Saturday, August 31, 2013

2013 HELP: SOUND: Control the sounds in Second Life

Control the sounds in Second Life
  • These instructions apply to standard SL viewers numbered 3.6 and above.
  • Details may differ with other viewers.
  • Sound in SL can come from five different channels 
  • You can adjust the volume of each channel 
  • or silence any channel completely.
  • But you have to know which channel
  • And you have to find the control panels
  • Especially the quick panel.  
Quick sound controls
Click image to enlarge
  • To get to the quick sound controls:
  • Hover the cursor over the loudspeaker graphic
  • Upper right of the screen.
  • The quick sound controls panel will appear
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  • To get to the main sound control panel:
  • Me (top menu)
  • Preferences (drop-down  from Me)
  • Sound and media tab 
Preferences, Sound and media tab
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Channels 
  • Buttons.  UI sounds, adjustment rarely needed
  • Ambient.  The wind noise.  I turn this off
  • Sound effects. From objects, some worn by people.   
  • Music.  See below.
  • Media.  The usual troublemaker. See below
  • Voice. See below 
Voice 
  • To raise the volume of a specific person, zoom in on the avatar 
  • See, Zoom, roam, and tag
  • If this does not work, see:
  • Preferences-Sound and Media - Voice Chat Settings
  • For more volume adjustment, hover the cursor over the avatar
  • Click on the green info button 
  • Use the slider on the info panel
  • More on voice: Voice 
Sound effects
  • Objects can be scripted to play sounds.   
  • You will hear the sounds from objects near you.  
  • The sounds may be music, voices, or sound effects.
  • If they annoy you, turn this channel down or off.
  • I usually keep this channel set to low volume
Music (parcel music channel)
Nearby Media Panel
  • The Nearby Media Panel shows all the media in range
  • Media includes web pages on a prim (BOP)
  • and music/video set to the parcel
  • The web pages can also play sound and video
  • If  web pages are playing sounds, 
  • you may hear hear multiple sources.
  • Use the Nearby Media Panel to sort that out.
  • Hear/see music/video media/BOP in Second Life
Get the nearby media panel
  • Hover the cursor over the player off-on graphic (upper right)
  • Click More on the drop menu that appears
 
Nearby media panel
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  • In the panel above, streaming audio and streaming media are inactive
  • If streaming video or audio had been active, they could have made sounds
  • Active items are in bold.
  • Four BOPs are active, showing web pages.  A web page is usually silent.
  • If web page plays video, it usually makes sounds.
  • Some web pages have media set to autoplay.  
  • They will start playing and making sounds when the page loads
  • You can turn that off:  
  • Click on the name, then click on the square at the bottom
  • Mystery sounds
  • These may come from a BOP that loaded media on autoplay
  • Or from parcel media (set on the land) 
  • Best keep your media channel set to low audio
  • That way you can see the BOPs, but not hear them too much
  • Then raise the sound when you need to hear it.
*****
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  • Annotated screen shots made with Jing
  • Creative Commons License, attribution only.
  • Second Life, Linden, SLurl, and SL are trademarks of Linden Research Inc.
  • This blog is not affiliated with Second Life or anything else.  
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