OSCgroups

Ross Bencina
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Page last updated 9 March 2006

News

October 17, 2005. The sources for oscpack and OSCgroups are now harmonised, so you can safely use released versions of oscpack with oscgroups.

Overview

OSCgroups is a system for routing OSC messages between a group of collaborating users. It is designed to make joining and leaving a group simple, and to overcome the problem of connecting multiple users behind different NAT routers using a NAT traversal server with the usual "NAT hole punching" scheme (you can put that into google for more info). OSCgroups also implements basic group functionality similar to the concept of channels in internet relay chat. You can read the README file for more info.

Status

OSCgroups is currently being used by researchers at the Music Technology Group, University Pompeu Fabra, for teaching at Georgia Tech and Mills College, and is also part of the Hub's current networking infrastructure.

The software works, it's been used for performances. The server has mysteriously fallen over twice in the last six months, so there is a suspected bug there. If you need to reboot the server at short notice you should run your own.

Code reviews and bug reports will be happily received.

Supported platforms

OSCgroups has been compiled and used on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. It should also work on 64 bit platforms, although this has not yet been tested.

Public server

Thanks to the kind folks at the Music Technology Group, Universitat Pompeu Fabra there is a public OSCgroups server running at oscgroups.iua.upf.edu port 22242. This server is administered by me (Ross Bencina) and is currently configured with a relatively low maximum number of concurrent users (which can be increased if there is demand). Please send me an email if you have any queries about this server.

Download

Recent OSCgroups snapshots can be downloaded below. The filename format is year_month_day_hourminute. In the Subversion repository (see below) interoperable versions of OSCgroups and oscpack are tagged with the same date/timestamp.

• oscgroups_2005_10_26_2304.zip (fixed Makefile)
• oscgroups_2005_10_17_1823.zip (goes with oscpack version 1.0.1, aka oscpack_2005_10_17_1823.zip)
• oscgroups_2005_06_13_1735.zip
• oscpack_2005_06_13_1735.zip
• Windows binaries: oscgroups_win32_2005_06_13_1735.zip
• Mac OS X binaries: oscgroups_mac_2005_08_09.zip

Subversion access

The OSCgroups source code is now hosted in a Subversion (SVN) repository at smartelectronix (thanks to Bram and Nessie!). You can browse the source code with your web browser at the following URL:

http://ross.smartelectronix.com/index.cgi/browser/oscgroups

You can access the SVN repository using an SVN client (anonymous read access available) at:

https://www.smartelectronix.com:9000/repos/osc/

See also

For more information about Open Sound Control, see the Open Sound Control home page.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to University Pompeu Fabra for the public OSC server.

Thanks to Tim Kreger, the guys from the reacTable, and the Hub for being beta testers and helping with cross platform debugging issues.

Completed at the Music Technology Group, Audiovisual Institute, University Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, June 2005.

Terms of use

OSCgroups is distributed under the GPL. It uses oscpack for OSC communications which is distributed under a BSD-style license.

Please email comments to Ross Bencina <rossb@audiomulch.com>