Re: Thoughts on OSC in Ardour

On 08/18/2015 02:41 PM, Guy Sherman wrote:
> Hi All,

Hi Guy,

A dedicated OSC Hardware control surface is a cool project.

Even though you mentioned for Ardour, is there a reason why this could
not be a generic surface - assuming one finds consensus about mixer
layout/plugins controls?  ie. are you panning to hardcode the OSC paths?

It'd be cool if the DAW could push the complete config (incl OSC paths)
to the device.

[..]

> * Querying ardour about the mixer layout. 

Let's postpone this for a minute because...


> Approach 1 - extend what Ardour has already, and tidy some of it up.

OSC via UDP has the very nice property to be stateless.

That'll need some extra effort for pushing configuration (packet loss,
re-ordering packets..)  If the control-surface is only a simple
microcontroller that'll not be trivial.


> Approach 2 - HTTP+WebSockets-based OSC implementation

That would require Ardour to listen to a TCP port, handle connects, bind
client ports and interpret minimal HTTP (all while doing realtime audio
processing and everything else in the same process).

While it should be fine in theory, I have hunch that in reality this
will be problematic (esp cross platform). If you want to consider this
approach, I highly suggest to prototype this before going deeper.

best,
robin