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.

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.

This week marked the first week where I had to go to work before I could put up the DJ table and all the equipment I need to start the show. The schedule was tight but I managed to get it all done in time!

And the show itself was nice as well but I really need to remember to put up the yoga mat for my feet next week, our floor is simply too hard.

Like every week we had a bunch of great new tracks by many old and new names. The beginning was made by “Vertigo” by Gareth Emery and Sarah de Warren, we had a new track by Ørjan Nilsen (“Amnesia”), the wonderful track “Started a Fire” by N-sKing, Metta & Glyde had Susanne Teutenberg sing on their track “The Universe You Need”, Ehren Stowers delivered a banger with “Supernatural,” and Simon Patterson’s “Up” hit home with me right away. However, as Favourite of the Week the goth in me simply had to pick the Aly & Fila remix of Schiller & Heppner’s “Leben… I Feel You” and I’m not ashamed of that! 🤗

However, it’s still important for you to make up your own mind about the tracks I have played and that is why I have recorded it so you can listen to it whenever you want. How nice of me! 😀

This week’s show went way better than last week’s; the tracks had been analyzed correctly, I pressed the 🔴 button, the second camera was back in the game, and I got to show off my new DJ table thingy. It has the perfect height, it’s way more stable than the scratching post and I discovered that the scratching post quite lived up to its name by scratching the underside of the DJ console. Screw that screw!

I also changed the setup a tiny little bit; previously the main output signal of the console (i.e. what you have been listening to) went into the mixer using two dedicated audio cables but as I was changing things around anyway and packing all of the tech for the DJ setup into a box and I had another Dante audio adapter lying around, I decided to put it into the box as well which gave me another two channels I could simply have available in my mixer without messing around with long cables going through half the room. Definitely an improvement!

And then we had a whole bunch of great new tracks! We heard a remix by Aly & Fila of “Leben… I Feel You” by Schiller & Heppner, David Forbes gaves us “Dreamstate,” we had another classic remixed with “Fine Day” by DubVision, two more tracks with male vocalists (Gid Sedgwick & Roman Messer’s “This Is Real”, remixed by Christopher Corrigan, and Giuseppe Ottaviani & Richard Walters’ “Keep You Safe”, remixed by Cold Blue), the new project of Nitrous Oxide and Simon Gregory called Digital Drift contributed their “Tension,” and Daxson finally turned everything up to 11 with my Favourite of the Week, “Before It’s Lost:”

And because I didn’t fuck up the recording, here is your chance to listen to it all again:

Oh my, what a bloody disaster this show was.

So, the room I’m currently working out of is currently being rearranged because my wife does a lot of work from home and she doesn’t want to do that on the dining table in the living room anymore so she got us new desks (standing desks, even!) and now we have to put them somewhere! That led to many cables being disconnected, and long story short, I nearly didn’t manage to get them all reconnected correctly in time for the show.

I did manage to connect most of them properly but other things fell a bit short; prep time for the new songs was at a minimum and as a result of that the first two tracks were being played at -15% which in a track with vocals is almost painful. I changed tempos up and down quite vehemently before the third track or so was finally back at where it should be… so I guess it’s almost a mercy that I forgot to press the record button so that these shameful moments will only live in my memory and the memories of those who witnessed the massacre live on stream but they will never have to be shared by anybody else. “Glück im Unglück,” as we Germans say.

While a recording would be nice, I can still tell you about my Favourite of the Week! There were a bunch of nice tracks, e.g. by Chris Jennings & Kenny Palmer (“Nerve,” a close 2nd place for me this week), Solarstone’s “Solarcoaster” was remixed quite nicely by Maarten de Jong, District5’s Dirty Remix by Technikal’s “Cubik” still kicks, and Andrew Bayer’s & Farius’s remix of Andrew’s own “Under Pressure” was lovely as well. This one managed to take the cake, though:

“Rattlesnake” by Audorn. Well done!

Anyway. Next week’s show is hopefully going to be on Wednesday again (as it should be) but maybe it will have to be pushed to Thursday. We’re going on vacation tomorrow and will only come back next week on Tuesday, and then we’ll immediately begin ripping this room apart for some deep cleaning (because it’s necessary) and recabling and rearranging and reeverything to make it exactly as nice as we want it to be. Until then, have a good week!