Mmmmusic, Professor!
One more picture of the Mel Cheeky concert:
She really does have a great voice. :) After the concert I made my way over to the Bighorn Lodge, where my buddy Henrietta Strangelove was spinning world music. :) There were some streaming issues and Joseph wound up giving out the stream's URL so that we could listen using iTunes or Winamp.
I've never been entirely clear (please feel free to add to my comments and 'splain to me, Lucy) on how streaming through SL works - does the music actually get fed through the SL servers or does the client just supply QuickTime on your computer with the URL and the connection is between you and them? I always thought it was the latter, but there's been so many complaints of poor streaming quality in SL of late that I wonder if maybe it isn't the former - Stream Eaten By Packet Loss, News at 11.
Of course, I guess it could be a case of SL hogging more bandwidth than usual trying to compensate for the packet loss, and therefore leaving your poor stream to starve... but then, why does the URL work just fine in WinAmp and iTunes? Is QuickTime really that bad? Or maybe the streaming isn't any worse than usual of late, I'm just spending more time at gatherings where the sole focus is the music.
Regardless of how the music's getting to me, I really do love these events. :) I even like just hanging out at the lake and listening to Dol's stream (which is what I did earlier this week).
The Bighorn Lodge is a good hangout spot - the decor reminds me of my uncle's basement. Has that very "rec room" feel. No matter how infrequent a visitor I am, the people there are always really nice, and I always have a good time. :)
Comments
The audio streams don't go through the SL servers at all...the client has a built-in streaming-audio and QuickTime video receiver. When your avatar is over a parcel that has streaming audio set, the server hands off the URL to the client, which then connects to the audio source itself, just as if it were WinAmp or another streaming-audio receiver. Video is similar but more complicated, as the client has to project the video image in place of the designated texture in your client's view.
As to poor streaming quality...maybe the stream receiver code in the client isn't the best, and tends to get jammed into weird states; I don't know.
Posted by: Erbo Evans | November 23, 2006 04:17 PM
Pretty much what Erbo said. Though I'm not convinced the streaming audio client in the SL client is in fact quicktime. iTunes uses the QuickTime framework so the behavior should be the same on any machine between iTunes and SL, but they're not. There are reproducible problems in the SL audio streaming client that do not occur with an iTunes client connection.
Posted by: dolmere | November 23, 2006 07:30 PM
It is, in fact, QuickTime for sure. Try deleting QuickTime from your computer. (I dunno if you can do this with a Mac, but you can with a windows box anyway.) You no longer get *any* sound in SL. It's eeerie. Unless you're one of those skeletal freaks who prefers to listen to his own soundtrack instead of the fantastic typing sound effect. ;)
Posted by: Coal Nelson | November 23, 2006 09:55 PM
I didn't know whether the streaming-audio code in SL was, in fact, QuickTime or not...but your experimental observation seems to support the fact that it is. (Then why the restriction to MP3 and OGG as streaming audio formats?) On the other hand, maybe either (a) SL uses some other streaming audio handler that feeds into QT to "mix" the audio for presentation via the speakers, or (b) SL uses QT to handle the streaming, but in some weird mode that iTunes doesn't use and hence is buggier.
Posted by: Erbo Evans | November 27, 2006 03:20 PM
SL uses FMOD - which is a cross platform sound library to handle all of it's sound connection needs - it may well kill all sound if you kill QuickTime, but FMOD is the main culprit here, afaict. Unless this changed when they were doing the linux client - they had all sorts of trouble getting any sound working before they got a dedicated developer in-house to handle the linux stuff.
Posted by: Kaklick Martin | March 8, 2007 02:59 PM