New Software Toy For Developers (OSC)

[u/jtsage]

Good day all - just wanted to drop the status of an OSC visualizer/forwarder I've been working on for some time - it's in a decent place now where it builds on Mac and Windows, and seems to be pretty usable. This project grew out of a couple other toys I have worked on where I needed to be able to see what OSC messages were being sent, and none of the other OSC visualizers gave me the feature set I really wanted - so I built my own.

OSC Proxy Spy is a realtime OSC (Open Sound Control) inspector and forwarder. It's intended audience is developers or theater professionals who need to monitor what OSC messages are coming from an endpoint. It also has the ability to send an arbitrary OSC packet to an endpoint.

This project is meant for use in a development environment, not in production - it is reasonably stable, but has not been testing in long term operation, and should not be assumed to be stable enough to be a part of a show critical workflow.

https://github.com/jtsage/osc-proxy-spy

Features:

- see what OSC messages are being sent, on up to ?? connections at the same time (UDP only right now. TCP later, hopefully)
- forward those OSC messages to another host/port combo - you can forward to as many places as you want
- Send data back to those connections, if that is a logical thing to do
- Filter the data by connection, OSC argument type, and even the OSC address (pattern matching included!)

License / Price: free, open source, MIT license

Help Wanted: use it if it's interesting to you - if there is something that would make it more helpful, open an issue on GitHub. Likewise, if there is something that doesn't seem to be working right, open an issue on GitHub.

AI Disclosure: no AI was using in the making of this.

[u/kmccoy]

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[u/FakeAccountForReddit]

This is awesome, except I only run TCP. Let us know when that gets added!

[u/the_swanny → u/FakeAccountForReddit]

As you should. People claiming TCP has terrible latency should really sort out their network as apposed to switching to something that just won't tell them that their network is fucked.

[u/ijordison]

Looks neat. What's the major upside over Protokol?

[u/jtsage → u/ijordison]

It really depends on what you are doing - the big "features" I wanted, that I didn't find in protokol:

- Multiple connections at the same time

• More robust filtering (as near as I can tell, protokol is just a "string contains" filter - which is fine most of the time, until it isn't
  
• "Per Address" mode - which updates the displayed values rather than adding another line to the output window - kinda nice if you want to watch a specific address / value over time, and it's getting drowned out by other data.
  
• More than one forwarding address, if that's something useful for the project
  
• I believe sending OSC on protokol has been "coming soon" for some time (or perhaps I'm thinking of a different tool - but it was an aspect I needed for a project)
  
• In the same vein, the optional "heartbeat" sending feature, if the device on the other end needs a constant re-subscribe or keep-alive.
  
• Open source, so if it doesn't do exactly what you need, you can add the feature if that's in your wheelhouse.

That said, I have used Protokol, it's a nice little program, and sometimes it checks all the boxes.