On Wed, 13 Aug 2014, Len Ovens wrote:
Just to be complete... I have looked at OSC. OSC is very flexable. However,
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
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