Huh, I never really talked on this blog about what happened and why I stopped doing shows… I guess I should really do that, and probably should have done that back in February already. Shame on me!

So, what happened? Due to a series of unfortunate circumstances (macOS upgrades, firmware upgrades, more upgrades, other upgrades) the SSD in my DJ MacBook died. The original SSD was way too small to contain all the music I had collected over the decades so restoring from backup wasn’t happening. Getting a replacement SSD for that particular MacBook was out of the question as well because the SSDs in those MacBooks are not standard SSDs. My other MacBook also didn’t have enough storage so it couldn’t be of any help, either. Sheeit.

After restoring basic functionality by putting in the original SSD I was able to put enough music on it to play the show in March. At the time I had already decided that I wanted to get the Denon DJ Prime 4 but held off on the purchase due to my then-suboptimal financial circumstances, what with being unemployed and all.

The weeks went by, turned to months, I found a new job, and at the end of August I felt financially secure enough to pull the trigger on the Prime 4. It was supposed to be delivered within 2–5 days which turned into 8 weeks at some point and then went down again and up and it was just like a rollercoaster, only I got sadder riding it every day.

But, as they say, all good things must come to an end and so, last week I finally could hold it in my hands and it is huge, it is beautiful, and the outer of the three boxes it came in immediately drew blood. According to my magic studies this means it will last forever?

Anyway, I recently checked the software side of the whole situation, i.e. the streaming side, and I only had to reinstall one driver and recreate one configuration, all the rest still seems to be working! Of course, not using Traktor anymore means that I will for now lose the ability to show track titles on the stream automatically but that only means that I will have to enter them manually, like in ancient times. I am working on a solution for that, though: the Denon players expose a lot of information about what the DJ is doing but of course it is using a proprietary protocol named StagelinQ which will require a lot of digging and trial-and-error to figure out. The future might be bright!

In order to get back on track (because I really, really like doing the weekly chart shows) I think I will start slowly, doing maybe one show every weekend. The first shows I will be doing will be Top of the Month shows (starting with February 2021) so you can catch up with all the great tracks released in the last ten months and once we are all caught up (which might be in next February, I guess) I will switch to doing my weekly chart shows again.

Or maybe I’ll do both a show during the week and one on the weekend? I am not sure yet… it may very well be that once I start doing shows again I won’t settle for anything less than ALL THE SHOWS EVERY DAY but I have picked up a couple of other regular appointments during the week which I do not want to give up at this time.

Anyway. This saturday, November 6, 2021, starting at 11:00 CET/UTC+1 (for old times’ sake) I will be streaming the charts from February 2021, in the same place where it always happened, on my channel on Twitch. I expect you all to be there!