3pointD.com

Just took a nice stroll over to Park Slope from the 3pointCrib to have a chat with Nathan Freitas and Jon Oakes, two of the co-founders of Cruxy, the new(-ish) Web site for independent musicians, filmmakers and other artists to promote and sell their work. (The third co-founder is Web services wizard Will Meyer, who’s based elsewhere.) That’s Nathan on the left (aka Nat Mandelbrot in SL), with his pet AIBO, which, sadly, suffers from the classic symptoms of DHS. I got in touch with them after blogging up their music player for SL, and was happy to hear that they have more cool stuff on the way, and are in fact already working on some things that could make it a lot easier to do media-making not just in a virtual world but on the Web itself, as well as to cross over between the two. For musicians, filmmakers and artists in both the real and virtual worlds, it seems like Cruxy’s versatile player and format could provide a small boon.

Cruxy relies on two main two technologies: (1) the XSPF (”spiff”) standard for shareable playlists, and (2) Amazon’s S3 service on the back end.

As I understand it, using spiff lets Cruxy’s SL player (as well as its Web players) act more like a CD than a cassette tape, letting you switch tracks on the fly. It also means creating an in-world player is no problem; the SL player uses the same back end as the Web player, with the XML-based spiff simply directing the client to retrieve the stream from an S3 server. The S3 system makes it far less costly to run the service, say Freitas and Oakes. So much less costly, in fact, that Cruxy is more or less breaking even at the moment, after launching as a beta site in August. (A more formal launch is due in a month or so.)

One nice thing about the player is that it’s open-source. SL musicians can upload songs to Cruxy.com, load a player up with a playlist, and give copies away to friends and fans. You can click through from the SL player to a Cruxy Web page where you can learn more about a band, and from there purchase songs for download. Cruxy is seriously considering making songs available for purchase in-world with Linden dollars as well. The open-source player also means you can put the code into any SL object you like, which leaves all kinds of possibilties open. (SL jukebox, anyone?) And, of course, you can mod more functions into it. I think you can even use it with services other than Cruxy, by pointing the spiff code toward a different back end.

Things get more interesting when you start to think about Cruxy’s other service, Mux, which lets you convert any video format to any other, for free and on the fly. The service stores the converted file only temporarily, but emails the user a link to either stream it while it’s still stored or simply download the file themselves. You can even point Mux at any YouTube video page and it will spit out a conversion for you, or Mux’s SL page will create a stream you can bring into your parcel for a day. While the technology is “definitely still beta,” there are already advanced services like Power Mux, which lets you resize and otherwise manipulate the coverted file, and Mobile Mux which lets you convert to a phone-friendly format. Other features include an API, code snippets to “Mux It” that you can install on a Web site, and an RSS feed of all the files you’ve converted. Seems like machinimators should be able to take advantage of all this in some way.

Mux will also be an open service that Freitas and Oakes say should be useful to other developers and startups. Though it is add-supported and all its services are free at the moment, the API and some premium services may eventually require fees.

Where SL is concerned, Freitas and Oakes are thinking of “the idea of music as fashion, that you could adorn your avatar with your favorite music, rather than it being about a parcel media stream,” Oakes says (even though it essentially works the same way). One cool upcoming feature Cruxy is working on is the ability to “squirt” a track or a playlist to another avatar, instead of having to copy over a URL or give them a new object, making Cruxy players something like a virtual bluetooth-enabled iPod. The over-arching goal is to create “ways for people to be entertained and interact with each other around media,” Oakes says.

While there are about 40 filmmakers, a couple of hundred bands, and something like 500 smaller independent artists on Cruxy at the moment, there are only a handful of SL musicians. Most of the ones Freitas and Oakes have contacted only want to play live in SL, rather than provide recordings for download and/or purchase, but they are hoping to recruit more.

The pair started developing Cruxy around the beginning of 2006, after having sold a former startup to Palm in 2001. Freitas is also an “old VRML-head,” oddly (oddly because he’s only 31). When worlds like SL and There.com started popping up, he was skeptical at first, he says, but is now very interested in seeing how they can be used to promote the kind of independent media-makers found on Cruxy.