[LAU] control surface design - was - Jack transport

On Wed, 13 Aug 2014, Len Ovens wrote: Another thought I had on this is that with a lot of control surfaces the information is a two way street, I move an ecoder, the softwre changed some parameter, the sw sends back a visual signal that matches that, the control surface changes the look of a light ring. A switch is pressed the sw lights the light, etc. The big one is bank change, which OSC could support but there is no support in the few pieces of sw I have looked at. I know MIDI can be transported over OSC, but why? I don't see applications that support it so there would again have to be middleware to convert, and there is, but each connection needs to be set up manually. OSC seems to have been designed from a SW point of view rather than HW where switches and controls are limited and their definition is static. I think OSC needs a static section that is well defined, probably starting with or bassed on MIDI. Any SW (that is adding OSC) that already has MIDI inputs should be able to take OSC input of /midi/whatever (or /static/midi/whatever so that static controls can be expanded) as a MIDI input to any of their midi ports and route a MIDI output back over OSC as well. I expect over time better static(standard) messages will replace MIDI messages (higher resolution, floating point or whatever) with messages that while more expansive might still be easily converted for old hw/sw. That is, that use the same naming for the same function at least. OSC vs. MIDI There is a lot of "OSC is better than MIDI because" stuff around. It seems a lot of it is not really true: http://www.midi.org/aboutmidi/midi-osc.php I would question the "MIDI supports multiple data formats" point in this link, while true, it is messy. OSC does do that better. But timing and transport are really the same in any practical sense (MIDI over net with timestamp as jack does). OSC lacks the one big thing MIDI has: "MIDI offers greater interoperability than OSC". It seems OSC is like Linux in 1995 in this respect. Linux is as "big" as it is today because it "just works" in most cases. MIDI has this, OSC doesn't. OSC is great for experimental use and places where MIDI doesn't cover, but the time and knowledge have to be there. For most uses, MIDI just works. -- Len Ovens www.ovenwerks.net