11 Apr
2007
11 Apr
'07
6:04 a.m.
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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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11 Apr
11 Apr
6:48 a.m.
On Wed, April 11, 2007 09:03, Ken Restivo wrote:
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.
Since when has been linuxsampler OSCified ? Nope. I'm pretty sure is has
no OSC support whatsoever. Linuxsampler certainly uses MIDI for input
control.
Confusion must come from that it uses some dedicated administrative and
control protocol, LSCP, which runs on straight client-server fashion, on
top of bare TCP sockets (and not UDP as in OSC, I think).
IMNSHO regarding your subject question, I'll would start with MIDI as
everything else does; e.g., alsa-seq API is a pretty high level
abstraction and you'll hardly notice that MIDI 80s byteness ;) Then, some
way down after, whenever you feel MIDI control space is exhausted, you can
add OSC for an extension or even substitution.
Unless you're actually after some "way-far-stranger" or non-standard
tunings, parameters and what not, then the MIDI standard is pretty good
enough and fit to purpose.
Cheers.
--
rncbc aka Rui Nuno Capela
rncbc(a)rncbc.org
7:57 a.m.
As far as DSLs go, Supercollider uses OSC internally. Csound and Pd both
support it, too. Don't know about Chuck, but I'd imagine it either does
or it's high on the to-do list.
IMNSHO regarding your subject question, I'll would
start with MIDI as
everything else does; e.g., alsa-seq API is a pretty high level
You mean it's historical then? ;)
abstraction and you'll hardly notice that MIDI 80s
byteness ;) Then, some
way down after, whenever you feel MIDI control space is exhausted, you can
add OSC for an extension or even substitution.
IMVHO, I think this is a little bit backwards (no pun intended) - if the
API design is limited to MIDI it won't be easy to open it up further but
built with OSC in mind you can expose a subset of it as MIDI.
The only disadvantage (and it is a real one) OSC has is lack of
adoption. I wouldn't recommend choosing MIDI simply because all the
other kids have it and anyway it's not as bad as it used to be :P
12 Apr
12 Apr
1:01 a.m.
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On Wed, Apr 11, 2007 at 09:47:23AM +0100, Rui Nuno Capela wrote:
On Wed, April 11, 2007 09:03, Ken Restivo wrote:
Thanks. I was indeed confusing LSCP with OSC. Sorry about that.
- -ken
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.
Since when has been linuxsampler OSCified ? Nope. I'm pretty sure is has
no OSC support whatsoever. Linuxsampler certainly uses MIDI for input
control.
Confusion must come from that it uses some dedicated administrative and
control protocol, LSCP, which runs on straight client-server fashion, on
top of bare TCP sockets (and not UDP as in OSC, I think).
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4:27 a.m.
Hallo,
Rui Nuno Capela hat gesagt: // Rui Nuno Capela wrote:
Confusion must come from that it uses some dedicated
administrative and
control protocol, LSCP, which runs on straight client-server fashion, on
top of bare TCP sockets (and not UDP as in OSC, I think).
Nitpicking: The OSC specification doesn't require UDP or any other
specific protocol on that layer. It just happens, that most OSC
implementations only implement OSC over UDP instead of TCP.
Ciao
--
Frank Barknecht _ ______footils.org_ __goto10.org__
11 Apr
11 Apr
8:35 a.m.
On Wed, 2007-04-11 at 01:03 -0700, Ken Restivo wrote:
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.
Ingen uses MIDI _and_ OSC. I don't know of any sequencers or hardware
interfaces that send OSC for note control, so if you want people to be
able to play the synth without too much trouble you probably want to
support MIDI. Also, are there any realtime safe, sample synchronous IPC
routing systems for OSC?
--ll
12 Apr
12 Apr
4:46 a.m.
On 4/11/07, Lars Luthman <lars.luthman(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Ingen uses MIDI _and_ OSC. I don't know of any sequencers or hardware
interfaces that send OSC for note control, so if you want people to be
able to play the synth without too much trouble you probably want to
support MIDI. Also, are there any realtime safe, sample synchronous IPC
routing systems for OSC?
The Lemur from JazzMutant
(http://www.jazzmutant.com/lemur_overview.php) seems like a great new
toy that supports OSC, if you've got an extra 2 grand lying around.
This summer I'm also working on a sensor interface that takes 0-5V
control voltages and sends them as OSC packets over an ethernet
network, and the plans will be released as a hopefully
easy-to-reproduce open-source project. There are also some Nintento
Wii remote to OSC interfaces out there. :)
There's no arguing that MIDI is definitely more prevalent as far as
hardware controllers go, but for internal communication within a
softsynth-type project, I find OSC to be a lot easier to use. I
usually have all my PD patches communicate to each other using OSC,
and if I need to communicate with a MIDI device I have a translator
patch on the front end that just takes MIDI data and spits out happy
OSC packets. That way I only have to deal with MIDI once, and it's OSC
from then on.
-spencer
6429
days inactive
6430
days old
linux-audio-user@lists.linuxaudio.org
6 comments
6 participants
participants (6)
-
Frank Barknecht -
Ken Restivo -
Lars Luthman -
Rui Nuno Capela -
Spencer Russell -
steev