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Re: [fluid-dev] OSC support
From: |
Pedro Lopez-Cabanillas |
Subject: |
Re: [fluid-dev] OSC support |
Date: |
Sun, 8 Jul 2012 09:33:16 +0200 |
User-agent: |
KMail/1.13.5 (Linux/2.6.34.10-0.6-desktop; KDE/4.4.4; i686; ; ) |
Hi,
On Saturday 07 July 2012, Peter Eastman wrote:
> Have you thought about adding OSC support? MIDI is very limiting as a
> control mechanism. Being able to use OSC would make FluidSynth a lot
> more useful and powerful.
I'm not sure if your message means that you offer yourself as a volunteer to
work in the subject and you want to ask if it would be a good idea, or it is
the opposite and you are advocating and asking for volunteers into the
endeavor.
Anyway, I'm going to offer my opinion and explain why I'm not going to waste
a single millisecond adding OSC support to FluidSynth or any other software
project I'm involved at this time. First, OSC can't be a replacement for
MIDI in all situations. The big success of MIDI among musicians in my
opinion was a consequence of providing good interoperability for all
devices, without any effort from the users. This was possible thanks to a
well defined protocol, which is OTOH one MIDI limitation. OSC doesn't define
one set of messages with standard semantics, which provides great
flexibility as each manufacturer is free to define its own implementation.
As a consequence, two devices or software applications using OSC are not
guaranteed to be interoperable unless there are mappings between arbitrary
external messages and its own internal functionality, which requires more or
less effort from the users, multiplied by the number of software and
hardware pieces involved.
Second: there is too much propaganda and hype for my taste around OSC as a
MIDI replacement, and as a consequence I don't trust it. I'm not going to
comment some of the lies and false claims that float around the Net. Here
are two links, so you can judge by yourself:
http://opensoundcontrol.org/files/OSC-Demo.pdf
http://www.midi.org/aboutmidi/midi-osc.php
About using OSC with FluidSynth, the fact is that FluidSynth is a SoundFont
synthesizer, and SoundFonts (along with DLS) are also MIDI technologies. The
capabilities of the SoundFonts are so closely related to MIDI, that I am
skeptical about OSC being a real advantage to control FluidSynth. Anyway,
FluidSynth is mainly a library that can be wrapped by applications, and you
can write new programs offering an OSC interface to it. If you don't want to
start from scratch, DSSI-FluidSynth is already a FluidSynth wrapper using
OSC: http://dssi.sourceforge.net/download.html#FluidSynth-DSSI
Regards,
Pedro
- [fluid-dev] OSC support, Peter Eastman, 2012/07/07
- Re: [fluid-dev] OSC support,
Pedro Lopez-Cabanillas <=
- Re: [fluid-dev] OSC support, Ebrahim Mayat, 2012/07/08
- Re: [fluid-dev] OSC support, Stefan Sauer, 2012/07/08
- Re: [fluid-dev] OSC support, Ebrahim Mayat, 2012/07/08
- Re: [fluid-dev] OSC support, Pedro Lopez-Cabanillas, 2012/07/08
- Re: [fluid-dev] OSC support, Ebrahim Mayat, 2012/07/08
- Re: [fluid-dev] OSC support, Ebrahim Mayat, 2012/07/08
- Re: [fluid-dev] OSC support, HartsAntler, 2012/07/08
- Re: [fluid-dev] OSC support, Peter Eastman, 2012/07/08
- Re: [fluid-dev] OSC support, Element Green, 2012/07/08
- Re: [fluid-dev] OSC support, David Henningsson, 2012/07/09