ABSTRACT

If you are familiar with some audio equipment and musical instruments, you may be wondering what the differences are between the musical instrument digital interface (MIDI) protocol and OSC, and why OSC exists at all since MIDI seems to be capable of similar functionality. The truth is that this has been an ongoing debate in the music technology circles for a while, but I would say that OSC is a more general solution to the problems that we can find in audio production, and more particularly in scenarios that involve networked devices, although it’s also possible to stream MIDI data over a network (by using RTP-MIDI). It is true that recent proposals for a MIDI HD standard would overcome some of the limitations of MIDI, but OSC has been around for a while already and its maturity and simplicity makes it still ideal for some of the use cases that we can find in game audio development. One of the advantages of OSC is that it allows us to model any data format and meaning that we want, as we are not constrained with the typical musical notation and control change parameters that are found in the MIDI protocol. So the abstractions built with OSC can go beyond music terminology and are customizable for being easily human-readable, as we will see in this chapter.