O2: A Network Protocol for Music Systems

Abstract

O2 is a communication protocol for music systems that extends and interoperates with the popular Open Sound Control (OSC) protocol. Many computer musicians routinely deal with problems of interconnection, unreliable message delivery, and clock synchronization. O2 solves these problems, offering named services, automatic network address discovery, clock synchronization, and a reliable message delivery option, as well as interoperability with existing OSC libraries and applications. Aside from these new features, O2 owes much of its design to OSC, making it easy to migrate existing OSC applications to O2 or for developers familiar with OSC to begin using O2. O2 addresses the problems of interprocess communication within distributed music applications.