By all technical rights, this should not have worked and there are still some technical problems to resolve but they're relatively minor ones. What happened just now is that I was streaming the guitar from here into Second Life where Cat could hear it and she said it wasn't breaking up at all.
Something that concerns me most of all is that there is no way this should work. I still have an abysmally slow WiFi connection and yet Cat said it was working well. I throttled back the stream quality to 80K but that's not a huge sacrifice when the highest is only 128K. By percentage that doesn't look too good but it doesn't matter as the audio quality anyone can deliver within Second Life is nowhere near high-fidelity.
The number of listeners won't make any difference to whether it breaks up as the audio stream goes through a server before it goes to Second Life. A server doesn't do anything magical, it's just a repeater and typically they go out to as many as a thousand listeners. So adding more listeners will not cause it to break up if it's not breaking up already.
One problem is propagation delay and this is when you say something / play something and it takes a fraction of a second to hear it. While that may sound trivial, it makes a huge difference to playing live as many notes only take a small fraction of a second to play and the propagation causes you to hear them way late. I don't have a fast answer to that one but it can be fixed, I just don't have a fix right this moment.
Another problem is that I can get away from the propagation delay by plugging headphones into the audio interface but the drawback to that is I can't use backtracks. The only way to make them work would be to send the audio output from the computer into the audio interface, then back into the computer, and in turn out to the stream. That would send propagation delays all the way up the Nile.
There will be one or more sound checks to make sure this is really working and then we will schedule a live Silas Scarborough show at Cat's Art MusikCircus.
Something that concerns me most of all is that there is no way this should work. I still have an abysmally slow WiFi connection and yet Cat said it was working well. I throttled back the stream quality to 80K but that's not a huge sacrifice when the highest is only 128K. By percentage that doesn't look too good but it doesn't matter as the audio quality anyone can deliver within Second Life is nowhere near high-fidelity.
The number of listeners won't make any difference to whether it breaks up as the audio stream goes through a server before it goes to Second Life. A server doesn't do anything magical, it's just a repeater and typically they go out to as many as a thousand listeners. So adding more listeners will not cause it to break up if it's not breaking up already.
One problem is propagation delay and this is when you say something / play something and it takes a fraction of a second to hear it. While that may sound trivial, it makes a huge difference to playing live as many notes only take a small fraction of a second to play and the propagation causes you to hear them way late. I don't have a fast answer to that one but it can be fixed, I just don't have a fix right this moment.
Another problem is that I can get away from the propagation delay by plugging headphones into the audio interface but the drawback to that is I can't use backtracks. The only way to make them work would be to send the audio output from the computer into the audio interface, then back into the computer, and in turn out to the stream. That would send propagation delays all the way up the Nile.
There will be one or more sound checks to make sure this is really working and then we will schedule a live Silas Scarborough show at Cat's Art MusikCircus.
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