Loopback OSC Broadcast

[FL K]

Hi lovely people on the list and at F53,

I am trying to trigger one specific cue within a workspace each time the playhead is moved. After research, I thought the following should do the trick:

- have a "self" patch, either with localhost or 127.0.0.1 and port 53000

- send /udpReplyPort 53000 (so that any QLab replies go directly back to QLab)

- send /udpKeepAlive (to keep it alive without time-out)

- send /eventFormat "/cue/thescript/start" (so that on every event update, the specific cue with the cue number thescript is started)

- send /listen/playhead (to only react to playhead moves)

This does not seem to work, whereas if I go through an outside "mirror" like OSCulator, I can achieve what I need (but of course much less elegantly and portably).

I am of course open to alternatives to achieve the same goal, but it seems like a rather elegant use if it can be done; if it can't be done, it would be amazing to understand where my logic goes wrong.

Thanks :)!

Cheers,

Freddy

[Brent Lord]

Hi Freddy --

This is a really clever idea! There are just a few tweaks to get this working:

1. OSC Event Broadcast is expecting to reply to a network client. If you use 127.0.0.1 as your Network patch destination rather than "localhost" (which uses a special internal route in QLab), this will give QLab the destination socket on which to deliver the OSC Broadcast reply message.

2. The /eventFormat command expects an argument that contains at least one format token, otherwise it returns an error. Try setting your event format with the message /eventFormat "/workspace/#workspace_id#/cue/thescript/start" instead which should create a valid reply format.

Brent

[FL K]

Hi Brent,

Great, that worked a treat :)! One question I have, somehow, and I cannot explain how or why or when, it seems that /udpKeepAlive does not work - as in, the OSC Broadcast subsription seems to lapse;... I currently use a work around (firing that whole sequence of OSC cues every minute), but I wonder if that is avoidable/if there is anything that I am doing wrong. Or would TCP be better than UDP (if that is possible in QLab)?

BTW - what I am using it for (happy to share if anyone is interested) - I use Word Comments (but any kind of PDF annotation should do) in a Script PDF to give me Q numbers on the right, tied to words or actions in the script. These cue numbers correspond with top level timeline group cues in my main cue list. I have written a script that controls Skim (a free source forge pdf viewer with AS dictionary) to automatically jump to the corresponding cue in the script when the playhead is moved onto a cue that exists in both QLab and the script.

Very fun indeed :).

Cheers,

Freddy