Kopi SoundBox

I have been looking to create a radio or music box object in SL for quite some time. Some object that can bring real world contents into the virtual world. Focusing my limited time on learning to create scripts to stream in music, I went on several trips to shops and places within the SL world and found out that you can't just play a music file through a script,... instead you gotta streamed it in from a websever.

Hmmm..... isn't that something like those radio stations online? Visual Radio from Nokia is following the same principal as well, just that it is through the wireless network.

I decide to try on building a Live station receiving unit by building on a few simple sample code stubs I got. Been researching and developing on to this for almost a week (going slowly. Got really limited amount of time.). Finally, I completed my own soundbox. I am able to stream live radio music live from the URLs found in shoutcast.com .

Have a look at my brand new system. I call it, the Kopi SoundBox Machine. Currently it picks up 6 stations, 3 in the US, one from Malaysia (I think so...), one from taiwan, and the last one from Japan. Unfortuately, the local radio stations seems to be pretty conservative, and hid their URL from public viewing. That's quite a shame, as an open concept might have triggered more local creativity into creating new platforms, that might reach out to an even wider range of audience. But well, this is still Singapore we are talking about.

I find the concept of internet radios to be really interesting. You can literaly hear the world, from just one point, in a virtual, and non-existing place. Interesting concept. What would the guy who invented radio (Bell is it? Or whoever he is...) thought about that.

With my curiosity still in full force, I proceeded to try the streaming on podcast this time. And who better than to try it on MrBrown's podcast, the MrBrownShow. At least, his podcast is open to the public. Well it really worked. With a simple modification of code, I am able to stream in a few of his latest podcasts, and cycle between them through the "touch" action... and of course since it is MrBrown, got to have the SoundBox in brown colour.

This development experience is really rewarding and I had drawn much basic knowledge on internet streaming through the research and development effort.