In what scenarios would you use OSC over MIDI?

Question

I use the TouchOSC Bridge app on my Macbook to convert OSC signals (sent from a Nexus 7 running TouchOSC for Android) to MIDI so that I can send note on messages and CC values to software (Predominantly PureData and Reaktor).

What I'm curious about is why you would use OSC when MIDI can convey most information you would require anyway. I'm yet to find a situation where MIDI hasn't been able to control a variable I need to edit, both from the controller to the host and vice-versa.

I might be missing something here so I'd like to throw it out there to the larger community!

Answer 1

In many cases OSC is used to encapsulate MIDI messages into UDP packets so they can be sent over a network (sometimes to multiple destinations).

However, the OSC protocol allows many more types of data to be transmitted. For example, you can send 32 bit numbers (float or integer) compared to 8 bit integers in MIDI, and symbolic messages, too.