5 ms·

What ever happened to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Sound_Control https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Sound_Control?

bluGill 3y ago
Serves a different purpose. A few things support it, but it isn't common from what I can tell
duped 3y ago
Too much overhead, too little benefit. No one ever really cared about it.
kallistisoft 3y ago
OSC still exists it just never became the defacto standard for the industry; primarily because there is no standardized device mapping for interoperability. MIDI 2.0 fixes a number of issues that OSC was intended to fix, but imposes vendor limitations which lead to standardized adoption. I still use OSC for music production, and it's my goto protocol for writing code that needs networking as it's a super simple message passing protocol that lets me quickly connect various devices and services :)
wrl 3y ago
OSC is basically a serialisation format with a few niceties bolted on for batching and scheduling messages. The massive unsolved problem is discovery – discovery both of endpoints (servers, devices) and messages that can be sent to said endpoints. There have been efforts to solve this over the years, but are largely vendor-specific. MIDI has OS-level support for discovering endpoints/devices, and there's enough standardisation of supported controllers that things largely "just work".
elihu 3y ago
The idea of MIDI is that you can grab any midi controller and any synthesizer manufactured in the last forty years, plug them together, and they just work. (As long as we can keep up the pretense that we're synthesizing something that behaves like a piano, and we aren't trying to use USB which introduces its own set of problems.) The idea of OSC is that you can send any kind of message at all from any device to any other device and the semantics of those messages are left as an exercise to the reader. There's no guarantee of interoperability. It's just assumed that if you're using OSC you know what you're doing and it's up to you to make sure both devices are speaking the same dialect. Sometimes people tunnel what is effectively MIDI over OSC, but I think that's the closest thing to a common standard, beyond the basic low-level data layout that OSC messages are expected to conform to. I think some people use OSC for various things, but it tends to be for custom bespoke installations that were designed to do something specific.
- jojobas 3y ago
  "Behaves like a piano" doesn't do it justice. Piano never had channel/note aftertouch, pitch bends or whatever you assign to the 128 arbitrary controllers.
  - rvense 3y ago
    The only "piano-related" limitations of MIDI that I've run into is that a) a note-on message is fixed at just three numbers (note, velocity, channel), so while I can map velocity to, say, a filter and envelope settings but I can't easily have independent per-note control of them. It doesn't come up that often, but sometimes I do end up with two slight tweaks of the same patch on two channels and it's a bit of a faff compared to just having more numbers per note event. b) there is poor support for sending articulation (ie., a number that changes without sending a new note-on event) that references a held note, because CCs refer to a channel, not an existing note. Poly AT but isn't universally supported and at least if you're using hardware it tends to hog bandwidth.
    - elihu 3y ago
      Some more piano-like limitations: The tuning is assumed to be 12-tone equal temperament. Other temperaments are possible, but you're kind of off in uncharted territory. Especially if you want a temperament that doesn't use a 12 note repeating octave. (MTS exists but it's not widely supported.) You can't play a unison without resorting to multiple channels. No way to do the equivalent of guitar hammer-ons and pull-offs in a polyphonic manner without resorting to multiple channels. (MIDI 2.0 at least adds per-note pitch bend.) (A lot of MIDI limitations can be gotten around by just using multiple monophonic channels instead of one polyphonic channel, and that's what MPE is. Sadly most of the otherwise amazing famous analog poly synths out there can only receive on one channel.)
      - jojobas 3y ago
        There are system-exclusive commands and reserved/undefined event codes for rare situations like that. (Apart from non-12-note systems, and it's kinda bizarre to expect everyone's music standard to cater for something that esoteric).

bluGill 3y ago

Serves a different purpose. A few things support it, but it isn't common from what I can tell

duped 3y ago

Too much overhead, too little benefit. No one ever really cared about it.

kallistisoft 3y ago

OSC still exists it just never became the defacto standard for the industry; primarily because there is no standardized device mapping for interoperability. MIDI 2.0 fixes a number of issues that OSC was intended to fix, but imposes vendor limitations which lead to standardized adoption. I still use OSC for music production, and it's my goto protocol for writing code that needs networking as it's a super simple message passing protocol that lets me quickly connect various devices and services :)

wrl 3y ago

OSC is basically a serialisation format with a few niceties bolted on for batching and scheduling messages. The massive unsolved problem is discovery – discovery both of endpoints (servers, devices) and messages that can be sent to said endpoints. There have been efforts to solve this over the years, but are largely vendor-specific. MIDI has OS-level support for discovering endpoints/devices, and there's enough standardisation of supported controllers that things largely "just work".

elihu 3y ago

The idea of MIDI is that you can grab any midi controller and any synthesizer manufactured in the last forty years, plug them together, and they just work. (As long as we can keep up the pretense that we're synthesizing something that behaves like a piano, and we aren't trying to use USB which introduces its own set of problems.) The idea of OSC is that you can send any kind of message at all from any device to any other device and the semantics of those messages are left as an exercise to the reader. There's no guarantee of interoperability. It's just assumed that if you're using OSC you know what you're doing and it's up to you to make sure both devices are speaking the same dialect. Sometimes people tunnel what is effectively MIDI over OSC, but I think that's the closest thing to a common standard, beyond the basic low-level data layout that OSC messages are expected to conform to. I think some people use OSC for various things, but it tends to be for custom bespoke installations that were designed to do something specific.

jojobas 3y ago
"Behaves like a piano" doesn't do it justice. Piano never had channel/note aftertouch, pitch bends or whatever you assign to the 128 arbitrary controllers.
- rvense 3y ago
  The only "piano-related" limitations of MIDI that I've run into is that a) a note-on message is fixed at just three numbers (note, velocity, channel), so while I can map velocity to, say, a filter and envelope settings but I can't easily have independent per-note control of them. It doesn't come up that often, but sometimes I do end up with two slight tweaks of the same patch on two channels and it's a bit of a faff compared to just having more numbers per note event. b) there is poor support for sending articulation (ie., a number that changes without sending a new note-on event) that references a held note, because CCs refer to a channel, not an existing note. Poly AT but isn't universally supported and at least if you're using hardware it tends to hog bandwidth.
  - elihu 3y ago
    Some more piano-like limitations: The tuning is assumed to be 12-tone equal temperament. Other temperaments are possible, but you're kind of off in uncharted territory. Especially if you want a temperament that doesn't use a 12 note repeating octave. (MTS exists but it's not widely supported.) You can't play a unison without resorting to multiple channels. No way to do the equivalent of guitar hammer-ons and pull-offs in a polyphonic manner without resorting to multiple channels. (MIDI 2.0 at least adds per-note pitch bend.) (A lot of MIDI limitations can be gotten around by just using multiple monophonic channels instead of one polyphonic channel, and that's what MPE is. Sadly most of the otherwise amazing famous analog poly synths out there can only receive on one channel.)
    - jojobas 3y ago
      There are system-exclusive commands and reserved/undefined event codes for rare situations like that. (Apart from non-12-note systems, and it's kinda bizarre to expect everyone's music standard to cater for something that esoteric).