
So, what can you do with OSC? A superb example is DiGiCo’s implementation on their SD consoles. Example: /your_lighting_desk_name/scene_ number 27 or /your_sound_console_name/channel 5 volume 0.7 It is used to differentiate between different messages you are sending on one port. For example, 8888.Īddress Pattern – This usually looks like a URL.

Use a 4- or 5-digit number to stay out of the range of most common ports. This could basically be any number, but a lot of ports are reserved for other purposes. Therefore, you send your OSC stream to an IP address on a particular port number, and the receiver must be listening on the same port number otherwise the stream will not get though. That is what ports numbers are to an IP address. The apartment numbers would be 1 to 50 at 100 Smith St. Say you have a block of 50 apartments at 100 Smith St. Port – The port number is like a box number for an IP address. In a poorly planned network, you could easily flood it and performance would suffer greatly. You must be very careful doing this though. That is, you broadcast the OSC data to every device on your network and only those that are listening on a particular port will act on it. In some cases, you can use broadcast addresses. IP address on a local network usually start with .x. All devices on your network must have a unique IP address. IP Address – The IP address of the device where you send your message.
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So, for example where a note-on MIDI message is a cryptic series of numbers: 1001 0011–0100 0101–0100, an equivalent OSC message would be: /Keyboard/MIDI/Channel_1/Note_On, tt: “ii”, 69, 79.Īs OSC messages are designed to be sent over a network, you need to define where you want to send your message, and what the message contains.

Just by looking at the text of a message, you can tell what it is for. A second advantage is that older protocols can be easily translated to and from OSC.įinally, OSC messages are self-descriptive. The data transfer rate of OSC is only limited by your networking hardware and comfortably sits on Gigabit networks.Ī great advantage of OSC is that there is no overall fixed scheme to define or restrict the set of possible messages, which is the case with MIDI. To 0.000000000001 of a second, which is more than adequate for live events. OSC also includes a picosecond-resolution timestamp, down It uses a human readable, URL-style address format and can send data in forms of words or numbers. With OSC you can transmit multiple data types.
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If you want to update yourself on show networks, check out my article in CX118 (link below). This means that OSC applications can send data using UDP to other hosts on an IP network without prior set-up of specific channels or paths, making OSC inherently networkable and so very easy to use via local networks and the Internet.

The main benefit for UDP is that the data gets to the receiver/s much more quickly because no handshaking is required. It pushes out data regardless of any bandwidth constrains, making it speedier, but riskier.īecause UDP doesn’t support retransmissions, packet ordering, or error-checking, there’s potential for a network glitch to corrupt the data en-route. UDP, on the other hand, starts without requiring any handshake. If a packet goes missing, it is re-sent because both ends know what has made it through successfully through error checking. The sender asks the receiver to start a connection, the receiver responds, and the sender acknowledges the response and maintains a session between either end.įor this reason, TCP is reliable and can solve issues of packet loss and ordering. The primary difference between UDP and TCP hinges on the fact that TCP requiresĪ three-way handshake when transporting data. User Datagram Protocol (UDP) and Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) are both core components of the internet protocol suite. Before we get further, I should explain the difference between UDP and TCP. OSC is built on the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) networking protocol.

Developed by the UC Berkeley Centre for New Music and Audio Technology and released in 2002, OSC introduced a robust communications method to remotely control media and other digital processes. Enter Open Sound Control, otherwise known as OSC.
