[LAU] OSC - where to start?

[Lorenzo Sutton]

Paul Davis wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 26, 2011 at 11:51 AM, James Morris<jwm.art.net at gmail.com>  wrote:
>> [...]
>>
>> Why is OSC support not more widespread?
> because there are almost no standards for OSC. this is not a protocol
> like MIDI that defines semantics. there is no standard way, for
> example, to tell an "OSC supporting app" to "start playing". an OSC
> sender has to know a lot about the OSC receiver. this severely limits
> OSC's usefulness (but does not make it zero by any means).
I wonder if it could make  sense/be interesting for this community to 
put forward some effort in this direction. That is, discussing and then 
trying to agree on a standard (broad meaning intended) for 
audio/music-aware applications, hardware etc. that use OSC... could be 
'LADOSC' :)

I'm no OSC expert myself, and am grateful to the James for opening the 
discussion which has already given me various interesting pointers and 
insights.
I've always been looking at OSC as better alternative to MIDI, but 
(partly due to usual laziness of course) have also looked at the 
familiarity and 'cosiness' of the good ol' MIDI standard.

A first step might be to try 'porting' all standard MIDI stuff to some 
agreed OSC scheme, exploiting the latter's functionality. For e.g. one 
apparently trivial, but IMHO iportant aspect, is the fact that precision 
isn't limited to 127 like in MIDI.

Another aspect is: apart from real-time use, how is osc 'recored'? Would 
a simple timestamped list of OSC messages do? What about time 
resolution? Is this (persistence) aspect relevant? Does it make sense to 
think of OSC-files similar a la MIDIfiles?

Just some thoughts/ideas

Lorenzo.
>> For instance, could/should there be an OSC tab in QjackCTL?
> could there be? if someone added OSC port support to JACK (which is
> relatively easy to do), sure.
>
>> Should we not be able to create tracks in
>> muse/qtractor/seq24/rosegarden that output to OSC to provide all the
>> advantages OSC gives over MIDI?
> ardour4 will support this. for whatever that's worth.
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