I'm creating a system where agents written in different languages need to communicate over a local area network using the open sound control (OSC) protocol. One controller agent will need to broadcast information to a number of client agents. I would prefer to use multicasting, so that any agents that appear on the network are able to immediately receive messages without establishing a connection. I have programmed in Java using MulticastSocket successfully, but it seems that many OSC libraries (NetUtil and JavaOSC in Java, udpsend and udpreceive in MaxMSP) don't support multicast sending.
Have I got this right? Does an OSC library need to support multicast for it to be able to send multicast? Or can multicast be achieved simply by sending to the right IP address (if so can you show how to get this working using the NetUtil library in Java, and/or the udpsend and udpreceive objects in MaxMSP)?