| Several months ago I reported on TouchOSC as a GUI controller app for
Android Csound6 running on the same Android device. For both OSC and MIDI
control from Android, whether to Csound on Android or Windows or Mac,
TouchOSC is the gold standard. It is stable, well-suported and extensively
documented. Its GUI editor for all mainline platforms is user-friendly - so
much so that it is required by other OSC apps for GUI design, *including
OSCillation*. The only possibly significant drawback of TouchOSC is that it
costs $5US.
Several other comparable OSC controllers for Android are free; the best of
them - and very close to TouchOSC conceptually - is OSCillation. It also has
a stable and growing Spanish company behind it.
If you want to *create* your own custom GUIs for Android, of course, you'll
need to purchase TouchOSC. (Note too that OSCillation does not include
MIDI.) If you only want to distribute performance GUIs to others, however,
you can save users $5 by distributing GUIs performable by OSCillation.
Coding .csds and TouchOSC GUIs for performance by OSCillation, however,
means making extensive changes to both. To test compatibility between
TouchOSC and OSCillation, I "ported" 4 of my compositions (both .csds and
GUIs) from TouchOSC to OSCillation, making as few changes as possible.
All materials relating to OSCillation are contained in this (non-public) zip
archive:
http://arthunkins.com/WORKOSCforAndroid.zip
The comparable TouchOSC materials are openly available at:
http://arthunkins.com/PeacealtAndroid.zip and
http://arthunkins.com/SpiritusSanctusAlts.zip
(These latter archives also contain, for comparison, .csds coded for my
enhanced, "alternate" yet standard Android apps, i.e., they do not require a
separate GUI performance app.)
OSCillation has several features that TouchOSC doesn't. 1) OSCillation can
communicate with up to 4 different servers, one per page of an OSCillation
Layout (GUI). 2) A version of OSCillation exists for Windows devices. I
didn't test either of these features, as they were not relevent to my needs.
Though OSCillation is a stable product, it suffers from several fairly major
problems: 1) documentation is poor, difficult to locate, and is not
well-expressed in translation. (Much correspondence with a helpful tech
person was required.) 2) As OSCillation is the only app by this company -
their primary business is hardware devices which OSCillation is designed to
control, all OSC communication is via *DMX channels* (with which I was
entirely unfamiliar).Though their devices are all media related, including
an emphasis on audio, their experience does not include interfacing with
music software such as Csound.
With DMX, values sent from OSCillation are limited to a maximum of 255, and
return values to OSCillation controller widgets to *integers* (max 255).
Together with a unique DMX message format, these numerical limitations led
to many necessary coding changes, both GUI and .csd.
Another coding issue - one that required visual change to the GUI itself -
was the fact that string messages cannot be sent to on-screen label widgets.
(This is promised to be "fixed" in a later version of the app. The
OSCillation tech was unaware that TouchOSC offered this feature.) This
difference can be viewed in the GUIs for my two "Peace" compositions.
A final note: the limitation of numerical displays for slider/knob values to
integers presented a special problem: I needed to display values with two
decimal places. (This limitation will not disappear in later versions of
OSCillation.) My creative if outlandish "solution" was as follows: multiply
my decimal value by 100, round it, send it out, then create a
decimal-point-only label widget pasting it on-screen precisely at the
appropriate position. Thank goodness values sent to *labels* can exceed 255.
(Conclusion: where there's a will there is often a way!)
Despite the extensive coding modifications, OSCillation GUIs are compatible
with TouchOSC. With the more usual TouchOSC GUI, the reverse is not true.
Bottom line: The $5US is well spent by all - especially by the
composer/arranger.
Art Hunkins
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