OSC - Open Sound Control

OpenSound Control ("OSC") is a protocol for communication among computers, sound synthesizers, and other multimedia devices that is optimized for modern networking technology and has been used in many application areas.

Use with VVVV

vvvv has native nodes to encode/decode to the OSC protocol. see the helpfiles of OSCEncoder (Network) and OSCDecoder (Network) for ease of use.

OSC Features

• Open-ended, dynamic,URL-style symbolic naming scheme
• Numeric and symbolic arguments to messages
• Pattern matching language to specify multiple targets of a single message
• High resolution time tags
• "Bundles" of messages whose effects must occur simultaneously
• Query system to dynamically find out the capabilities of an OSC server and get documentation''

--> http://opensoundcontrol.org/
--> old site

Here's a patch which show how OSC encodes application's data type into packets.
OSC packets

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Be aware that's OSC does not send data over network. It just feed data to a network transport layer, which most time will be UDP (as OSC encapsulate data into packets) and sometimes TCP. And this is the network transport layer that will then send/receive the data from/to the network communication.

Another important point. OSC converts the application data type into it's own data type, it's allow easier software inter-communication as you don't have to care which kind of data you could expect to send or receive.

So that whenever you a pass a data trough OSC, OSC will encodes it into one of the OSC data types (which could be int32, float32, OSC string, and OSC blob) and then feed it to a transport layer as packets. Once received, OSC will decode packets and extract the data to feed it to the application after convert it to the application data types.