Using Open Sound Control in Reaktor to send messages to Maschine

In this video, I show how to use the Open Sound Control (OSC) protocol to send messages from one instance of Reaktor to another inside Maschine.

Open Sound Control has been hailed by many as the replacement for MIDI as a protocol to communicate between music devices. Unfortunately, it has failed to catch on over the years as quickly as many advocates predicted. I chalk this up to a lack of proper standardization – OSC is so powerful and open-ended, last I knew there was no accepted message to send to tell a synthesizer to play a certain note, for example.

However, OSC is an powerful method for communication – it can be used to connect multiple Reaktor instances, or even multiple computers, to each other. What’s more, we aren’t restricted to the frustrating limitations of MIDI – 7-bit (0-127) messages, a small set of available message types, etc.

In the video, I show how to set up OSC in Reaktor, both for receiving and for sending messages. Then I show how to send the value of a knob from one instance of Reaktor to the other. This technique allows us to share data between two ensembles.

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