Last night, used GP ‘live’ for the first time in about a year for a zoom-based church ‘gig’ - worked spectacularly well with GP acting as the mixer for my vocal, guitar, incoming zoom to my in ears, etc. Really really good.
For this sort of thing - just a small event - there is one of our tech guys who is doing the spotlighting, etc in zoom. We were chatting after how it would be really useful if there was a way they could control in some way the audio coming from me just to have a little more control on levels etc. We were chatting about doing remote desktop etc and then it struck me - would it be possible to just use OSC (using something like Open Stage Control) across the internet?
I’m happy enough using OSC on a local network but have never tried it over the internet and not sure if a) it even works, or b) how to set it up to do that…
Any thoughts or anyone doing something similar before?
It works the same, you have to define the IP and ports of both PC you want to communicate, but what can be tricky if you have no idea, is to configure the two routers such that they open (allow you to use) the ports you want to use with GP.
The guy who would be on the other end is very very tech savvy and so pretty sure between us we’d be able to get that to work. We shall try and I will feedback with how it goes
I would be cautious — remember that OSC runs over UDP, not TCP. That means that packets (in this case OSC messages) can get lost. There are no retries and there will also be latency.
Also, depending on the day, gateways, routers, it can work perfectly one day and fail the next.
Nothing to do with Gig Performer though — just the nature of the beast.
To be honest, the situation where we would do this is super low profile and is more a one-time setup than active mixing throughout (it’s just a vocal and acoustic guitar).
The issue we found is that I can mix my end but it’s difficult to know what it sounds like over Zoom (which I really do not like…but thats a different story…) so useful for someone; whilst I am actually playing to be able to just tweak levels. Or if I get a bit more excited at some point and the level goes too high then to tweak a bit, or vice-versa. So If a message got lost it wouldn’t be the end of the world as it’s not doing anything time sensitive.
Anyways, as you say - we will have a good play around with it and see what we can do
But as a mixing platform for this sort of thing, GP really does rock! When I get home later I’ll stick another post in the ‘Stories from the trenches’ with the setup; it’s nothing special but the main thing is that it was super easy to set up a relatively complex bit of routing and worked perfectly first time!
A little delayed on the response here, but Open Stage Control would do what you want using TCP over the internet through a web browser interface.
Open Stage Control has on OSC server that would run on the same system as Gig Performer. Because they’re on the same system, UDP isn’t really a concern or problem.
The “control surface” part runs in any modern web browser, so that just needs to be able to establish a connection to the Open Stage Control server running on the system with GP. That would be TCP, thus no lost packets and auto retries, rerouting, etc.
