Preparation for today’s show was less eventful than last week, the playlist was synced to the player on the first try! I mean, that is something that should be expected and it’s kind of sad that this is so unusual that I have to mention it, but what can you do? 🤷

Well, I know what I am doing: I am changing things in the background. This site is not what it was last week! It is now running in a Docker container, downloads are handled by my Nextcloud instance, and on top of that I am currently writing a bit of JavaScript that may eventually replace that (rather useless) Mixcloud widget.

Okay, enough of that. This has already been more information than has been exchanged in the chat during the show. 😄 I still ❤️ all my lurkers!

Really, enough of that now. What did we have? A couple nice openers, taken from the “other” trance charts, and then we got a couple of nice tracks from our regular trance charts, such as “The Pursuit of Perfection” by Inoblivion, “Nebula” by Aly & Fila and Richard Durand (which is actually from last week already but apparently it managed to slip by unnoticed), and then we have the track that I have picked as this week’s Favourite of the Week™: “Never Felt This Good” by DT8 Project, The Space Brothers, and Andrea Britton.

And maybe some other tracks managed to slip by without getting noticed today as well? If you hear something, say something, or leave me a comment, or whatever. You know.

The next show will be on Wednesday, July 17, at 19:00 CEST/UTC+2.

Today uploading the show onto the player only required two tries. Almost acceptable!

What may end up as “maybe not quite acceptable” is the number of tracks that I have added this year, and that have 4 or more stars. We have just entered the second half of the year, and I am already at 108 tracks that I would need to play at this year’s End of the Year mix. If the release rate stays that way (and on average it should) I’m looking at 200 tracks that I need to play. Two bloody fucking hundred! At five minutes a track that would be over 16 hours! I’m gonna die… 😵

For this week I’m only going to point to the Favourite of the Week™: Woody van Eyden’s remix of “Balearic Desire” by Sunstar.

You definitely should listen to the rest of the show as well, though!

The next show will be on Wednesday, July 10, at 19:00 CEST/UTC+2.

I think this software wants to kill me.

Of course it cannot directly do so, as it has no devices it can use to physically manipulate matter (except for photons) but holy crap, Engine DJ 4.0 is so incredibly bad for my blood pressure and my generally peaceful composure, it’s a miracle it’s legal. You could probably market it as a rage enhancer for soldiers.

I had to start late because for over an hour it was not possible to sync today’s playlist to the device. On the sixth try the playlist suddenly did sync, and I have no idea what I did differently and how I can reproduce that successfully, but I guess I will start even earlier with that next week. Like, on Tuesday, probably.

Anyway, fuck software. We had a bunch of bangers in tonight’s show, such as the Luca Morris remix of Andrew Meller’s “Born Slippy,” an old classic with a fresh new face, or “Into the Night” by Audorn and Sarah De Warren, or “Lenda” by DIM3NSION and Mirage, and Talla 2XLC’s and Zyrus 7’s version of Binary Finary’s “1998” was not a bad one, either! None of them can hold a candle to this week’s Favourite of the Week™, though, because that one is 🔥: “World on Fire” by Alex Kunnari and Bo Bruce, remixed by Alex himself.

If you want to light your ears on fire, here’s your chance:

The next show will be on Wednesday, July 3, at 19:00 CEST/UTC+2.

Two days ago I decided to bite the bullet and update the DJ software I use for feeding tracks and playlists to the PRIME 4, and it has been a wild ride — and I’m not sure it’s over yet! The only good thing I can say so far is that I am very much in awe that the player happily installs whatever firmware you throw at it; switching it between the oldest available and the newest available in either direction is not a problem at all. Bravo, Denon!

However, the software is still an unmitigated disaster. So far I have not yet found a way to use it without getting incredibly frustrated in a very small amount of time. “Everything is a playlist now” is one of the most stupid ideas any product manager has ever had, and “oh, it’s a playlist but you can’t put a track in twice” is a close second. Getting the software to re-order tracks (you know, a thing that one might want to do in a playlist) has me clicking far too often without a clear idea of whether it even should be working that way. And as soon as you attach the player (i.e. its drive which is exposed via USB) everything is simply fucked. You simply want to reverse the order of the playlist you’re looking at right now? Sure, let’s wait 85 seconds.

All of that led to the show starting 10 minutes late, and also I need to re-think whether I want to change the setup… before, I copied everything to a second MacBook which then had the software and did the whole syncing with the player, while I switched the screen to the Windows machine to prepare the encoding, and during the show I could use the second MacBook to talk to you and take notes in the playlist, like tracks I liked, and all that jazz. However, that would now require me to switch the screen back to my main MacBook. Not a good idea. I’ll have to give that some more thought.

Anyway, there were a bunch of cool tracks that I have shamelessly snatched from the Raw/Deep/Hypnotic Trance charts, e.g. the two Airwave tracks, or the Protoculture tracks, and also the Favourite of the Week™. In the second part of the show (where we’re most definitely leaving behind the progressive stuff) there was a bit more action going on, like with “Air Raid” by David Forbes, or “Space Time” by Digital Culture, RAM, and Richard Durand, or what about “Breathe Fire” by Pinkque and That Girl? They’re all good tracks, Bront!

During the show the volume was a bit all over the place but I fixed that for the recording!

The next show will be on Wednesday, June 26, at 19:00 CEST/UTC+2.