Comments on: Open Source OSC iPhone App Coming; Chicken and Egg Argument Dead

By: Tim Thompson

Tim Thompson — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 17:18:38 +0000

Anyone looking for an OSC app for the iphone that has configurable screens should definitely take a look at the 1.1 update of OSCemote. You can now do screens in HTML/Javascript that both send *and* receive OSC. Probably not as easy to create new screens as Mrmr, but OSCemote now seems WAY more open-ended.

By: Peter Kirn

Peter Kirn — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 12:50:14 +0000

Hi Patrick,
Oh yeah, good point….

And I expect we ought to have a standard Arduino-style implementation that’s Ethernet + OSC and is open source. Here’s one:

http://experimentalistsanonymous.com/ooscc/

By: Patrick Delges

Patrick Delges — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 07:05:20 +0000

Ooops, sorry for the typo:

makingthings’ Make Controller

By: Patrick Delges

Patrick Delges — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 07:03:16 +0000

Another hardware supporting OSC is makingthings’ .

There was also La kitchen’s kroonde, but I think it isn’t produced anymore.

By: Formal

Formal — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 22:11:09 +0000

I don’t mean to spam or anything, but I see this article is receiving more attention then the one on createdigitalmotion. I won’t repost my entire question, but if you feel like helping me out with OSC to midi please read my original post http://createdigitalmotion.com/2008/09/05/mrmr-iphone-2x-firmware-beta-and-the-self-configuring-touch-controller/ . Thanks!

By: Peter Kirn

Peter Kirn — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 17:18:26 +0000

@Christopher: Ah, yes, good point; updated my list there. (I start getting a little, uh, flaky round about Friday evening!) And, of course, Max is now no longer even an external, so that’s really a glaring omission on my part (not to mention, I use it)!

As for OSCemote, the plan as I understand it is that mrmr will be *both* open source and distributed via the App Store. I don’t think there’s anything about the App Store that fundamentally precludes doing open source software, you just have to be careful about which libraries you’d link to / what you open source, and of course the Apple bits aren’t open source. But what’s important that Eric has done that OSCemote does not do is that mrmr is also a protocol, and also has this client/server model for actually pushing out the controller templates.

Anyway, I plan to run both and use them for different things.

By: Darren Landrum

Darren Landrum — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 13:41:14 +0000

Wow, for once I’m in complete agreement with Paul Davis! ;-)

This is a proposal for a SYN OSC namespace:

http://stud3.tuwien.ac.at/~e0725639/OSC-SYN.txt

Theoretically, this could be the OSC syntax/implementation that replaces MIDI.

By: Christopher Penrose

Christopher Penrose — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 10:01:34 +0000

I have OSCemote on my iPhone already. I commend an open source effort, but unfortunately it will not be distributable on the App Store and thus relegated to iPhone pwning folk.

Someone complained that the Lemur was mentioned in the OSC article but alas it was; look again.

The most glaring omission in Peter’s article was the silence about Max/MSP/Jitter. I would wager that 80-90% of all OSC use occurs in Max/MSP. And another 5-10% in Supercollider and PD. Max/MSP has tremendous market penetration now so I was surprised that it was missing.

By: Paul Davis

Paul Davis — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 09:56:42 +0000

@John: for POSIX-ish systems liblo (google it) is an excellent place to start.

There are also implementations of OSC for languages like Python, Java and Perl, but several seem to exist for each language and its not trivial to determine which to choose (I have certainly been unable to do so).

But understand that OSC is a very, very simple protocol at heart. The reference implementation is just a UDP connection between the two endpoints, and simple strings sent back and forth. All that the libraries/SDK’s offer are more wrappers to make higher level things a bit simpler.

The one to do is to never go near the original reference implementation. Read the specs that come with it, but stay away from it. Its probably the worst C code I’ve ever read.

By: Peter Kirn

Peter Kirn — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 00:09:12 +0000

@John: It’s a pretty simple protocol; any development tools will work. For end user-facing tools that do the utility stuff, I’d like to see Java used, personally … but mainly for OSC utilities; Java’s great for networking and fairly lousy for audio.

Mostly what we need is to get people working on more fleshed-out syntax and implementation; I agree entirely with Paul Davis on that.

But a basic implementation is pretty simple … existing SDKs are just fine, and the basic protocol is well documented at opensoundcontrol.org.

Peter