Aishagain

Yep both my mains on both FS and the official viewer. Seems that the tech "have identified the problem and are implementing a band aid fix. So we wait. It wasn't a long wait either. The failure was spotted quickly and the fix implemented equally quickly. WTG LL for once!

So many folks wax lyrical about how much Somafm streams meant in their Second Lives..The CEO of Somafm vouchsafed this to me: "People buy and sell parcels and virtual goods in SL all the time, so if someone could come up with a way for use to successfully monetize the use of our streams in SL, we'd be open to that. But as it stands now, no one wants to pay and instead say "think of all the exposure you get". But you can die from exposure too. And when you take away something people have considered as free (or start charging for it), they get very upset. We actually tried creating a subscription music service specifically for Second Life many years ago, but there was no interest in it and we canned the project." Oh and he said to me that I was the only one who had donated from SL who had contacted him. Makes ya fink, dunnit. Might I suggest that if you are even remotely serious that you email dj@somafm.com

I'd laugh at that, Mazidox, were it not for the implications of that. It seems to show quite vividly that the present generation of Lindens really do not comprehend the behemoth that is SL. PS I am very glad that you DID catch it though!

That is sad, also it is not correct, or what I mean is, Linden Lab could help. If random items are returning then they still exist in the Linden copy of your inventory, probably many other items do as well, it is just hard to recover corrupted inventory flie items, not impossible. Linden Lab have had to face up to the fact that there are far more inventory faults and glitches than they like to admit and most (not all) are recoverable. They are now a lot more cooperative when it comes to inventory faults, for which we should be grateful, since by their own ToS they have no obligation to recover lost items of inventory.

Wow! I opened a real can of worms here. I hope Linden Lab don't tell Somafm where I live!

D'oh!

@Mazidox LindenSince Rolling Restarts for Main Server have been scheduled for Tuesday next, is there any chance that the release notes to whatever is being rolled there (I am presuming it will be that which you pushed to the RCs this past Wednesday) will be operational? Henri pointed out the failure of the page on Thursday and yet no corrective action has been taken.

News just in: Somafm have told me rather bluntly that they are not, apparently, trying to get LL to pay royalties. The are simply blocking our streaming since thay cannot, they say , recoup losses they are incurring in providing the streams. Reading between the lines here , I'd say that Somafm are about to go bust and this is just one of the symptoms. As an aside they just refunded a series of donations to them that I made over the last few months. I did not ask for this and to me that epitomises their economic model. They are bonkers. ps: They claim to be attempting to block the use of the streams via our MOAP (goodness knows how they expect to do that) and claim NOT to be blocking FMOD specifically(!)

This thread was "supposed" to be in the General Second Life technical forum but I accidentally double posted and there seens to have been a lot more interest and worthwhile suggestions in here!

@Qie NiangaoYou ask "why?". I have asked them directly. I await their response. They do not appear to understand that by removing Somafm exposure to SL users they are most likely actually reducing the likelihood of them ever recovering any income from good intentioned users who then donate to Soma as per their occasional "begs". They also clearly do not understand the relationship between SecondLife audio streaming and Linden Lab, since the only involvement that SL actually has is the displaying of the stream in the region information. The stream is actually routed to the individual viewer directly from their server. Attempting to get royalties out of Linden Lab for streaming makes attempting to get blood from a stone appear child's play. Also it is just plain wrong. At best Linden Lab could be cited as a conduit for the streams and as such are no more liable to pay royalties to Soma as Soma are to pay them!

I realise that I may have given the wrong impression about the Somafm streams and their playing of adverts. The only adverts that interrupt the music are adverts for the station (like a Station ID only a little more elaborate) and the occasional exhortation to support the station or channel. My error. Ashes and sackcloth are being donned as I speak (virtually).

Just so Chaser!

Agreed. The fact remains that a shared stream is not possible (though I gather that MOAP still works so maybe that gives us a workaround?).

@WhirlyFizzleBingo. I didn't know that. I'd say that has a lot more to do with this than any of the specious reasons Soma have quoted to me thus far! However, how do we get around that block? It seems unlikely that simply disabling the metadata function would solve the issue and yet if an individual streams Soma via an external player or browser, they have stated that they "have no problem with that". Presented with that situation, it seems to me that Soma would have no case. Do we, in fact? It seems that Soma consider that they have a dominant position in streaming into SL and "they can no longer ignore this situation" . Put less prettily, they want to create a revenue stream from this. Unfortunately, by crudely targeting Linden Lab, they hit the wrong target, I suspect. The original artists get precious little from a stream, but now it seems the conduit wants a share of the pie.

