Questions about OSC

Community Ideas for Ardour
#1

Hello, i will project to make a high end control surface for ardour (open hardware and open source)

I’m a little confuse , i read this :

and that ardour is very controllable via OSC (every menu action can be triggered by OSC, for example)

and this :

At present, OSC control is limited to transport and per-track solo/mute/rec-enable operations

What about the support of OSC for now ? and for the future ?

How much is difficult to add new controlable function whith osc ? ( i mean fader, sends , plugin control, edit function…)

Where can i found information about this ?

Thanks a lot
Best regard.
Olivier

#2

I took a stab at providing more information via OSC a while back. (see http://tracker.ardour.org/view.php?id=2239 for where I stopped (for now))

The problems of OSC are many-fold.

  1. Although it is a controller interface, most implementations lack a sane way to enumerate possible controllers.

  2. A smart surface requires more information (for example, current volume) than OSC was really designed to provide. It is an asyncronous interface to something that is syncronous in nature.

That said, the above patch actually showed it was possible to provide huge amounts of information via OSC without much impact on the central processor.

  1. Time stamping just plain doesn’t quite work. There is no standard way to cope with or measure latencies in the controllers.

  2. The namespace idea seems to be a good one, but wildly variantly implemented in practice.

#3

Thanks for reply

OSC have probleme to syncronize message in the time ?

  1. “It is an asyncronous interface to something that is syncronous in nature.” i not inderstand what you mean ?
    for exemple when we press play on transport key, the surface will send /ardour/transport_play, and is not possible to have a reply from ardour to have the curent statut of transport /ardour/get_transport_statut/ and the reply is "playing " to ligh on the play button in the surface.

How it’s difficul to ask ardour for invormation via osc ? (for exemple /ardour/get_vumeter/track8 ) and ardour repply via an osc message the requested value.

" it was possible to provide huge amounts of information via OSC without much impact on the central processor."

this is a good news !

Thanks