Is Live music possible in SL?

I've noticed there's quite a bit of canned music as part of the SL experience. I had a brief chat with Travis at the Newbie party at Shelter this evening and he suggested that I use shoutcast. The thing I really wanted to know was: would that mean I'd have to have the full band here or could it be various people in SL feeding streams from different locations into a cntral server which would then mix them and feed the mixed full band signal out? I can imagine there would be some latency/lag problems though as a registered Cubase user I did know that Steinberg ran the Rocket online music jamming/composition feature. AFAIK that was only for MIDI. If it could work with audio it would be a cracker.

Anyway.... suggestions, comments, whatever... all welcome. And if the SL system couldn't handle it, please tell me up front so that I don't waste time chasing a dead duck. Also... I'm *NOT* a techie, so please don't hit with with too much arcane obscure copmuter programming/setup stuff. Keep it as simple as possible for me. Sure, I built my own computer & home network, but I'm a musician and composer first. As the saying goes 'It ain't rocket science'.

The most you can do is to play one single stream through SL. This is streamed through a URL tied to your property/land. The stream is actually played directly from the stream source to the SL end user..... it doesn't go through SL's servers.

The fact that we can only hear one stream at a time means that you have to either have the band play live at one location, then stream that to your land... or compile multi-conference streams. However, this would be done outside of SL. So, do whatever you have to do to get the live music into one stream... then set that as your SL land media URL and enjoy.

I imagine that each band member could sit at home and play an instrument, streaming to a central hub (your house). With enough bandwidth, you could have one computer per band-member that would play the stream into a mixer. With a final computer, you could feed the mixed signal to an outgoing stream for all of SL to listen. The problem would be keeping the band synced. This would likely require each band member to be on a conference call with the others so they can play along.

The MIDI format is super lightweight compared with raw audio, so that's probably why it was possible to do this "Rocket" thing you mentioned.

Getting a band to sync up and get it mixed at a centralized location, then fed to a shoutcast stream could work, and for synchro, you could use a net-based metronome type thing to keep the timing right, but as far as players hearing other players, probably way too much latency.

DoteDote Edison: that's pretty much what I suspected. It's probably down to bandwidth. That's what comes from having ideas that are just that little bit ahead of the existing technology curve. I'll probably route my Shoutcast radio station thru my property when I get a full membership. Do you know of any cheapo or free audio multi-casting s/w? And is it possible to hook one output stream up to shoutcast?

gene Poole: greets again! I saw you at the WA in that weird kebab AV of yours. But as both you and DDE point out, the latency/lag issue is likely to be the biggest bugbear.

The musician Thomas Dolby tried this sometime back without the added overhead of SL traffic; it failed miserably. Marching bands have a drum major who uses a visual cue because the speed of sound induces a musically intolerable latency along the length of one marching band.

Maybe Internet2?

I thought as much, Malachi Petunia. Still I'm interested in how Astrin Few manages to stream his jazz band live. Maybe they play together in the same studio and send out a feed from there. I can see at some point audio communication will completely replace text in online games so it's only a matter of time.

I've only heard Astrin play solo which he streams live up to a shoutcast server so that ~30 people can tune in. If you did hear him playing with more than his voice and guitar, the accompanist was almost certainly physically present with him.

Shameless plug for Astrin Few: If you haven't heard him, he appears weekly at Clemintina Park on Tuesdays at 1900(?) Linden Time, and elsewhere as he sees fit. I've no connection to Astrin but as a fond listener.

hehe, you could have a band member at a time record their part then the next plays along with it and mixes their part in at the end. would allow for disseperate band members to make beautiful music but it's not really live .

Astrin also did a jazz concert simulcast with Flaming Moe from different parts of the country. twas a first for sl from what i heard. These guys are great and would be likely to provide assistance with your endeavor.

I believe they are backed up by MP3's. Also, I think Astrin has utilized Jamie's server of late.

*looking for Astrin to come in and represent himself*