On Fri, 2006-05-26 at 09:38 +0100, Brett Parker wrote:
On Tue, May 23, 2006 at 10:05:07AM +0100, Richard Lewis wrote:
First is the mixing software.
PD has a command line mode, and is actually reasonably light, you can also set it to spool out mp3 and get sources from a variety of places... if each user is supposed to get a different experience, then, yeah - without a lot more work, you'd run multiple copies of pd. Then each person just has the output chunk of the running pd, should be relatively simple. I think. probably. (this is off the top of my head so might be wildly inaccurate :)
Yes, I think I've decided that pd will be the best tool. Partly because the design of the patch is the responsibility of the other guy I'm working with and he has some experience with pd.
Part of the difficulty I'm having is finding information on using Open Sound Control with pd for two reasons: 1) the most often cited link http://barely.a.live.fm/pd/OSC for the relevant external is gone; and 2) "osc" in pd means an oscillator!
Second is the streaming software.
Icecast generally only provides one stream that you can connect to, or multiple defined streams, I'm not sure that it's what you're looking for in this case. Unless all users are supposed to hear the same thing?
I think Icecast will serve multiple streams using a "mount-point" paradigm. They are presented to the user as distinct URIs and you can set parameters for them like maximum listeners etc.
If they're all getting their own streams, bandwidth will become an issue fairly quickly if it becomes popular ;) (10 people at 64kbps is going to eat most of a 1M connection, after overheads etc...)
I think the most practical solution will be to have, say, ten always running instances of pd which each have a separate output stream on the streaming server. When a client arrives at the Web interface, he is allowed to choose one of the vacant sessions to play with and takes exclusive control of it or he can listen in to a session which someone else is playing with.
Thanks for your thoughts!
Cheers, Richard