Shoutcast Stations

Is there any chance of ever being able to make an object play music from a shoutcast server? There has radios which you can make play any shoutcast server which made me think.. why not Second Life?
Would sure make playing music a lot easier than splitting music into insane amounts of wavs and wouldnt require the music be stored server-side..

Just seems that it would open some possibilities.

Oooh that may be a good idea... but if There has it there must be something wrong with it...

Heh, never know.. Maybe they screwed up and actually implemented a good feature..
It seems to work flawlessly, the jukebox plays shoutcasts stations and you can click on it and select to view the shoutcast stations webpage or mute the object playing the station.

With talk of a Second Life Radio shoutcast station in the general chat I'm suprised noone has any interest in it. Easier playing of music and less load on the SL servers seems like a win-win.

I like the idea. However, instead of shoutcast, maybe we can use a different system, since There uses shoutcast.

lol, theres always icecast if you use linux/bsd

That is a FANTASTIC idea. I'd love to have Nectarine demoscene radio stream at my place! I've already uploaded a few tunes but... man... that whole 1/4-second pause thing is annoying. Even if they fixed that (as I have suggested separately) this would still be preferable.

P.S. We'd need a separate volume slider for radio stations... we, uh, don't all like the same kind of music. 'Course there will also be people who don't want to sacrifice 64-128 kilobits of bandwidth to Internet radio, so as to maintain SL at comfortable throughput.

Man... imagine going to someone's place and they have some talk radio show or whatever playing... and there's a conversation in-world about it. You'd want to set it up so it would only play within a certain area (i.e. llTriggerSoundLimited() or whatever it's called) so as to avoid overlap.

This should be relatively simple to implement, but it could be HUGE in terms of impact. I'd love to set up a Live365 station for my in-world locations.

Totally, completely and all for this idea.

I'll do some more research into this. I had started some a while back when I played TSO, and the stations were rather successful there.

Even if it's not supported in SL through objects... there should be no reason why we couldn't form a station in the mean time, with just winamp playing behind SL (which is what i do most of the time anyway). In fact, I still listen to some of the TSO radiostations

check this site if you have any curiousity reguarding shoutcast: http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?threadid=70404

--Water

I am dying for this feature to be implemented - the music support in SL is rather annoying right now and needlessly complex and resource intensive. In its current form, There's implementation of streaming music is near perfect, and adds a lot to the experience. The stereo system objects allow you to choose a station via a web browser interface to Shoutcast. The only limitation is it will not play any streams under 56K - I am not sure why There chose that. Anyone in the environment of the object automatically connects to the same station and hears the music with no perceptible pause - it just starts playing immediately. The range is very close to the object also, so you don't have the annoyance you have with the current music objects, which go a ridiculous distance even when adjusting the sound settings.

Don't let the fact that There implemented this feature blind you - it is a great feature that would make SL even better. It would be interesting to see how SL would implement this, since currently there is no true browser window inside the interface. I hope this will be considered for 1.2.

I'm sorry to say that this isn't going to happen. The point of sounds is to add realisim and ambience to the world, not music.

I believe someone said if "THERE" has it why not Second Life? Well, THERE uses voice chat, not really meant to stream music but to talk to one another in voice chat. What most of the people in "THERE" do is play music off their computer. Doesn't matter what you use, just as long as your sound card is capable of playing sound through a feature called "What you here." I had a radio station at live365.com and broadcasted in THERE as if I was talking in voice chat. Sometimes I would just play MP3's off my winamp player for the public.

Even if they don't implement voice chat in second life, it's still easier to allow MP3's to play music instead of wav's. Your breaking down the song in increments of 10 seconds and it still compiles to a totall of 30-60mb. If we were able to upload mp3's which are compressed, we would be looking at 4-6mb files instead of the huge wav which is not compressed.

Does second life compress the wave files when uploaded? I don't know much about that, maybe you do. Not only is this a great idea to use voice chat to talk or play music, but it also should have been a high priority.

Linden told me that second life is still growing and that anything is possible. Cross your fingers, we might see the voice chat feature sooner then you think.

Enjoy!

Which is why this is the "suggestions" forum

if SO many people want a feature that they think would better their game experience, why suggest that this will never happen? Is it defined somewhere "sounds are striclty for 'realism' and ambience. There will never be a chance of getting any type of streaming audio into the game, period."?

The point of this forum is to make suggestions to the staff... the creators of the game... the people who control the content in this small world we've come to enjoy known as Second Life.

I really don't want to flame here, nor steer from the topic at hand. And I don't mean any disrespect, but if your name was Darwin Linden and you posted this.... it would make better sense to me.

So put on a smile and shoot for the stars here.... that's the point!

--Water

Two problems with that argument. One, it has always been possible to stream music, even though there is a slight hiccuping issue every nine and a half (or so) seconds. So it's already been done. Two, I don't think it's safe to assume that because the current sound interface isn't 100% perfect for streaming music, Linden Lab intends to deliberately avoid in-world music altogether.

As long as there's a separate volume control for radio stations (one that disables it completely at zero, so we don't spend bandwidth on unwanted streaming audio), I can't see any down side to this at all.

Regardless of whether the original intent of the sound functionality was to create ambient and event sounds, the reality is that increasingly it is being used to add missing music support, which users obviously want. I for one hate the music right now - it is choppy, multiple streams play at the same time, and I live by someone with a very monotonous music collection that I can still hear even after adjusting all the audio sliders. As badly as I want streaming music, the only way I would like to see it added is with complete control over user experience - the current audio experience in SL is one of my least favorite aspects of the system.

I really want seamless music in SL.

Right now everyone is sent a streaming wav file if you want to hear music. 10 people nearby, 10 downloads from the SL servers. Not good.

Shoutcast streams could be played from a different server. If you walk into range of a Shoutcast stream, the object simply passes the SL client the URL of the shoutcast stream and tells Winamp to start playing. (Let us turn this on/off at the client side of course). Clients wont all be synchronized but as long as the "skips" are gone I'll be happy.

I'd prefer that they use something native rather than Winamp, so my playlists don't get filled with everyone's Shoutcast stations.