Second Life Karaoke

I had an idea: SECOND LIFE KARAOKE! Figuring out exactly how to pull it off may turn out to be a community project, though. I have no clue and the few people I've talked to about it can't really think how to do it, either.

I was thinking: stream the singer through the land's music ip and stream lyrics with music in the media stream that will be available in 1.6. Would that work? If not, is there another way it might work? Perhaps through scripted objects?

If anyone has any ideas how to accomplish Second Life Karaoke, please respond with your thoughts.

The best place for this idea might be in the discussion forums. I imagine you could do something really fun, if you can get a group together to work on it. I'm going to move the conversation to the Event discussion forum.

Lets think out loud.

There are voice chat programs and servers that people use for games. Ventrillo, rogerwilco, game voice. to name a few.

So the people that want to sing kareoke would have to connect to one of those, and so should the music. But could it be possible to connect to those servers inworld, without having to run another application in the background? doubt it.

For listening the sound have to be streamt inworld. But that could mean that voice chat programs would get alot more connections then intented. Don't know if that is possible, maybe the complete sound have to be streamt to a southcast(or other) server first.

If that works, I only i see one real problem, lag. But it is certainly something that we should try.

Maybe talk to some of the dj's and other musicians that host events. They probably can tell much more specifics.

hope to see it someday.

I have had similar ideas..... but it gets really complicated rigging the hosts computer and then telling people how to rig there own. I think i will play around with this idea tonight I will let you know how or if i can get it to work for me.

this sounds like a lot of fun... and maybe we can get group karaoke going, hahha the official sl chorus

Latency is your enemy. If you're streaming music in game, by the time the singer gets the streamed music and sends back the vocals, syncing vocals and music becomes really tough.

I know some musicians have overcome this enough for virtual jam sessions, but I've no idea how they accomplished it, or if the tech could be adapted to Second Life.

The only thing I could think of would be for the music to be streamed outside the game to the singer, and then the music and vocals streamed together into the game.

But... here's another roadblock for you. What's the appropriate fee structure to pay to publishers for a virtual public performance? Would it be a blanket fee, such as clubs and bars in America pay to play music? Or is it going to be on a per-song basis? Who pays the fee? Is the venue the game as a whole, or just the property hosting the event? It's virtually guaranteed that unlicensed performance is going to violate some aspect of the DMCA, but there are no provisions established firmly for virtual performance venues. If the lawyers get wind of this, there's going to be a legal catfight (or at least the usual barrage of threatening "cease and desist" letters).

I happen to run one of the oldest Karaoke businesses in the US. I'm a competent coder, but I'm still new to SL. I've been thinking about this issue in detail.

First, why do you HAVE to stream the singer? One of the fun things about Karaoke, is being able to sing. If we stream the background music and put the lyrics up "somehow", everyone could sing along. I agree it would be fun to have the official singer actually sing, but there is still fun to be had without that technological hurdle.

I haven't looked into the license issues, but I imagine that SL would just qualify as another, abet quite large, show.

I've got a huge catalog of computer readable karaoke, and a desire to put this together. My entire catalog is already referenced in a mysql database for online lookup of songs and printing of books. I'm a software developer by trade, and would be very interested in getting involved with building a virtual version of our club

This could be a L$ maker too. Imagine selling the resulting karaoke player that charges a fixed amount per song and pays the owner?

I understand that Japan has a similar feature for doing karaoke in 1st life. They have some service that has a central repository of Karaoke music, and bars pay a monthly service charge for access to the music and rental of the local networkable player. The back-end of this system may be able to be used for a similar 1st life system if licensing arangements can be made.

Anyway, this is what I've come up with so far;

We'll need an online repository holding all the karaoke music and the online database. It must be queryable for looking up songs. It must also respond to requests by a jukebox to stream a song.

We'll need a "karoake book" object that allows the user to look up a song. It will also need to be able to make a song request to the karaoke jukebox.

The jukebox must accept requests, perform some "standard" karaoke ediquette for singing order. It needs to identify if the Avitar that requested the next song has left the singing area and skip that request. It will need to be able to request that the song needs to be played, and access the streaming server. It must be tied to one or more karaoke monitors that will display the CDG lyrics. This may require a HUGE conversion of CDG/Laser Disc/DVD karaoke to some standard streaming format, or a major effort at creating a CDG playback facility inside SL. The jukebox must congradulate the last singer, and announce the next singer. I imagine the anouncements could be some combination of simulated voice from the server stream, or floating text.

I've got the hardware and the music to do the database side at least for testing. I imagine that the bandwidth use will be huge once this gets done. I don't have the storage or bandwidth access for the final product yet, but I imagine it would be worth while.

Please contact me if you are seriously interested in persuing this! I want it!

along with the music

I looked into this a few months ago for my cafe. I am planning to host the music on a server and get custom animations done for each song. Then when they click a song title and pay the device the URL for that song loads (like the Raster Jukebox does). When the singer hears the tune start then she/he will trigger the accompanying animation. Of course, all the animators I contacted absolutely refused to develop a animation for a 3 minute song.

how much you offered em?

Wow, imagine having the jukebox animate your avitar to the karaoke song... that WOULD be a lot of work for each song, but would be quite cool. I'll start reading up on animations. I figure there are a few basic moves that can be repeated as neccesary;

slow rocking with mike
soft musical break (mic away from mouth)
emotional singing (hands waving, maybe bending over for emphasis)
air guitar musical break
devil horns & head banging while singing
devil horns & head banging break
clutching chest for emphasis

Maybe a HUD with these showing could be given to the singer so they could "perform" more like a lipsync act as apposed to actually singing. Less work for each song that way.

So I met up with Beefy and Raster Teazle and the music and scrolling text movie can be saved as a quicktime film and added to the land. We can use a Raster server Jukebox to launch the movie URL. We still are developing the HUD to go along with this device.

I think the owner of the Karaoke Machine owns the animations and the HUDS are given out free to participants that interact with the animations. The person can choose a series of animations to go along with their performance.

And now we need to work on actually hearing the person singing. We could use SAM broadcaster or Winamp to broadcast the voice. But I wonder if the streaming dealy would adversly effect this.

Or should we use the actually song with lyrics and just animate ourselves?