Open Sound Control

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Tree Farm
Tree Farm's picture
Joined: December 22, 2009

Am I confused about what Open Sound Control is? Is it a kind of media message similar to MIDI? If so, does Mulch support OSC?

Ultimately, I'm hoping for Mulch to accept Open Source messages from my monome without having to deal with MIDI in's and out's and VSTs as I'm on a Mac.

Most likely, I have no idea what I'm talking about. Trying to figure some of this out so feel free to educate.

Ross B.
Ross B.'s picture
Joined: April 11, 2009

OSC is kind of like generalised MIDI. It usually uses IP/UDP networking communications, which means you can transmit it over a LAN between computers (not so easily over the internet, but it's possible).

Unlike MIDI it doesn't define a standard set of messages and message types. So it's better suited to situations where the sender or the receiver is fully programmable (as a real programming language like SuperCollider, or a visual programming environment like Pd) since messages often have to be reinterpreted and translated. That's one reason why I haven't implemented it in AM -- because the task of implementing an easy to use interpreter/translator layer is much more complicated than implementing MIDI mappings. For example, with a Monome you would need to be able to program AM to do all the interpretation of Monome inputs and send outputs back to Monome -- AM doesn't have that kind of programmability.

In future I may add some level of OSC support to AM but it will probably be of the kind that requires the sender to be programmed to understand what AM expects to receive. The scenario you're describing doesn't fall into that category (you kind of need some glue between what Monome sends, and what AM receives).

I'm happy to answer more questions about OSC. I know a bit about it.