Flux::Immersive, L-Acoustics, Radio France and other major industry manufacturers have established an initiative whose aim is to standardise Open Sound Control as a streaming protocol for interoperability among immersive audio systems.

‘Since 2018, Radio France has been experimenting with object-orientated audio productions of electronic music concerts,’ explains Radio-France Audio Innovation Project Manager, Hervé Déjardin. ‘These trials have highlighted the need for a common protocol between the different elements of the chain. The objective is to be able to address the metadata streams to different rendering engines without using translators.’

The ITU BS.2076-2 Audio Definition Model (ADM) is a solution for the archiving and interoperability of immersive audio productions. ADM-OSC provides an implementation that follows the ITU standard, allowing to stream positioning information of audio objects in real-time using the Open Sound Control protocol. Led by use cases from Radio-France, Flux::Immersive and L-Acoustics have collaborated on a common language to ease system integration within the production process.

‘Few things are more of a roadblock than trying to build an integrated workflow that incorporates multiple manufacturers and getting stuck in a proprietary communication portal,’ says Flux:: Immersive Business Director, Hugo Larin. ‘We felt there was a need to adopt a common communication, a common grammar, between industry peers.’ With this in mind, Flux::Immersive has added ADM-OSC as a supported input or output OSC communication option within its SPAT Revolution platform.

‘We clearly hear in the field the challenges of integrating multiple object editors and or renderers delivering for various stream formats in a production. Allowing for the selected tools of choice to interoperate in the environment of the day or at different stages of a project is one of the things that this audio object language can brilliantly achieve.’

ADM-OSC offers a universal communication language among object-based audio software for live and post-production. A technical workgroup with industry peers has been created to advance on this proposal and collaborate on the parameters. This workgroup has received the support of multiple manufacturers and the ADM-OSC language is currently implemented in some audio software.

‘As an industry, we need to nail down the immersive workflow to enable the next generation of productions,’ says Guillaume Le Nost, L-Acoustics Executive Director of Creative Technologies. ‘I am really glad to see that many pro audio manufacturers have reacted positively to our initiative, from Digital Audio Workstations to Broadcast systems. I look forward to providing a super strong ecosystem, where users can easily use several audio renderers at the same time, or easily move into postproduction with ADM files at the centre of their workflow. It is still early days for ADM-OSC, but users and manufacturers can already try an initial ADM-OSC implementation in our L-ISA Controller software.’