There's mention that some of the applications I'm trying to download and
play with "use the /box prefix". I'm afraid I don't know what this
means.

What do I need to do, please?

Toby

in serialio (the first router) we were sending out OSC messages on /box 
as the prefix, so

/box/led 0 0 1

would turn on led 0,0

unfortunately this was leftover from debugging, as "box" is 
wonderfully/stupidly nondescript.

monomeserial came around and not only did we make the prefix changeable 
dynamically, but the default to something sensible like /40h

so for older apps, change the prefix to /box because they're expecting 
to see serialio.

new versions for both os x and xp will be posted in the next few days, 
which have session saving so that if you set it to /box you probably 
won't need to worry about it.

until people start writing patches which take advantage of the new 
features...

Thanks Brian!

I might need to ask some more questions about this, but not tonight; 
it's late!

:-)

one more thing:  having differant OSC prefixes for each device is useful 
depending on the programmer making the app wants to work.  say a user 
has a 40h and (eventually) a 100h.  in monome serial, you could keep the 
same prefix, and use offsets, so that the app sees monome serial as 
controlling one huge xxh (this is hw mlr works, if there are 2 40hs, you 
set the row offset of box 2 to 8 with the same prefix for both, and mlr 
thinks its dealing with an 8x16 40h).

or, you could use differant prefixes for each device, and the app could 
send to and receive from each prefix seperately and the app could work 
the same way that a midi app does using multiple devices on multiple 
midi channels, etc.  meaning, basically, that the application 
acknowledges the fact that there are multiple devices.

personally, i think the first approach is more sensible for developers 
making apps for other users, since you dont know how many devices the 
end-user has.  also, this is good for making apps that can work the same 
using a single 100h, or four 40h's (i think only Brian knows this joy!). 
OTOH, for a programmer's own personal-use creations, using seperate 
prefixes could be alot more convenient.

i just wrote vlad about this.

i think the way to go for developers is to have the prefix follow the 
name of the app:

/mlr
/64step
/balron

etc. then you can "map" a grid to each individual app and run things 
concurrently. this makes sense in that is seems like a lot of people are 
going to be running multiple units soon. balron+ableton etc.

you can have an "app focus" button in your app which sends

/sys/prefix mlr

which changes the prefix to /mlr so the user doesn't have to 
micro-manage via monomeserial, though it's honestly not a hard system to 
use.


i've never actually plugged in more than 2 40h's at once, beyond a test 
to see that they all worked. they sold too fast? still looking for time 
to build the ones we're planning on keeping for ourselves...