Sounds

I did a search a month back before posting this, and didn't find a thread that seemed to be on this topic, so here goes.

What is with sounds having to be bloated-beyond-reason .wav files? I mean, this is 2006. How about, say, midi files? Yeah, a nice, quick loaded file for a musical intro. Or how about supporting .mp3? It's not like mp3 encoders are only owned by pirates, is it?

It would be nice to see SL's sound system get updated a bit to support these two nice and, more importantly, bandwidth-friendly formats.

WAV files are used only for upload; before storage they are converted to Ogg Vorbis (roughly equivalent to MP3). Every sound sent from SL to the client is in Ogg format (except streaming sound which isn't sent from SL but from some third party).

Whoa, MIDI files... does anyone outside the music industry still use them?

Not really except for a surprising amount of automated control. It turns out that sequencing arbitrary events in time is very well handled by the MIDI communication protocol which is pleasantly low-tech (cheap) and has many tools for sequencing. I probably wouldn't use it to control a warp-drive, but for things like stage lighting and even huge model train sets, the trains don't really care that this is an A# at time 1:01.005 they can interpret it as "lower this gate" or suchlike.

Oh, and if you want really cheesy music on your website, MIDI is the way to go.

Hehe. I saw a MIDI controller a little while ago that was operated by hamsters running about.

Midis are great to use when setting up something like this.