MIDI to OSC Interpreter

[MilesBuckley]

Myself and one of our sound designers (Tony) are trying to get our FLX S48 to be commanded by the sound software (SFX6). Initially we are only looking at getting the Go button operated for the master playback but it would be nice to explore what else we could do with it.

The S48 does not have MSC, only OSC. SFX6 can not output OSC so we believe that we need an interpreter (to run on the SFX PC perhaps) to convert its output from MIDI to OSC before sending those commands over ethernet to the S48.

First question is this possible / realistic?

Secondly has anyone achieved this already?

Miles (new to S48 from Jan this year)

 

[Davidmk]

You can do it with TouchOSC (the new, paid version not the mk1, free one) but it would require some coding.

[Edward Z88]

Hi @MilesBuckley

Welcome to the forum.

I have not personally had experience with converting MSC to OSC. However, another potential solution - could you contact the SFX6 team, and see whether OSC is on their road-map? You never know - they may be planning on implementing it soon, which would save you the time and effort of figuring out a protocol converter.

[Davidmk]

A quick Google for "midi to osc converter" shows a lot of people have had the same issue in various situations and some of the hits cover solutions that are on offer. These include free options.

I haven't time to review any of the options and, even if I did you should still carry out your own research but I am intrigued by the first result I got. ShowCockpit, it costs between €30 and .€299 depending on on the options you want and seems to be well documented. This is not a reccomendation but it interested me enough that I may give it a try myself even though I already use a TouchOSC thing I wrote which includes midi input and OSC output. In 24 years I've had one touring show come in that wanted midi control of the desk and it might be handy to have a solution on standby in case it happens again.

Looking at free options I found MidiMonster interesting. It is open source and appears to be free. It's a bit more complicated to set up but not too bad and there is documentation although it seems a bit sketchy. Again, you should do your own research - there could be better options.

When you get a solution that works you should give the forum a heads up as there may be others that need it.

 

[MilesBuckley]

David and Edward, thank you both.

We spent 5 hours on this on Tuesday and (surprisingly) never came across TouchOSC - thank you for that one it sounds promising with good documentation (we are an amateur theatre but we do have a realistic budget for tech). I looked at MidiMonster and a couple of others and I apologies for not putting those I have tried / looked at in my original post.

One thing that I've come across is OSC via Telnet. SFX can send data packets (assuming text messages at this point) via TCP/IP. The S48 seems to be able use TCP (SLIP) for OSC so that's something for us to explore.

It doesn't help that searching for "open sound control" largely returns items about turning on Windows sound!

Miles