Metaverse Music
There are a couple of new blogs on the SecondLife Music scene.
The SLMC is focused on Live Music specifically, while MetaMusic is looking more at soundtracking and ambient audioscapes.
It’s all music to me!
I missed the first inworld meeting of the MetaMusic group due to Rl, but reading the chatlog I had a couple of initial thoughts to some of the dialogue that bounced around.
re: MIDI
Open Sound Control can encapsulate midi and is potentially a much more useful protocol to implement, as it has uses for everything from audio to control.
I remember pushing hard for OSC with the old LL voting system in SL waaaay back…but without the new SL design allowing for scalability and real time data input that’s probably still on the back burner for a while.
re: Audio and Sound
There are quite a few interesting advanced audio engines for games on the marketplace, as it is a specialist middleware market similar to the game engine middleware market they plug into.
AFAIK SL still uses the old FMOD sound engine.
One option is for LL to scale up their audio team and look at how they can take full advantage of the FMOD’s replacement for it called FMODEX. Or at least evaluate the competitor engines and see what functionality they offer and which ones might best match a set of use cases based around enhancing the overall ambient sound experience in sl [or other worlds for that matter!]
Sun’s Project Darkstar, for example, has an audio system called jvoicebridge. While not as functional in the interactive audio space like FMODEX and other audio engines looks to have some neat specs for general audio.
And of course there’s always good old OpenAL!
I’ll be looking at these in closer detail soon.