Hacker News Reader

Comment by magnusson | Hacker News Reader

Ha! I dunno, what occurs to me is how cool it is that we can still get so much use out of MIDI, a standard adopted in 1983.

View on HN

MIDI is well past its prime. It places unnecessary limitations on musical expression. I'd like to see browsers (and instruments) adopting Open Sound Control.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Sound_Control

One could argue that it places necessary limitations on musical expression that allowed it to flourish. Defining scales, etc in the protocol left some issues w/ microtonal stuff. The timing protocol is a bit squidgy for beat matching, but if you look at OSC everyone creates their own namespace and instead of one protocol you have a bunch of devices with different mapping conventions.

I would say the 0-127 range of controls hurts midi more than anything, if someone just bumped midi to osc's range most people would be happy. HD MIDI does that and may end up usurping OSC before OSC even gets traction: http://www.midi.org/aboutus/news/hd.php

I think you really nailed that - OSC is a useful protocol, and it's definitely been used important in computer music (Supercollider for example uses OSC as the protocol for messages from the language to the server).

But the beautiful thing about MIDI is how plug-and-play it is, because of the one standard. You can plug one keyboard into another and boom, you have an instant controller. I can't see that functionality in OSC's future.

0-127 is really limiting though - I've tried using faders where 0 is no volume, and 127 is max volume, and it just doesn't feel like there is enough resolution to fine-tune things.

Re the 0-127 range, you may be familiar with this, but many devices are capable of sending 14-bit MIDI messages by combining 2 different MIDI CCs, allowing for much finer control. 106.js supports both 7 and 14-bit messages.

Wow, looking at that it looks like my old (lost?) Peavey PC-1600 could send 14 bit messages. In the end I think a lot of the problem is also fixable with better interpolation and mapping, but I've definitely ended up sitting in the range I want on a synth mapping, but getting clicks when I touch a knob. Pretty interesting to think 14 bit midi has been around for so long but it hasn't really taken off. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NRPN whenever I go into the midi standard I end up finding neat stuff. These days USB MIDI and bluetooth MIDI have also kept it alive while OSC is still lost in a web of standards all different, great for communicating when one dev is on the send and receive side, but bad for easy interop.

I love how its so simple you can bit bang it, but yeah, 128 values ain't enough. 14 bit midi is a dodgy hack. When you get used to turning knobs on analog gear, using midi to control complex modern digital synths feels barbaric.

(TBF if I think 14 bit midi is a hack then I should really be against OSC)

I am happy with MIDI.

MIDI just freaking works. I've seen someone fight to setup OSC for about 20 minutes (and failing) in a particular DAW, and the creative process of just plugging my hardware synths together with a sequencer - no computers involved, and having it work is awesome.

I agree channel routing is annoying, but for most things I do (electronic music) it's not limiting. Am I wanting to sequence a Harken (sp) Continuum with full aftertouch and funky envelopes? Not so much.

I dread the day everything requires a computer, and the MIDI cable is an amazing beast for having lived as long as it's lived. It's somewhat like a shark or crocodile in that respect.

I agree it's not beautiful to automate a smooth filter sweep but in general, it's a great thing.

The thing about OSC is that its kind of too Open - its really a raw layer that various protocols similar to MIDI could run on top of, but the standard itself only defines how messages and types are structured.

It doesn't specify anything like pitches, tempos, control messages, envelope triggers. (In fact why is it even called "Sound Control" ? There's nothing specific to sound in it.)

It isn't a standard there that let's people just plug things into each other. Each program that uses it has completely different APIs.

I think there needs to be an initiative from developers and manufacturers to make establish standards that run on top of OSC to make it useful.

Is there such a thing as an "OSC file" that can be played back like a MIDI file? If not, I think it's a critical reason why OSC has yet to see wider adoption — or is, at least, a symptom of the reason.

Yeah, it was a little strange to me that we got WebMIDI but not WebOSC. I wonder if there are discussions around this choice.

MIDI is a super straightforward protocol, so maybe that is why?

There is a W3C proposal for TCP and UDP sockets in the browser. Then we could easily implement OSC

http://www.w3.org/2012/sysapps/tcp-udp-sockets/

There are a few projects out there that use websockets to talk to a node js server and then forward that to OSC.

I guarantee this is why! This is a first step for this whole thing, it only makes sense to get the most widely-supported (and arguably simplest) implementation out first.

but OSC is so much more straight forward...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com