Second Life has a vibrant music scene that we are big fans of. We’ve been working hard to bridge the various media promotion and distribution services we’ve built for RL (real life) musicians into the SL Grid and we’re ready to start sharing the results.
Warning: If you aren’t familiar with Second Life, I recommend you watch this video of live acoustic show or this Fatboy Slim DJ Event as a small taste of what’s possible.
Cruxy Player for Second Life is a portable music player for use at listening parties, as a promotional giveaway, or for just some relaxing downtime in your personal parcel of land. It can load and play music from mp3 playlists using the XSPF standard (http://xspf.org). XSPF (”spiff”) is like the common M3U format, but formatted as XML, much richer in detail, and supported by sites such as Odeo, Webjay, Yahoo! Music, Last.fm, Magnatune, and of course, Cruxy.
To provide maximum opportunity for creativity, the player is being released open-source, under the GNU General Public License. It allows for full modify and copy rights, and can be easily skinned, colored, or otherwise customized, much like our flash player for the web. You can even take the core player script and embed it into another type of object - an old-fashioned radio, dj turntables, your spaceship’s console, or some other use we would have never imagined.
Through support for this standard, the Cruxy Player can be used for many purposes, however we are most excited about the power it brings to musicians to promote themselves inside of Second Life. Anyone with a free Cruxy.com account can load the player up with their uploaded music hosted on Cruxy via an automated, personalized XSPF playlist. Then from within Second Life, the setup process just takes a few steps and some familiarity with basic building and scripting:
1) Acquire a copy of the player from the Cruxy Media Island (link below)
2) Edit the player script in Second Life to use your feed- for instance, Curt Perkins‘ (featured in the screenshots) playlist is located at: http://curtperkins.cruxy.com/xspf
3) Customize the look of the player - you can change the color or texture, or even completely modify the shape
4) Give away free players at your next show, a store kiosk, or from anywhere you can on the SL Grid. The recipients can then take your music and play it on any land they are an owner of.
(We plan to automate this process more, but for now, we are glad to provide personal assistance to anyone who requests it)
This diagram provides a bit more detail on how the Cruxy Player in Second Life interacts with the playlist, media files stored on Amazon’s S3 server, and the Second Life media streams itself.
The player is controlled through simple chat commands, with the ability to switch to any track or to link out to Cruxy.com for purchasing “real life” downloadable media of the same music being heard in Second Life. (Cruxy users receive about 75% of gross profits, paid out monthly - learn more)
If you’d like to get your own player, or check out some pre-configured ones we’ve setup, just look for this display area in the small building on the Cruxy Media Island. Its on the far side of the lake from the main house.
We hope you are as excited about this new service as we are. If you’d like to talk more or need help in SL, you can find me as ‘Nat Mandelbrot’.
- This is the Cruxy blog, and boy have we got some ideas for you!
You can learn more about the folks behind this online or you can just come to Brooklyn for a cup of coffee. - Join the Cruxy mailing list to receive occasional updates on the latest and greatest
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Fantastic! I am in awe about this for lots of different reasons, not least that it’s GPL.
Indeed, this looks very useful.
Magnatune just launched publicly useable XSPF playlists of everything (genres, albums, podcasts) and I was looking for an “ipod” like device that people could take with them in SL to listen to Magnatune music when they go back home.
The main improvement I might suggest is a way to pre-load XSPF playlists into it, and then a pop up menu to let the user choose the playlist with mouse clicks, rather than editing the script. Not sure if XSPF has in its spec, a playlist of other playlists, but that’d be a way to do this too.
-john
John,
That’s definitely an easy feature to add within Second Life - we can just use a notecard in the object’s contents with a list of XSPF urls. Otherwise, we could also look into OPML perhaps as a way to load that list remotely.
We plan to continue to do work on the player that improves it, but obviously we hope some other developers will pitch in - hence the GPL. We’ll see what happens!
+Nathan
Thanks. Glad it was useful.
nice site
nice
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OK, I give up. I have been all over that rather laggy island… found a massive art museum, erotic photo/art show, tons of rental cottages, and a couple mansions that kicked me out… but no Cruxy media display centre! Where is it?!
Phineas,
I think the links on this post are now out of date. We promise to update them soon, as we have a new 3.0 player that will be out any day now.
For now, make sure to check out the primary Cruxy in Second Life page at http://cruxy.com/sl
Thanks for your interest!
This is sad, this is the work of the Main Grid? I am a resident of the Teen Grid, and my media device has surpassed this to the point where the MG looks like crap now. If this is MG technology, then you adults are just shit when it comes to creating and scripting things.
This says its open source but i cant find the Secondlife script for this?