I interviewed Nat Mandelbrot of Cruxy today. He outlined the way their fantastic Cruxy player works, and revealed some tantilising news about a future product to be released imminently. Unfortunately I can’t blog about that as yet due to some potential legal issues, but I can say it was very impressive in action and could potentially enable far more depth to the Second Life audio experience. I hope to blog about it very soon.

The Cruxy player is a personal media player which sets the landstream ( owned or deeded ) to a stream from the cruxy website, so users can listen to their mp3s within Second Life. This could lead on, with multistream technology similar to i3d’s silverstream, to different users being able to listen to different music on the same land – potentially very useful for interesting unique soundtracks for parcels :

[13:36] Dizzy Banjo: I’m fascinated by your product, I wondered if we could talk about the possibilities it enables in terms of audio in Second Life and other virtual worlds ?
[13:36] Nat Mandelbrot: Thanks, yeah, we are trying to do two things
[13:36] Nat Mandelbrot: one we have our RL life focused site Cruxy.com
[13:36] Nat Mandelbrot: and then one of the places we’ve extended it is SL
[13:36] Nat Mandelbrot: we are moving there, but right now we are in Facebook, MySpace, etc. and some mobile
[13:37] Nat Mandelbrot: so basically taking creative media to new places
[13:37] Nat Mandelbrot: SL is my personal fav obviously
[13:37] Nat Mandelbrot: and I have spent many hours trying to build different players that hook into music and video on the web easily
[13:37] Dizzy Banjo: so could you briefly explain how it works?
[13:37] Nat Mandelbrot: What we have public today is the Cruxy Player 3.0.
[13:38] Nat Mandelbrot: It supports an open standard playlist format called XSPF.
[13:38] Nat Mandelbrot: This is like a podcast rss feed, but for playlists of media, mostly music.
[13:38] Nat Mandelbrot: It can contain titles, thumbnails, info links, and most importnatly links to mp3s and so on.
[13:38] Nat Mandelbrot: Our player parses that file, and loads it up into an interactive SL gadget
[13:38] Nat Mandelbrot: that controls parcel media streams.
[13:39] Nat Mandelbrot: You can use our player with any XSPF file and any mp3 file
[13:39] Nat Mandelbrot: however, when combined with an account hosted on Cruxy.com
[13:39] Nat Mandelbrot: we can do neat things like track plays and map locations of your fans: http://cruxy.com/sl/map
[13:39] Dizzy Banjo: interesting, so people host mp3s on your site ?
[13:40] Nat Mandelbrot: They upload media to promote and sell,
[13:40] Dizzy Banjo: ok
[13:40] Nat Mandelbrot: we convert whatever is uploaded into mp3s, flash video, etc
[13:40] Nat Mandelbrot: so you can upload a 44.1,16-bit WAV for sale
[13:40] Nat Mandelbrot: but we will generate previews streams that are mp3
[13:40] Dizzy Banjo: then with things like facebook / myspace.. its an app which plugs into that which streams the media..
[13:41] Nat Mandelbrot: Exactly, just another player client for our feeds and streams.
[13:41] Nat Mandelbrot: Which is how we approached SL initially
[13:41] Dizzy Banjo: but in SL.. it redirects the landstream the person is on ?
[13:41] Nat Mandelbrot: Currently, yes. The entire land stream is switched.
[13:41] Dizzy Banjo: how does this work with land ownership ?
[13:41] Nat Mandelbrot: You must be an owner or the player must be deeded, etc.
[13:42] Dizzy Banjo: will this incorporate multi streams on parcels, like the vHud ?
[13:41] Nat Mandelbrot: We have been going in two directions from here -
[13:42] Nat Mandelbrot: first the i3d guys have their silverstream servers
[13:42] Nat Mandelbrot: exactly
[13:42] Nat Mandelbrot: so that wuold be one step – perhaps a player mode
[13:42] Dizzy Banjo: how many streams per parcel are possible under the current architecture ?
[13:43] Nat Mandelbrot: Well in terms of back end scaling we run on Amazon S3, so we can scale pretty well
[13:43] Nat Mandelbrot: in terms of SL scaling, I think there are no special limits on personal media textures
[13:43] Dizzy Banjo: ok
[13:43] Nat Mandelbrot: its no different than 40 avs watching one stream
[13:43] Nat Mandelbrot: its just that they each receive a different url for their media texture
[13:44] Nat Mandelbrot: The frustrating thing is that you’d think a user-controlled script could always
[13:44] Nat Mandelbrot: set their personal media url, but for some reason that is not the case
[13:44] Dizzy Banjo: so how easy is it to control what each avatar hears ?.. they wear this hud and they hear it and just them ?
[13:44] Nat Mandelbrot: Yeah, each av hears their own stream – remember though this is using Media streams not Music
[13:44] Nat Mandelbrot: so what they have is a video texture – perhaps album art
[13:45] Nat Mandelbrot: with the mp3 playling as part of that
[13:45] Dizzy Banjo: sure but it could be blank visually
[13:45] Nat Mandelbrot: Right, or you can actually craete dynamic text rendering
[13:48] Dizzy Banjo: is the stream something like a shoutcast ?
[13:48] Nat Mandelbrot: Well thats a decision to make.
[13:48] Nat Mandelbrot: We approach things as static SMIL documents – which are quicktime playlist format
[13:48] Nat Mandelbrot: that allows you to mix video, audio, photos, etc
[13:48] Nat Mandelbrot: You can load up a SMIL which sets a playlist for a certain amount of time
[13:49] Nat Mandelbrot: but you can’t change whats in that playlist on the fly without loading up a new SMIL file
[13:49] Dizzy Banjo: Great, well thanks for your time Nat

Here is an excellent report by Draxtor Despres on Cruxy :