Bernstein

Bernstein is a simple Ruby message queue for OSC messages that gives Ruby the ability to asynchronously send messages to OSC-enabled software and hardware. It is built on top of the ruby-osc libray and currently uses Redis to queue the messages. Bernstein provides support for float,integer and string datatypes. In addition, it offers an awk-mode that a client can use to be notified that an OSC message was delivered and awknowledged.

Why is it useful?

While typical OSC communication is 1:1 between a client and an OSC consumer, Bernstein allows for many clients to control an OSC device or process. For example, there could be a web interface adapting requests from many users and sending them as OSC messages to a sound generator in an installation or performance. See here. Due to the queuing there is an inherent latency, however that might be neglible in certain situations.

Basic Usage

gem install bernstein

Make sure that Redis is running. Start the background poller daemon:

bernstein start -- -c bernstein.yml

require 'bernstein'

# see sample yml file for options
Bernstein.configure_from_yaml!('bernstein.yml')

# send a message string, all parameters will be converted to floats
msg_id = Bernstein::Client.send_message_by_string "/synths/4/filter_cutoff 0.5"

# send a message with specific types
msg_id = Bernstein::Client.send_message '/synth/params', 'sinewave', 440, 556.3, 334.0

# get status ('queued','sending','sent')
Bernstein::Client.message_status(msg_id)

Stop the background poller like this:

bernstein stop

Default Configuration

See bernstein.sample.yml. Note: if no redis options are passed, then the redis connection defaults will be used.

Awk mode

By default, bernstein has awk mode enabled which means that it will send an internal message id along with every message and expect the OSC receiver to respond back with an OSC 'awk' that contains the same message id. For many software OSC implementations this is pretty easy to setup, however it is not likely to work with hardware. Make sure to disable it using the require_awks config key.

License

The MIT License. Copyright (c) 2014 Anthony Plekhov. See LICENSE.