Re: [fluid-dev] OSC support

[Pedro Lopez-Cabanillas]

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