Music To My Ears (hopefully)

Hiya all,

I'm just wondering if anyone could help me with the following:

1. I want to be able to download a full mp3 to use within SL and possibly put it for sale to whoever's mad enough to purchase it!!!

2. I've been googling for free mp3 hosting sites that will allow me to 'store' the mp3's and then obtain the url to use with an SL streaming radio etc. so that people can hear the song of their choice etc. but of the ones I've seen, they're kinda confusing...to me anyway.....does anyone know of a simple one that would allow me to do this

3. What would be the best computer set-up needed for live performance in SL if one were to use mp3 backing tracks?

Any information at all would be really appreciated.. Thanks.

Hi Pocket,

For advice from live music experts I'd recommend checking out the SL Music Community Forum: http://slmc.myfastforum.org

You have to join to post, but I'm sure they'd be happy to help you out

I'd like to welcome you to the music community here in SL, which is a very active and dynamic one. One of the best music community forums right now is:

http://slmc.myfastforum.org/index.php

As for uploading an MP3 to SL, you can't do that directly. You can upload 9.9 second WAV files and use scripts to stitch them together, but it's sort of a waste of time and they sound pretty bad.

You can host the MP3 anywhere you have web access to it, and simply have the URL of the file as a streaming URL on an SL land parcel, but then it's possible (and likely) people will simply find out the location and download it directly.

As for in-world sales, there are a couple, SecondTunes seems to be well thought of.

As for a set-up, the beefier the better. I'm pretty happy most of the time w/ my 2 yr old Dual G5 2.5ghz Power Mac. I'd be happier, probably w/ a nice new quad core MacPro, but budget...

Anyway, I use Garageband, NiceCast and SL all at once on my machine and almost always have good results. I just play and sing myself at this point, but I used to do shows using all the source tracks from my recordings, and create a new vocal channel to sing into. Worked quite well, though did have tune changeover time to deal with. I've since heard of people loading up several songs as stereo tracks, and simply soloing the ones they need at the moment, bypassing the load-time problem.

Feel free to look me up in-world, and really look at the link above - there's a lot of good folks focusing on SL music on that forum.

I do in-world DJing, my set up is nothing special, mostly a "Scrap Parts" tower thrown together with whatever parts I had playing around and a Barton 2500+ CPU I stole from work. LOL No one would miss it. It runs as a stand alone system along side my main system.

The spec of my system is as follows anyway.

AMD Barton 2500+ CPU ~2.0GHZ
1GB DDR1 Ram
13GB IDE Hard drive (OS and software) and a 250GB Hard Drive (Music Storage)
Windows 2000 Professional

For software I use SAM3, it works very well.

Thanks for the info guys......it's been driving me insane trying to figure out the best way of doing it. I'll definitely check out that music forum....I'd just love to do live performances in SL but I want to be absolutely sure that I have the right set-up and equipment and of course know how to make the tracks work, as unfortunately I don't play piano or guitar to a standard that I would feel comfortable doing in public.....but I'm a RL singer and can't wait to be an SL one too. The thought of no more driving miles to gigs in a smelly van really appeals to me.....

One more quick question.....do you think that singing through the 'voice' system would work if one had a really really good microphone! And is there a way to do a gig with another musician through SL?

(sorry for the daft questions )

if you can find a streaming host all the better, or someone that will let you use theirs at certian times.

I've managed a shoutcast stream from home, but bandwidth is limited, the best bet is is to use a streaming client to and outside host, and is easily manageable with any computer that will handle SL (I've used oddcast for winamp, on my clunky 700mhz) setup is easy.

I'm guessing you will have found that music forum by now........ there's a section about collaborations too

/me waves at Kaklick

Hiya all,

Yep, I joined the forum last night with great intentions of reading though it but unfortunately I FELL ASLEEP at my computer.....aaggghhhhh

Anyway, I'll look through it later on today...thanks for pointing it out to me as I never knew it even existed...

You've all been really helpful and I appreciate it....thanks.