it does to is to provide a
common transport mechanism and a standard namespace convention (the
lowly '/'), and the agreement to use text messages which makes adding
certain capabilities to a pair of receivers and transmitters just a
bit simpler than it otherwise would be.

--p



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