Streaming Music Into SL (On A Mac)
The folks at Taunt posted a nice tutorial on how to stream music into SL. Unfortunately it's specific to PC users and posted using a windows media wmv compressed movie. I've gone ahead and dowloaded the Intel Mac compatible Flip4Mac plugin that allows QuickTime apps to playback wmv media and listened to it (ugh - ffm did not support whatever video codec was used I guess).
What you'll need on a Mac:
1) iTunes would be best, pretty much ANY other audio player will work though - including the system or quicktime - FREE
2) Nicecast - Shareware with 20 minute at a time demo
First choose your audio player. This is going to be whatever application you have the most audio in I assume. Audion, iTunes, Quicktime Player, etc, etc. You CAN use a different player at any given time but not on the fly. You'll just need to stop your stream, choose the new capture device and restart your stream. Nicecast can capture all system sound - if you do that then you can change audio between different applications on the fly but system beeps and alerts will also broadcast so be sure to mute that in System Preferences.
Now download Nicecast from http://www.rogueamoeba.com/nicecast/. Read more about it on their features page.
Nicecast will allow you to stream for 20 minutes at a time without registering it or paying any fee. When I first started investigating my upload speeds I just used this free version to test things. I was able to have several folks tune in and listen to my feed for a while and then I would just announce that the stream was going to restart. You need to stop then restart the server stream and your listeners will need to refresh things. To do so they could just click the stop button and then the play button in the SL player if that's what they're listening with.
All the other comments regarding streaming and stream settings posted at Taunt are valid. Pay attention to the discussion about router/firewall issues - home routers are the stumbling for most anyone trying to broadcast a stream. On the Mac the equivalent of the command "ipconfig /all" is to open System Preferences - click Network - look for the green dot next to the active network port - double click that network port (airport, ethernet, etc) then click the TCP/IP tab to find the same information.
If you have too much trouble getting your local router setup properly you could pay a fee to use a relay server. Something like http://www.serverroom.us/?page=shoutcast-relay-server-hosting might help.
Finding the router's IP address is the same - whatismyip.com would work for anyone regardless of platform.
(NOTE: PC users may also look into the OddCast open source tool.)
Comments
Audion also includes an encoder to stream to a Shoutcast server from 32k on up.
Posted by: Triste Bertrand | August 25, 2006 01:23 AM
Yeah, Flip4Mac works with a lot of streaming sites, but the problem is that there are SO many formats, PC'ers can't stick to just one. Makes compatibility a problem.
Posted by: Antonio | September 7, 2006 09:32 PM
Does Audion allow a talkover function to talk between (or over) songs?
Posted by: palochi | September 19, 2006 05:58 PM
IN reply to Audio question; no. I actually use MegaSeg, a professional DJ software product for the Mac, with NiceCast picking up the audio.
Posted by: Triste Bertrand | September 19, 2006 10:13 PM