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

[Len Ovens]

On Wed, 28 Apr 2021, Jörn Nettingsmeier wrote:

> On 4/28/21 12:30 AM, Len Ovens wrote:
>> The Wing with TCP would not need this... but of course some OSC libs do 
>> not support TCP because OSC 1.0 is UDP and OSC 1.0 never got past OSC 
>> 1.0 due to lack of funding. There was work started on OSC 1.1 but it was 
>> never formalized and the documentation has vanished from the OSC site. 
>> This means no bundles, no TCP, no # or ? just / and so many OSC 
>> controllers are OSC 1.0 only.
>
> Ah, that might explain why I never got OSC over TCP going with standard 
> tools - I thought I was just being stupid...

UDP was originally chosen because OSC was meant to replace MIDI for 
performance controllers like keyboards and all the new keyboard/neck like 
controllers out there. At 100M net speeds tcp would show timing issues. 
There are now better ways of doing things and faster networks. For mixer 
control, tcp would be better because surity of message delivery is more 
important than speed.

There are other control solutions out there that might be better than OSC 
because they are more firmly suported.

OCA which is now AES70... and so no longer free to look at... though of 
course free to use. OCA is a two way protocol from the start and the 
controlled device is supposed to give the controller enough information to 
create a controller (on glass anyway) on the fly. It has more of a 
standard way of talking about controls.
https://www.ocaalliance.com/

There is muscle https://public.msli.com/lcs/muscle/index.html which is 
used by Harrison Console in their digital consoles

both use a path like structure

> Look at it this way: there is an amazing choice of standards :o)

So long as there is an amazing choice of standards, it will take a long 
time for OSC physical knob controllers to show up... the Wing is perhaps 
proof of that. OSC 1.0 made it out the door, OSC 1.1 has gotten lost and 
was never finished and OSC's main site is effectively static. I think 
sendosc, touchOSC and Lemur seem to be all that keeps OSC alive. Maybe the 
Wing will change that in the same way the Mackie Control did (almost 20 
years after OSC 1.0 was released).

Hmm, I just took a look at http://opensoundcontrol.org/ and it seems 
things are worse not better. The OSC 1.0 spec now points at 
https://web.archive.org/web/20030914224904/http://cnmat.berkeley.edu/OSC/OSC-spec.html
There is however a pointer to the sugestion of what OSC 1.1 might have 
been: https://zenodo.org/record/1177517

So http://opensoundcontrol.org/ is now just a rough few lines that point 
at some archives. OSC is still alive only in the libs and the SW that uses 
them. This is maybe enough as OSC has proven useful enough to stick around 
anyway. That anything has been done on the http://opensoundcontrol.org/ in 
the past year is perhaps a sign of hope.


--
Len Ovens
www.ovenwerks.net