Sending OSC from Max to another Computer/Lighting Console

Ok. Where to start?!

Are you connected to a wider network or are you trying to connect your PC directly to the lighting unit with a single Ethernet cable? Whilst it can be made to work on a direct connection with a single cable, Windows is actually dire at doing this and it can be a nightmare getting it work (unlike Macs that seem to cope with minimal fuss!). Ideally, you need to create some sort of a network with at least a switch, a DHCP server or, better still, a router between the two. Alternatively, if the lighting unit has a DHCP server then turn it on and let it generate the network settings for your PC.

What you must not do is give the PC the same address settings as the lighting unit - neither will be able to send or receive anything! The PC address must be different, even if by just one point, eg 192.168.100.31. This might not work if you are on a wider network and you happen to pick an address used by another device - hence why using DHCP on an unfamiliar network is the better option. If there is a router in the system or the lighting unit has a DHCP server then set your PC to use DHCP rather than a fixed address.

With UDP, it is the norm for send and receive to use two different port numbers. There are rare exceptions (like my dreaded Behringer mixer that uses the same port for both). Unfortunately, there are no standards for defining port numbers so I'm assuming that you can get the lighting unit to tell you what it is using. The PC must be sending to the receive port of the lighting unit and the receive port on the PC must match the send port on the lighting unit. Source Audio will tell you to broadcast from your PC using 255.255.255.255 as the address in the udpsend object but that doesn't help much with udpreceive if you need two way communication, and he uses Mac's that do networking properly unlike Windows that doesn't!!!

I had nightmares using OSC over UDP in my project until I came across the Sadam Library - accessible through the Package Manager in Max. You'll need to install Sadam to use it. This was my solution:

I've attached the bit of code here if you want to paste it into your patch to try:

OSC messages are sent from your patch via a corresponding "s OSCOut" object and responses received via a corresponding "r OSCIn" - or you can just create your own connections. The two message boxes will display the most recent sent and received OSC messages.

You will need to change three other things - the address in the Sadam.udpClient object needs to be the address of your lighting unit (192.168.100.30). The "dst_port" number needs to be changed to the receive port on the lighting unit and "src_port" needs to be changed to the port number it sends on.

Press the RESET bang to initialise the configuration.

The "p X-Mix OSC Debug" embedded patch contains a message roll of the last 64 messages sent and received for debugging purposes - click the "X" control to enable it and double click the "p X-Mix OSC Debug " object to view the message log.

I hope that this helps in some way!