[LAU] Open Sound Control: Is it still a thing?

Fons Adriaensen fons at linuxaudio.org
Wed Apr 28 16:22:42 CEST 2021


On Wed, Apr 28, 2021 at 02:00:35PM +0200, Jörn Nettingsmeier wrote:

> Ah, that might explain why I never got OSC over TCP going with standard
> tools - I thought I was just being stupid...
 
Can't find any official reference to this, but one way to send OSC over
TCP was to prefix each packet with a 32-bit int (in network byte order
of course) giving the lenght of the packet [1]. IIRC there was even some
RFC about sending any type of packets over TCP by doing exactly that.
In 1.1 this was replaced by SLIP encoding, destroying the nice 32-bit
alignment of all data elements that we had before. Apparently this
was selected only because the OSC authors happened to have some
hardware using SLIP encoding -- not a good idea IMHO.

OSC has IMHO some serious design flaws. One of them being that a client
can force the server to either fail or store an arbitrary amount of
state (bundles, regexes,...). No problem for a PC, but surely one for
e.g. an Arduino with 16 kB of RAM.

[1] This is also how OSC is stored in some files, e.g. Tetraproc configs.

Ciao,

-- 
FA




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