[LAU] MIDI or OSC?

Ken Restivo ken at restivo.org
Wed Apr 11 04:03:41 EDT 2007


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I'm playing around with hacking together a custom softsynth. In this case I'm building it out of "pre-fab" parts using a HLL (ChucK), but I think I'd be asking this question regardless of the level at which I was doing this or the language I was using.

My question is: should I use MIDI or OSC as the control interface? OSC seems a lot more flexible, and more modern, and I've already found a few things that would be much cleaner in OSC. But I'm worried about latency in going from MIDI to OSC, or any other gotchas that might be awaiting. Then again, this is 2007, and byte-oriented protocols are so 1980's, and maybe I'm over-worrying this.

But, surveying the Linux softsynth landscape, I see OM/Ingen and LinuxSampler and maybe a few others using OSC as their control interface, and everything else using MIDI. And I have to wonder if there's a reason for that other than just history.

- -ken
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