New artists in the SP amphitheatre

A historic day yesterday as I cracked converting and uploading audio files so they can play in the amphitheatre in the SP Adopters' hang out.

The first song streamed into the area was 'Happy end of the world' by my RL friend Chris Blythe, with Fleur Sant. Drop in and listen by activating the in-world music player at the bottom of the browser window.

In the immediate future, I will be adding a radio player so you can opt to listen to an album of Chris's music, specially prepared for the SP amphitheatre, or to various radio interviews given by Simultaneous Policy campaigners.

See the previous blog for news of RL meetings that will be coming to the amphitheatre at the end of February.

Music wise, I am planning to feature new artists and look forward to arranging live concerts as well a putting up albums on the radio player. If you know anyone who would like to be featured, please direct them to this blog so they can contact me.

Here is the technical stuff on how I did it which may help you. Me too, if I forget. This is for a Mac.

The original file was in Quicktime, so the main challenge was converting it to mp3 as it seems SL will only play mp3 files.

1. Opened it with Quicktime pro and exported as an AIFF file.

2. Opened the AIFF file with Audacity (which won't open Quicktime files). Audacity can be downloaded from here. It needs LameLib to work, which can be downloaded from here.

3. Exported as mp3.

4. Uploaded to a free hosting site I found called MediaMax.

5. Opted to listen to the file from MediaMax, selecting to download the playlist file (this is usually automatically opened by iTunes or another media file - but save it instead).

6. Open Word or other text programme and open the playlist file. This will contain the URL of the streaming audio file.

7. Go to the land in SL where you want to play the audio. Click on the land description at the top of the browser to open the control window. Select the 'media' tab. Type the URL into into the top audio field (cut and paste doesn't work to put things into SL unfortunately).

If you have a radio player there will be a playlist where the URL can be put. Alternatively it should be possible to create a playlist with more than one song in MaxMedia so an album of songs can be played.

Watch this space for news of these plans being implemented.