MP3s in SL - a bandwidth warning!

Hi guys,

I have my own web domain, which is hosted for free, and I get 1Gb of traffic allowance each month. Last month my website was suspended on the 25th Feb, because I had exceeded my traffic allowance.

With a clean slate on the 1st March I decided to do a test. I have several mp3 files on my website which I play directly in SL via a script which writes the URL into the About Land music media box.

Each of my mp3 files average around 3.5Mb in size. I then chose three tracks that were exactly 3.5Mb, or just over 10Mb in total, and played them in SL. The next day I looked at my website traffic statistics, and found that playing those three files of 10.5Mb total size generated 30.4Mb of traffic!!! That is around triple folks!

I have no idea why this is so, whether that is normal, or whether SL is responsible in some way for this huge overhead, but I thought I should let others know who may be thinking of playing mp3s directly into SL.

Rock

Streaming media of any type is a troughput pig. It's the constant stream that gets you. Even if it takes a small portion of the bandwidth, it is steadily eatting up your download limits. Almost anyone with cable will hit their daily limit pretty quick and get throttled back to 512K. Such is life. You get what you pay for and you pay for what you get. If music is not worth it to you, turn it off.

Not all cable providers have the same rules. I have Road Runner, and there are no such limits. You might want to check out what options are in your area.

This is why, if you sign up with a stream provider, you pay for the amount of slots. How many folks connected to your stream and downloaded your music?

Each time someone visits your land, and hits that music play button, its a new stream from your web server. So, 3 people listening to the same song at the same time would equal 3 times the traffic from your web server.

Note if no one is on the land, you shouldn't be streaming anything from your web server...just having the music URL set doesn't pull anything, it takes a user action to start the stream.

It is my understanding that this is why I pay for a streaming service like NeoStream; I stream the music (via the WinAmp Shoutcast plugin) from my computer to the streaming service, and the streaming service streams it to my land. That way I am only using the bandwidth of a single stream, even if there are 20 people on my land listening to the music - the stream service is providing the bandwidth for those 20 listeners.

Exactly!

Well done Wicked, you hit the nail right on the head there.

My MP3s are not on a streaming server, it is NOT a stream at all, they are discreet files. The two people who were with me when I played those three tracks also listened to them. I did not think that this would triple the download, but that is exactly what has happened. When I played a single track, and I was the only one in the sim, the bandwidth used was exactly the size of the file.

Thanks again,

Rock

that's because the files aren't pulled by SL's server, but by each individual client that is listening... you'd think a bandwidth hog like SL would support .aacp or a similar format that provides good quality at low bandwidth. but alas no.

another factor is that you could re-record your MP3s at some lower fidelity. This could make them much smaller.