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Open Sound Control – It’s The New MIDI!!

By Primus Luta

That’s basically the way I was introduced to Open Sound Control.  It was (is) going to be THE protocol for digitla music connectivity.  That’s a pretty big statement, and when I first heard it I was quite skeptical.  I mean MIDI is a mainstay, but having been developed long before the digital revolution completely changed the face of music, it has many limitations.  Of course there’s always the possibility that a MIDI 2.0 protocol will pop up one day, but in the meantime, looking to the future OSC seems to be well on its way to establishing itself as the “Sound Control” standard.

So what is it that makes OSC so different from MIDI.  Well the primary thing is that it is based on network protocols, the backbone of computer connectivity in this digital world.  But beyond that it presents a level of flexibility which simply leaves MIDI in the dust.  Where MIDI is confined to a limited (albeit extensive) message set, OSC is designed to be open so that the messages can be defined by hardware developers, software developers, and even the user.  What OSC can control is literally only limited by the imagination of the user.

Recently the iPhone and its OSC support has taken the protocol mainstream, but there have been a number of both hardware and software developers who have been ahead of the curve in OSC.  With the rise of iPhone applications using OSC one can only predict there will be a rise in OSC in the coming years.  Indeed one of the biggest limitations in the past of OSC is that development has been restricted to ths small set of hardware and applications that support it.  But with Hardware from Jazz Mutant and soft-synths like Circle Synth popping up with OSC support, I invision a future where full studio setups are communicating to each other via OSC the way they do now with MIDI.

But enough about the future, for right now there’s still a lot that can be done with Open Sound Control, and the Bidule tutorials is now ready to start showing you how.  The fourth tutorial in the series is now online providing an introduction to using OSC in Bidule by setting up the OSC Servers to support monome communication.  The majority of the tutorials from this point forward will be built on this OSC foundation, though I will be adding a new section for non monome related tutorials as well to supplement.  I hope you enjoy it and the rest of the series.  If you’d like to learn more about OSC be sure to check out the introduction page over at OpenSoundControl.