This article includes a list of references, related reading, or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. (August 2010) |
Open Sound Control (OSC) is a protocol for networking sound synthesizers, computers, and other multimedia devices for purposes such as musical performance or show control. OSC's advantages include interoperability, accuracy, flexibility and enhanced organization and documentation.[1] Its disadvantages include inefficient coding of information, increased load on embedded processors,[2] and lack of standardized messages/interoperability.[3][4][5] The first specification was released in March 2002.
{{cite web}}
: Missing or empty |url=
(help)
one of the reasons OSC has not replaced MIDI yet is that there is no connect-and-play … There is no standard namespace in OSC for interfacing e.g. a synth
OSC suffers from a superset of this problem: it's anarchy, and deliberately so. The owners of the specification have been so eager to avoid imposing constraints upon it that it has become increasingly difficult for hardware to cope with it. … More severely, there is an interoperability problem. OSC lacks a defined namespace for even the most common musical exchanges, to the extent that one cannot use it to send Middle C from a sequencer to a synthesiser in a standardised manner
OSC also introduces new obstacles. First, since there is no fixed set of messages, each participating server needs to know what messages it can send to the servers it intends to communicate with. Currently the OSC standard does not provide for a means of programmatically discovering all messages a server responds to