OpenSound Control
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OpenSound Control (OSC) is a communication protocol for computers, sound synthesizers, and other multimedia devices. It can transport over many protocols, but is commonly used with UDP.
OSC is meant to supersede the MIDI standard, which was conceived in the 1980s and which many consider inadequate for modern multimedia purposes. It was developed by the same team who proposed the unsuccesful ZIPI protocol.
Features:
- Open-ended, dynamic, URL-style symbolic naming scheme
- Symbolic and high-resolution numeric argument data
- Pattern matching language to specify multiple recipients of a single message
- High resolution time tags
- "Bundles" of messages whose effects must occur simultaneously
- Query system to dynamically find out the capabilities of an OSC server and get documentation
OSC still lacks general acceptance, but support is growing.
There are dozens of implementations of OSC, including real-time sound and media processing environments, web interactivity tools, software synthesizers, a large variety programming languages, and hardware devices for sensor measurement. OSC has achieved wide use in fields including computer-based new interfaces for musical expression, wide-area and local-area networked distributed music systems, inter-process communication, and even within a single application.
Some examples of software with OSC implementations: