I popped out yesterday to the Japan VW expo at Tokyo Big Sight . Some of the more interesting exhibits that caught my eye:

• Masterpiece - a “beta” multi-world 3d printing service from an Akihabara firm involved in gamedev. When the cost comes down and quality goes up these real models of avatars etc will become excellent merchandising items for online musicians to add to their marketing toolset.
• Eitarosoft’s mobile 3d virtual worlds. They have an interesting solution to scaling the system to allow up to 400 people to access a virtual town at one time. I’d tell you how but then I’d have to kill you…
• Vizimo’s lightweight funky world that supports up to 8 people at a time. Current version allows users to design physics enabled games/activitities from pre-built components [next version to allow import of user created content], with integrated sns.
• Daletto World has an interesting look, with flat 3d characters.
• SL ® was well represented, and opensim/realXtend also had some demos from 3rd party providers.

After attending the virtual worlds party in the early evening I visited the Tokyo 2.0 SNS party next door, the Japan SNS and Linux worlds events being held concurrently in the same hall as the virtual worlds event. Fortunately the beer and food at the web 2.0 party proved to be a little more real than the virtual worlds one!

A gaggle of VW people then met back at Bar Tube in Shibuya, where Philip Rosedale signed the Toilet Door, a tradition at Kanda-san’s bar when visited by internutz celebrities.

Another loose bar tube jam session eventuated with a number of people swapping off on different instruments - Hayashi-san from Impress on drums/bass, Kanda-san [owner of BarTube and well know IT/Video journalist] on bass, japanese j-rock guitar legend Hatake-san on bass/guitar, Komuso on harp/bass [badly I might add!], various jpop singers, Jets Fride on guitar/Bass and even Philip Rosedale attacking the flying V - though we had some trouble tuning that beast and it took Hatake-san to finally tame it into submission! Rock and Roll!

All images © Paul Cohen 2008, apart from image to above right © Yabush Yamdev 2008

I produced my first ticketed event in SecondLife® in December 2006, the first virtual Blues n’Roots festival.

Following on from my recent ninjams with Hathead Rickenbacker and Moshang Zhao I recently collaborated with Von Johin on a ticketed event, also using ninjam, to celebrate the opening of his new sim - the French Quarter.

We sold out in just over a day after going on sale. To keep the sim performance reasonable for the audience (and ourselves!) we limited it to ~55 tickets. It was still laggy, but considering the tech issues we had with rehearsals the final event went very smooth, with only one disconnection and some other minor glitches. The internet gods were with us that evening, and the paying audience were more than satisfied with the three hour show we put on. Setlist was Von Johin solo, Komuso solo (with 1924 martin acoustic, 1934 National Steel, and electric), then Komuso on Harp with Von Johin followed by Von on Bass with Komuso’s electric set.

I recorded it all as well, maybe we’ll release a cut or two soon!

You can subscribe for free and they will send you the magazine for free…very cool!

Grab a pdf copy of it complete here! ktinterviewslang0_new

Thanks to SLang life for the interview!

While the death throes of the recording industry become more frantic the music industry itself is quite vibrant, and in the new paradigm only two things ultimately count: the artist and the fans.

As such, it pays to take a pause and consider the nature of this relationship and music culture a little more deeply.

A very useful resource on this topic is Nancy Baym’s pdf of a talk she gave recently on online fan music communities. Grab it here.

This NYT article also touches on some interesting points related to getting in closer contact with your fan base and the issues in managing it.

I’ll be writing more on this key topic as I digest Nancy’s doc a little more.

I’ve been testing a very cool little xplatform open source streaming application.

Basically I have a very high workload with some of the gigs I do, esp more recently doing collaborative ninjams while running visuals as well. So I want a very simple 1 click app to control streaming and recording.

I only need my streaming app to do a couple of things - stream and record.
A bonus is to tell me the stats in realtime so I can track how many logged in and monitor for breaks in the stream, but I now use NetMeter to do the latter and I can have a firefox window open logged into my shoutcast admin to tell me the current logins - and I can also download the stats later anyway.

A small learning curve, and then you can finally dump SAM, Nicecast, Simplecast, and that clunky winamp/shoutcast dsp plugin. Version 1.8 just released with updates to the recording function. Does both shoutcast and icecast, and records your stream at different [ie: higher] bitrate than the outgoing stream - perfect for live recordings.

There are two ways of recording the stream automatically - start recording when you press the record button or to start recording only when you start streaming. I prefer to start recording manually as I like to check the stream is connecting to sl etc. The other way is a little tricker, could possibly use a “record armed” signal just to let you know status visually, but read the help and play with it.

Pros/Cons?
+ simple
+ fairly lightweight
+ flexible enough on streaming and recording formats
+ responsive developer
+ opensource xplatform
- record “on stream connection” setup a little non-intuitive (giving developer feedback now) - manual record aok though.
- no stats graph - can do without but would nice to have a la simplecast

Apart from that is does exactly what I need for this function in my live performance workflow. Other people may need more;-)

Project info site is here , help page is here, and direct download of latest version is here

The developer is very responsive, and feedback helps to keep them interested so let them know if you use it!

Impress R&D had a great celebration party at BarTube last night for the second edition of their SL™® ;-)) Magazine.

I had a lot of fun playing with a prototype of a new interface that a team working on Softbank’s sim had going.

It was using a 3-axis accelerometer hooked up to a modified client to send control data via chat, driving a big robot holding a box full of avatars and physical objects. The objective was pure and simple - get them all out of the box, while they keep trying to get in! Lot of Fun - go here to check it out. Excuse the quality of the images, taken on a mobile!

Update 05 April 2008: Tori Teatime, one of the developers, has just released a demo video:

Then we had a little boogie blues jam - Komuso Tokugawa [me!] on Harp/Slide/Vox, Hayashi-san from Impress on drums, Kanda-san [owner of BarTube and well know IT/Video journalist] on bass, and Yabush Yamdev on guitar along with japanese rock guitar legend Hatake-san . I left Hatake-san, Kanda-san, and Hayashi-san to finish off the night with some wild 70’s rock classic renditions.

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.

Find out how in the first episode of Komuso the BluesBorg’s travels through the metaverse…

I’ve done two previous SL music machinima as soundtrack artist and one of them was also as producer.

This effort was an attempt to cover a few bases on a number of levels, in addition to seeing if it was possible to use a low end tool like Windows Movie Maker to produce reasonable machinima.

And the answer is..yes! Though not without some problems. Music videos are particularly tricky with synchronization between audio and video, and WMM lacks video track locking functions which make it a little tricky - but we got there in the end.

Celtx was invaluable for pre-production and tracking production work - and it’s free and open source!

I hope you find it interesting!

cu in the bitstream soon, kt

I was playing with the voice First Look client, and though I had previously dismissed the idea of using it for music due to the encoding restrictions etc Why SL voice is inappropriate for music performance

a) was it possible
b) What did it sound like
c) would people be interested
d) what were some of the limitations and constraints for performing with it.

Why not give it a shot, nothing to lose!

So I set myself up, tp’d to a new empty sim I knew was voice enabled and plugged in.
Interesting! Lost all my stereo width, and the sound was a bit squeezed with the voice codec, but as I usually play dirty blues it sounded quite damn funky - a bit like busking in the tube with a low grade dirty amp! [which I have previously done a lot of in rl at various times]

Also the sound was very different in my monitoring headphones from my usual setup, so it took a little adjusting to play with this.

So after a quick fiddle I hit my blues group and tp a few people in with voice clients and awaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay we go.
SL Voice Busking 1

SL Voice Busking 2

I jammed a couple of quick numbers out and we played with some of the settings to see where the issues are but the general consensus was … YES!

A few tips learnt from this early test:
. only the musician should be in lockdown talk mode, eveyone else in push to talk
. individuals should use the list of people button next to the voice controls to turn down everyone else so they can just hear them and turn the musician up - that is if you want to hear them I guess!
. audience is hearing positional sound now, so may need to adjust their physical and/or camera position to hear properly
. musician should turn down all other sounds in preferences, set voice to a comfortable level
. musician should set your input signal level to just below the red visuals when you are speaking/playing [ie: clipping/crackle point]

We have another string to our musical grid bow;-)
Thanks Linden Lab!

Ty to Towanda Middle and Angelika Jacobus for the tips while I tested!
Thanks to Rayo for one of the shots above!

Cu in the bitstream soon for some grid busking in addition to my regular High Quality streaming gigs!