OSC Overview

• Open Sound Control (OSC) was proposed in 1997 by researchers Matt Wright and Adrian Freed as a more flexible alternative to MIDI.

• OSC was designed as a highly accurate, low latency, lightweight, and flexible method of communication for use in realtime musical performance.

• OSC is a communication protocol that is independent from any specific transport mechanism.

• That said, OSC packets are most typically sent and received using the UDP protocol over ethernet or wifi networks.

• OSC uses an open-ended, dynamic, URL-style symbolic naming scheme.

• The OSC protocol features:
  • a pattern-matching language to specify multiple recipients of a single message
  • high resolution time tags
  • "bundles" of messages whose affect must occur simultaneously
  • a query system to dynamically determine the capabilities of an OSC server and get documentation

• The OSC data format is big-endian.

• The OSC specification can be found at http://opensoundcontrol.org/