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.
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.
Oh my, what a show! Due to a very low number of new tracks this week I was forced to gather tracks from elsewhere, and as a first source I chose the Raw/Deep/Hypnotic Trance charts which yielded in a couple of very cool and relaxed tracks that found their place in the first hour of today’s show. And I also managed to sneak in a number of older tracks that made the rest just so much more enjoyable!
So it is not a big surprise that this week’s Favourite of the Week™ is not from the usual trove of tracks: it’s “Captain Future” (great title!) by MRPHLNDR.
And you really need to listen to all the other tracks I pulled from the other charts, there’s a lot of good stuff in there!
The next show will be on Wednesday, June 19, at 19:00 CEST/UTC+2.
June has begun, we’re getting dangerously close to summer (which means that somewhere around this time some of my allergies should flare up for a month or so), the encoding machine doesn’t give a single fuck, fans are great.
One of the things I am allergic to is cats, actually. Nevertheless The Cat™ has on this day blessed us with her presence, and we are thankful for it. We have also been blessed with good music, and I would like to bestow a special blessing upon this week’s Favourite of the Week:
Get blessed right here. Touch the screen, touch the screen!
The next show will be on Wednesday, June 12, at 19:00 CEST/UTC+2.
Well, I guess the new machine is satisfied with the new fan settings from a week ago, it hasn’t dropped a single frame during the show. Splendid!
Also, pretty much nobody has said a word during the show. All the chat fit on a single screen! I’m so proud of you, my lurkers! ❤️ 😂
We did have a couple of cool new tracks today, such as RAM’s remix of “Walk the Edge” by Alex M.O.R.P.H., or “Lore” by David Broaders, or The Favourite of the Week™: “Paladir” by Kyau & Albert!
Continue your lurking here:
The next show will be on Wednesday, June 5, at 19:00 CEST/UTC+2.
All the playing around with the fan settings that I did over the weekend apparently paid off. I test-streamed for several days (not lying here, the machine was encoding and streaming stuff for over 80 hours) without a single problem. The fans are barely noticable, and the machine itself doesn’t even get warm. Definitely an improvement! I’m more looking forward to the summer now; today it was raining and rather cold, as soon as the sun shines directly on the machine we can really put the fans to the test! 😄
Anyway, there also was a show! And we did have a couple of nice new tracks today, like “Remember the Future” by Bryan Kearney and Spektre, or “Way to Heaven” by Max Freegrant and Slow Fish (great name!). The Favourite of the Week™ is this one, though: “Starshine” by Aligash!
More cool tracks are hidden right behind the button.
The next show will be on Wednesday, May 29, at 19:00 CEST/UTC+2.
Well, that was a hot mess of a show, and literally so. The encoding machine got so warm that it started refusing to do anything related to encoding which for an encoding machine is not a good look!
Good thing I bought a small fan a couple weeks back, so I was able to point something at the encoding machine which made it get back to work, for a while at least. Of course at some point its batteries were empty, and of course it cannot work and charge at the same time, and so began an endless cycle of me turning the thing on, it cooling the system for a bit until its battery ran out, me not noticing for a while during which the fan could charge, and then me finally noticing and turning it back on.
The thing I used to keep the other thing in check. (Picture by Amazon user MettDroid.)
Just now after the show I went into the machine’s BIOS and fiddled with some fan settings which immediately made the fans go wild but OBS was able to display the shaders at a smooth 60 fps. I’ll give that more spin over the weekend and maybe I’ll even disassemble the thing once, to take a look inside and see if I notice anything. What would probably help would be to re-seat the heat sink on the CPU, with new thermal paste and everything, but it’s hard to put into words how much I do not want to do that. 😄
Anyway, in addition to almost-burning CPUs we also had a bunch of 🔥 tracks tonight! I absolutely recommend listening to the show again, and I totally need you to listen to my Favourite of the Week™: John Askew and Shelby Merry – “Steady & Stronger!”
The rest of the show was also pretty cool, and you can verify that here:
The next show will be on Wednesday, May 22, at 19:00 CEST/UTC+2.
There is another long weekend coming up here in good old Germany, because next week it’s Pentecost and that means this Thursday is Ascension Day, and I took Friday off so I’m gonna do four days’ worth of fuck all.
But before I can get started on that I had to feed you hungry lot, and even though I only added eleven new tracks this week (usually it’s between 15 and 20), there has been an almost disproportional amount of bangers in it, like:
Gareth Emergy, Giuseppe Ottaviani, Sarah De Warren: “Carry On”
Nilsix (aka Ørjan Nilsen and Mark Sixma) with “Gone”
Richard Durand, “Feels Good”
And then of course there’s still the Favourite of the Week™, and that is the RAM remix of “7 Colours” by Lost Witness:
But there’s more to hear! Don’t believe me? Check yourself (before you check the mix):
The next show will be on Wednesday, May 15, at 19:00 CEST/UTC+2.
It’s been Labour Day here in Germany today so everyone had a day off work and oh boy, I really had to remind myself about once per hour that I still need to do a show tonight… 😄
I managed to not forget, though, and all the preparation was finished in time. What I didn’t account for was the weather: first day with 25 °C, and apparently my encoding machine doesn’t like that. Not. One. Bit.
Of course OBS wouldn’t show that; frame rendering time was a measly 2.2 seconds, the number of dropped frames was a consistent 0, and still, the shader did very much not play at 60 fps. Fuck you, OBS! 😡
So, yeah, I have to find a solution to keep the machine a bit cooler than today. I’m really surprised that it’s actually a problem because I have that machine since April last year, so it already spent a whole summer right where it is now, and I can’t remember it being this bad last year. Can you? Anyway, I have to fix that.
What you have to fix is your lack of knowledge of all the great tracks that I played. The best way to do that is to hit that Play button on the nifty Mixcloud widget below, or by downloading the show from the link below. And you may also want to give a real good listen to the Favourite of the Week™: the C-Systems remix of “Am I On Your Mind” by Oxygen and Andrea Britton!
And this is the place where you can listen to the show again:
The next show will be on Wednesday, May 8, at 19:00 CEST/UTC+2.