Not tested it, Animats

The above points are noted @bigmoe WhitfieldYour point is very interesting, I'll see how Soma respond to that. @Quistess Alpha You may not have noticed but the stream does, in fact, contain adverts for Somafm on a regular basis, they are just not very intrusive, being audio only. On your criteria no, it is not reasonable. It was a similar argument that was stated as their reason for blocking SL by DI.fm and was equally spurious for them, since the stream contained adverts, just not visual ones.

@Qie NiangaoThat is the point I have made to Somafm and I am awaiting their reply. I am not holding my breath. @bigmoe Whitfield: pardon? I am not sure that I know what your comment means!

It may not come as a surprise to some that SomaFM streams are no longer avaiable in Second Life. I have been in touch with SomaFM and the reason is simple. Soma have blocked Second Life because LL refused to pay any royalties on the music streams provided to SL by SomaFM. What your opinion of this will almost certainly vary, and of course the streams can still be played in external radio players, so the music is not unavailable to all, but for now the shared experience of music streaming to the region from SomaFM is no more. I do not hold out any hope of LL changing their attitude over this so we must, I guess, accept the situation. It is something that really needs to be addressed and it is the same for virtually (sic) all streaming services. The artists and the broadcasters need to be given due recompense for their medium

It may not come as a surprise to some that SomaFM streams are no longer avaiable in Second Life. I have been in touch with SomaFM and the reason is simple. Soma have blocked Second Life because LL refused to pay any royalties on the music streams provided to SL by SomaFM. What your opinion of this will almost certainly vary, and of course the streams can still be played in external radio players, so the music is not unavailable to all, but for now the shared experience of music streaming to the region from SomaFM is no more. I do not hold out any hope of LL changing their attitude over this so we must, I guess, accept the situation. It is something that really needs to be addressed and it is the same for virtually (sic) all streaming services. The artists and the broadcasters need to be given due recompense for their medium.

Going back a couple of years I had a similar issue...one DJ's stream simply would NOT play. Eventually I found out the the domain used by the stream rental operation had been classified as potentially malicious by my antivirus. I had to contact the AV support who shortly thereafter unblocked the domain.

@RicDelMoro: OK so You are placing the blame for the microstuttering squarely on Firestorm's interpretation of EEP. I did not realise that it was not the same renderer as the Linden Lab viewer, I must admit I had assumed they had used the code as it had been provided by Linden Lab. In which case... @Beq Janus: what did you do ? If I am to assume that there is some difference, what IS different and please fix it! I cannot belive that Firestorm is so changed that such an obvious flaw cannot be corrected.

This topic is of great interest to me since my system has a 1660Ti GPU (6GB vram) and 16GB system ram, an AMD Ryzen 9 CPU and yet some scenes slow my viewer to sub 10 FPS crawl. I use Firestorm 6.4.21 and I notice that this viewer is noticeably faster than the previous two EEP releases, water gives me no significant FPS hit (the previous two did), and while the viewer eats ram in crowded scenes, generally it runs well. One issue I do find is that if I am in a crowded location, even with reduced draw distance and quality, as low as mid, occasionally to get good FPS (above 25, say), I get micro-stutters regularly. I have "whitelisted" all the folders and .exe files I can, so I do not believe my AV is causing this. What IS causing this, I wonder and is Firestorm's EEP renderer significantly different to the LL viewer? As a 10 year FS user (or however long it is since Phoenix evolved into Firestorm), I am puzzled at what happens. EEP is a step-change in rendering, just as Windlight was all those years ago, but I did not expect it to hamstring my system as it does. So what am I doing wrong?

@Mazidox Linden:Seeing as there was no post on the restart thread, is it safe to assume that the roll to the RC channels today was that intended for last week but postponed due to the AWS outage?

But...but...but...it's raining outside!!

Linden Support say there are undefined "database issues", affecting all accounts "intermittently". They were doing some maintenance earlier and it is now back up on the Grid Status Page. So basically the database cluster is SNAFU.