Losing music at club & at home

[mQQnie]

is anyone else having this problem?

i was DJ'ing at a club yesterday, and had three people tell me continuously that they were losing music. i would constantly monitor my SAM player, and it was fine... this problem was in world.

i have my own personal stream into our house stream at home, and it's happening again... about every 10 or 15 minutes or so, our music fades out then comes back in....

[Alwin Alcott]

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mQQnie wrote:

is anyone else having this problem?

i was DJ'ing at a club yesterday, and had three people tell me continuously that they were losing music. i would constantly monitor my SAM player, and it was fine... this problem was in world.

i have my own personal stream into our house stream at home, and it's happening again... about every 10 or 15 minutes or so, our music fades out then comes back in....

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streaming music has nothing to do with SL servers, it's handled by external servers you rent (=your stream) or you host yourself at your machine when you broadcast your stream from your own server.

Losing it is a connection problem somewhere between the streamserver and their pc.

Fading is only a feature to let music slowly come in/out without your speakers blowning you away. The losing of the sound is the same as mentioned above.

[Ayesha Askham]

Alwin

I'm sure you know this, but music streams in SL have been suffering this periodic disconnecting for over a year now, and no-one seems to either know what the true cause is, or be able to correct it.

It is not simply the listener's connection at fault since nearly everyone I speak to has encountered it.  At first I was told it was something particular to Firestorm, but I can personally vouch for it occurring on other clients and other connections.

Some sims seem more prone to stream failure than others, so I am inclined to think that at least part of the issue is at the server level.

It may have a similar causality as the perennial issues that folk have with Vivox, but I do not know.

By the way, music fading is something that can be modified at the client level, or at least it can in FS.

[mQQnie]

thank you, Ayesha...

i know how my stream and my SAM works...i was also under the impression it's 2nd Life... just wonderin' if a tech would answer and maybe we could find a fix... 

[mQQnie]

and Alwin, for the price i pay for my stream, there is no WAY it's a "connection" problem... lol

 

[Qie Niangao]

So I'm the last person to notice, if there really is a new problem -- I rarely have sound enabled at all, let alone parcel audio, and anyway I've never known streams to stay reliably connected in SL or TuneIn (or even, back in the day, WinAmp), but just to think about this a bit:

First, Alwin is exactly right about the architecture here: the streamed audio never passes through the sim or any other Linden Lab network, ever. Does not happen.

What does happen is that the sim tells viewers what connections to make and when. It does that if:

1. it thinks the avatar has crossed into a parcel with a different audio stream (in which case most viewers will default to fading the streams out and in), or
2. it thinks the parcel's audio stream has changed to a different URL.

So if stream reliability is actually worse than before (and again, it has always been godawful for me), it seems as if something must be confusing the sim into spuriously triggering one of the above conditions.

Not that this helps much in identifying the problem. Maybe if a TPV developer could be motivated to craft some debugging code to detect when the viewer was getting "switch streams" messaging from the sim, that might help a very patient tester to observe a pattern. (Or maybe... might already be in the console output?)

[Alwin Alcott]

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mQQnie wrote:

and Alwin, for the price i pay for my stream, there is no WAY it's a "connection" problem... lol

 

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as soon price for a stream means it's having garanteed no connection issues for you or listeneners  the guy who invented that is rich within a day...

a stream ONLY promesses you bandwith... thats something totally different.

[Ayesha Askham]

Qie

All your points are well-made, but the essential issue remains.  The sim does have a role in the routing of the chosen stream to the client irrespective of whether it retransmits it or not.  It is most likely some aspect of sim-client communication that has become intermittent, and just what that is I haven't a clue.

The fact that some sims cause random dropouts while others do not is, in my estimation very likely to be an issue with the workload a sim-server is expected to do now.  That there is a similar but most likely unconnected client side component involved is also in my estimation, clear, since that type of dropout tends to fade at whatever setting the client has for it.

What I find frustrating is the apparent (and I emphasise apparent) lack of action with regard to this issue either on the part of Linden Lab or the TPV developers.  I would just like to know what is causing the issue!  :smileyfrustrated:

[Qie Niangao]

Well, I checked the Debug Console and indeed there are several distinct messages the viewer gets from the sim related to parcel audio streaming that anybody who really cares about this could be monitoring in the console logs to see when it occurs.

When the avatar goes from a a parcel with streaming audio to one without, or when the parcel's stream URL is removed, the viewer logs:

LLViewerParcelMgr::processParcelProperties: stopping parcel music (parcel stream URL is empty)LLStreamingAudio_FMODEX::stop: Stopping internet stream: http://[....]LLStreamingAudio_FMODEX::start: Set internet stream to null

When going from a parcel without streaming audio to one with a stream, or when a stream is added to the parcel, it logs:

LLViewerParcelMgr::optionally_start_music: Starting parcel music http://[...]LLStreamingAudio_FMODEX::start: Starting internet stream: http://[....]

For reasons I've already expressed, I don't care enough to follow up further on this, but I'm reminded of a possible clue: I think I recall a bunch of work done a while back to accommodate changes in FMOD, so a TPV developer is likely to remember some of what changed, and that might be relevant to any changes in reliability of viewer processing of stream-related messaging (or possibly even stream contents, if Firelight's updates made FMOD even worse than before).

[Ayesha Askham]

Qie!

Thankyou, that is what I was trying to remember...I am pretty sure that FMOD is involved in this issue,  one of the FS devs mentioned it a good while ago and it slipped my mind totally!

The trouble for me is that I am almost totally ignorant of how some of these routines work, so I'll need to poke Whirly and see if I can get an explanation that won't blow my little mind. :smileywink:

[mQQnie]

Thank you Ayesha & Qie!