Bazille and Open Sound Control

[papertiger]

To uhe,

This question may arise from ignorance, misunderstanding, or maybe some unholy combination of both, but it's something that I've been curious about.

To my knowledge, neither ACE nor Bazille support OSC (Open Sound Control). I find this lack of support puzzling given that the parameters are of such fine resolution. The latter is wonderful for sound design but maddening when trying to map things to MIDI and sweep through parameter ranges to hear the effects on the sound. Would OSC help with this issue? It would seem, at least a lay person, that the finer resolution of OSC would benefit those trying to control Bazille, or any of the uhe synths, from an external controller (lemur with an OSC template, etc.).

thanks in advance for any input you or anyone else may have!

M

[papertiger]

hmmm, is my question so off-base or non-sensical? i really am curious about OSC v. MIDI when it comes to controlling uhe synths... esp. from the design perspective.

thanks!

[xh3rv]

It's not off-base given how OSC is often perceived, and what people really want it to be. Unfortunately it's just not comparable to MIDI. There's actually very little to the OSC specification and there's no standard implementation, just a message format. Consequently, nobody's versions of OSC are likely to be the same; the messages might look similar but how to engineer hardware, a DAW, or a plug-in to use OSC is completely up in the air.

[papertiger]

thanks, xh3rv. that's incredibly disappointing. no wonder OSC will not replace MIDI, at least in the near term (...or at least until manufacturers/programmers start agreeing on some standards).

perhaps i can attempt (!) to create a Max for Live device that will snap to certain values and not just the 128 divisions of the MIDI spec.

[Urs]

Well, it's a chicken and egg problem. OSC isn't like Copperlan who have example controllers, plug-ins and hosting solutions to go by. Unfortunately Copperlan has a license that just isn't for us, but they were kind enough to adapt their free wrapper for our stuff. If someone was creating a cheap alternative to Copperlan with OSC alongside a similarly easy to use plug'n'play interface, then we're all ears. But as is, OSC remains within our low priority pool of feature requests.

[thetechnobear]

yeah, OSC is cool if you are happy to write code, but of little use to the average musician

>perhaps i can attempt (!) to create a Max for Live device that will snap to certain values and not just the 128 divisions of the MIDI spec.
how are you going to communicate with the plugin? 14 bit midi ?

[~Pd~]

To control just about any plugin's parameters from OSC, use Reaper as a host. When you MIDI learn a control to OSC using the Reaper "param" menu, Reaper translates the OSC to host automation, which runs at a much higher resolution than MIDI. That eliminates steppiness from filter sweeps, etc. Works great for me using Konkreet Performer to control Zebra parameters. When you get the mappings set up how you like, you can save it as an FX chain to reload later. Should work with Bazille too.