| Archive for SLMC Second Life® Music Community Forum |
| Vlad |
Streaming with my Macbook...video/streaming issues galore :(Hi there,I wonder if anyone can help...I hope so... My setup is a Macbook Pro 2.2Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2Gb Ram with a Geforce 8600M GT videocard (the cad well known to be a pile of crap). Decent Firewire connected external Mixer, Decent Microphone and using Nicecast to stream. Now for the issues... -Video??? I use Karaoke Quicktime movie .MOV backing tracks with moving lyrics and with Second life window open so I can follow local chat and see whats gong on etc...so I use these backing tracks when I sing...but with both Second Life open and the .MOV's slow down and the lyrics freeze for a few secs etc...which messes me up with songs i dont know and im no good remembering lyrics or singing from a sheet.... Does anyone know what I can do to resolve that? I'm not sure playing them in another software player will work and think Itunes is more memory sucking that Quicktime and not many other players are gonna play quicktime MOV files...plus MOV Quicktime vid's are good quality so would rather not convert to mp4 or avi etc... I've also tried using less demanding SL viewers like Snowglobe etc...but snowglobe isnt so reliable and crashes....Emerald uses a lot more memory and crashes a lot for me...open to other suggestions...Ok so my Mac is the most powerful machine and I know SL uses a lot of memory and graphics memory...my card has 128mb memory...someone suggested I change the 'Texture memory' in SL hardware settings to 128mb...so i did...not sure thats right tho and how much difference it makes.... -Stream issues Now, this may be related to the above but sometimes whilst I'm singing I get a crackling occur...once this put me off completely as it became quite bad and loud in my monitoring earphones... Now though it happens sometimes...not sure if its my mixer, the mixer virtual settings, nicecast, not the bitrate as i now stream at 64kbps 
May even be a combo of them all...or even my TalkTalk broadband speed...? I even switched to using a direct LAN cable from my laptop to the router rather than use wireless as SL is more stable with a direct cable apparantly. Even when I'm not singing and just listening to a stream in SL i get a weird 2/3 sec freeze in SL...could be Emerald that does this...? Wow...if you've made it this far in this essay congratulations and bless you... I guess I don't know where to go for help...and hoping someone here can or point in the the right direction...I've seen many guides here on SLMC and online but none really go into detail and thats fine I can't expect them too...the manufacturer of my mixer helped me set it up and so I dont think its that...although it has some options where I can set the length of latency etc on my side...Nicecast is a nightmare as there guide is not good and I can't find much info or detailed advice from those that use it to stream in SL... I know it takes time to tweak and if anything I may just keep tweaking and playing around with it but with so many things to try and change u can prob understand why I'd rather get some advice from people that know...I'd rather not splash out on a new machine...I may upgrade my internet speed to Virgin FIbre optics...with higher speeds but am wondering what else I can do...SL viewers are a nightmare too...with 1000 different settings...who knows what is the best way to configure it to be least intensive on your machine...i mean i have it on low graphics when i stream etc...have tweaked other things on SL viewer too like max bandwith and disk cache size (both maxed) and reg clear cache etc... I just dont get it...I hear musicians in SL and they have no issues and theres me with excellent equipment (mic and mixer are top level) and ok the laptop is maybe not excellent but Macbook Pro! it should cope! damn you SL for being such a drain on machine resources... So please help if you can, and congrats if you read all of this posting/semi-rant... Thanks, Vlad 
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| ticious |
I didn't read all the way through (no essay points for me!) mostly because I"m a venue owner, not a musicia, so I'm not really qualified. But one comment you had, "Even when I'm not singing and just listening to a stream in SL i get a weird 2/3 sec freeze in SL...could be Emerald that does this...? "
Yes, I've heard this from other Emerald viewer users. It's great when your building or whatever, but not good at shows. I've also heard many, many musicians say they run SL on one machine and all of their music and streaming on a second machine due to SL piggy resource requirements. Not all do, but many do. |
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| RayW |
Well, I have no help to offer, sorry, Vlad. YES! SL is a drain. I have a PC, that had problems (over temp). So, since I've got it working, I run a CPU temp monitor all the time. Normal use: 49 C. Recording and producing: 51-55 C. Running SL: 60-63 C ... Thermal Shutdown: 70 C. So, you can C that SL is one hot proposition.
You know all this. So, it doesn't help. But, like others would say .. thin-out that SL .. lower everything to barely being able to recognize anything. Shrink down the window to as small as you can and still read what people are saying (what with wrap and all). The only other think is get a cheap deal on a used laptop, and read and broadcast through that (SL needs to run on the better machine). |
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| Slim Warrior |
Hi Vlad,
It seems like right now you are using a fairly complicated way of using Nicecast and streaming into SL. In my guide to streaming using nicecast here on SLMC I gave a very simple way of using Garageband to load your backing tracks and use that as well as your mixer for your vocals. If you want to use Itunes which I suggest as a far better option than using Quicktime Movies (which of course will lag your machine out whilst having SL open at the same time, then I suggest you go to Nicecast and choose application mixer ( select Itunes which is the default) and use that to hijack the tracks you want to use as backings.Load the backings into iTunes. Using the Voice over in Nicecast is Never going to give you a good vocal quality to be honest, and there is a tad more multitasking to do each time you need to slide from application to source everytime you sing/talk For lyrics, then I would grab the lyrics of a lyric site and paste into Text edit or a word document and have that up on screen so you can see the words. Failing that then you can get yourself a copy of Prompt Lite which will scroll the lyrics at a speed you can sing to. You can find that here: http://mac.softpedia.com/get/Multimedia/Prompt-Lite.shtml Do you have a registered Licence for Nicecast or are you using the demo version? Using the demo will decrease the quality of your streaming after around 20 minutes to a hideous crackle. The best thing to be honest Vlad is for you to contact me either on Skype @ SlimGirlFat or on voice in SL and I can run you thru your set up, what you have set up now, and why you are not getting the performance you need. You also have a couple posts on getting your vocals sounding warmer and Nicecast is not going to do that very well at all. Slimmie |
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| Vlad |
thanks Ticious, RayW and Slim...yes Slim I will add ya.
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| Vlad |
I'm sure we'll discuss this but in response I have actually loaded the tracks into itunes but to my knowledge Itunes uses more processor than quicktime and itunes still plays them using quicktime anyway...i looked at the processor to see the % used also and it is higher for itunes...
im aware how to hijack too and dont think I use voice over?...my nicecast is fully registered and im sure im using it well i even had a tech guy from focusrite set it up for me...we had to set channels in nicecast and all sorts...only thing in nicecast i dont know is the buffering for input and output and all the diff effects which i prob have to play with...i have fousright virt effects which work well and im deffo not buying a seperate unit...the effects will work fine i just need to optimise it all and see if its got anything else more useful than reverb for me
...worth chatting to u Slim and look forward to it )
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