Lunch Trance – 2022-12-07 – Top of the Week

So… the Windows MacBook… you know what, let’s just not talk about it. 🤦

Okay. So… last week! Oh yes, I was on vacation. My wife and I rented a small house at the Baltic Sea (like, literally 150 meters from the beach) and spent a couple of days doing pretty much… nothing, and a lot of it. It was great! We lay around on the couch, watched some TV, ordered pizza, did a bit of shopping, ate more snacks, fed about a thousand birds (like sparrows, magpies, and blue tits) on the terrace (there was a never-ending stream of them, it was great to watch), played some games, did more nothing, it was amazing. I’m already looking forward to the next vacation!

I couldn’t be bothered to take any DJing or streaming equipment so you had to take your Wednesday night into your own hands but I’m sure you’ve managed! However, this meant that this week I had a little bit of a backlog so I changed the program slightly to match my needs: today (with one or two exceptions) I only played tracks that were new entries, either in this week or in the last week. All to make sure you don’t miss any great tracks!

Next week I will returned to the regularly scheduled program, and that will happen on Wednesday, December 14, at 🕖 19:00 CET/UTC+1.

Download and Playlist →

Lunch Trance – 2022-11-23 – Top of the Week

It wouldn’t be Lunch Trance if everything worked, right?

Yesterday I noticed that the Windows MacBook was starting again, like nothing ever happened. I don’t want to say that I was ecstatic but due to performance reasons I would like to keep using it because on macOS OBS for some reason is unbearably slow. (And it crashes if you try to connect it to your Twitch account.)

However, I did like all the new background videos and the programming I did around that so I copied that all over to the Windows machine and set up OBS. Still looks nice!

Tonight I sat down, started the Windows machine again and did a test stream. 1080p60, almost sub-1 millisecond frame rendering times, just like one would expect from video material that is basically almost free to render.

I let it run a bit and went into the kitchen to feed the cats.

By the way, the new cat gets more and more cuddly which is awesome! 😻 However, there’s still some tension between the old and the new cat; they’re getting closer to each other all the time but they both are still wary of the other one. Time will fix that, I’m sure!

Anyway, I also fixed myself some little dinner snack and then came back to the Windows machine and immediately felt like breaking things, many things, and with lots of force. The encoder was suddenly dropping everything it was handed!

I checked the configuration and noticed that OBS wasn’t using the usual encoder anymore; instead of the Intel H264 Hardware Encoder it was using the AMD H264 Hardware Encoder. Theoretically I don’t really care which one it uses as long as it works but what was worrying was that the Intel encoder didn’t even show up in the list anymore… which means more debugging, probably somewhere around the EFI area of the MacBook. Not looking forward to that.

In the meantime the macOS machine was a viable backup solution so I fired that up again and while that one was still dropping 10% of the frames because of rendering lag, it did manage to hardware-encode the stream and send it out to the world where you were then able to watch it and listen to it. Amazing! 🎉

During my show I did get a raid by Pisces1, thank you very much for that! ❤

Next week a show may or may not happen as my wife and I will be vacationing at the Baltic Sea once more. I don’t yet know how much stuff I want to take with me so I guess I’ll decide that on Sunday when it’s time to pack. 😀

There will, however, definitely be a show on Wednesday, December 7, at 🕖 19:00 CET/UTC+1.

Download and Playlist →

End of the Hiatus

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! 🥳🎉

Frohe Kunde!

Mit Riesenschritten naht erneut die CeBIT, und selbstverständlich lässt sich Viprinet erneut nicht nehmen, Besucher und geladene Gäste am vorletzten Tag der CeBIT (dieses Mal ein Donnerstag!) nach alle Regeln der Kunst (und Strich und Faden) zu verwöhnen. Mit von der Party ist dieses Jahr Kollege Nico Erfurth, seines Zeichens selbst Viprinet-Mitarbeiter. Ich bin schon sehr gespannt!

Für alle, die den verkorksten und abgebrochenen Versuch eines Sets auf der letztjährigen tUM mitbekommen haben: Fürchtet euch nicht, ein Softwareupdate hat anscheinend sämtliche Probleme behoben, und mein Rechner und das S4 werden euch zu Diensten sein!

Neue Hardware (und neues Headerbild!)

Ich habe beschlossen, meine Gerätesammlung ein wenig zu erweitern. Und wie der Zufall so wollte, kam mir dabei ein KONTROL S4 über den Weg. Tja, und das steht jetzt hier neben mir (und ist oben im Header zu sehen) und bereitet mir sehr viel Freude! Ich bin auf jeden Fall gespannt, was ich mit den neuen Möglichkeiten, die mir das S4 bietet, so anfangen werde!