Hallo Guys,
since one year I’m developing controller hardware and software for Ardour with the Osc protocol.
Originaly I wanted to do it with the Mackie Protocol, but that’s way to limited.
Than I found out about the OSC protocol and I’m convinced that this should be established as the new
standart for controling DAWs.
I’ll puplish and document all the progress on my Git repository.
Please if anyone is interested and would try the things at home I would be very happy.
I’ll post here if there are any advancements.
Manuals for setup and videos for demonstation will come soon.
I guess to make this happen it would have to be standardized, and than some DAW companies have to implement it and the others will follow…
This is not going to happen. One of the simultaneous benefits and disadvantages of OSC is that there are precisely zero standard messages - the sender and receiver have to agree on precisely what messages they can usefully exchange. There have been attempts to create some OSC standards in the past (e.g. there is no way to even do the equivalent of a MIDI “note on” message), but they have largely failed.
If you are working on this based on a strong hope that some OSC message set will become standardized for this sort of thing, I would urge you to think again.
My motivation is to have a controller wich can if possible completely replace the mouse.
I had in the past Mackie Control and Console One, and none of the solutions is a complete solution,
feel good and are inspiring in my jugment.
I guess the only real thing would be an Avid S4, but who has the money for that.
After I did some tests with Ardour and the OSC protocol I knew it can be a complete solution for
navigation, standart controls and plugin control.
I have a working example where a Mackie Control controls Ardour via OSC and can use the spill feature, and customized plugin routing.
In case OSC will never be standardized and even no other DAWs would use it, that would not change my motivation.
I think Ardour and OSC makes a complete controller solution possible, the hardware just has to be made for that.
And I think it would be a great thing.
I’ll post all advancements in the future.
Looks like there is some standardization on the way, and the MIDI Association are looking for contributors.
In the announcement, they even state the same reason as @samuelhannapp , that good old mackie needs a replacement. So maybe it might be worth to look deeper into that.
The way I understood this, is that controllers and daws will have to support certain “blocks” of the spec. If they match, you can control that block without any further configuration necessary.
From this, I extrapolate, that it should be possible to use different controllers for different blocks or multiple for the same block. So either you get different hardware modules, or a fully integrated controller, or have transport controllers etc spread out across your different instruments or whatever you can think of.