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:
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!
The defining thing of today’s show was a bluescreen right in the middle, followed directly by a lot of audio problems while the network hardware was getting back into its groove after the reboot. I hate that hardware seems to simply break after a year or three and everybody (including me) simply goes out and buys replacements, instead of visiting the company’s CEO’s home and setting it on 🔥.
Anyway, the show starting off with a banger that I immediately wanted to make Favourite of the Week but then there was this other track which was already in its second week and the other track was in its first week and would surely be with us next time as well so here the Favourite of the Week which we won’t hear again next week: “Strikefast” by James Dymond!
Other tracks that you may want to give some attention to are “Under Pressure” by Andrew Bayer, remixed by the man himself and Farius, the afore-mentioned contender but there’s also “Wasp” by Above & Beyond which has grown quite a lot on me since last week so you should definitely give that one a listen, too! Greg Downey has also been delivering with “Zenith,” and District5’s Dirty Mix by Technikal’s “Cubik” is great as well!
Anyway. Next week’s show is going to be on Tuesday because I will be on holiday starting Wednesday and I don’t feel like packing all the stuff I would need to play a show from there… not after the disaster of last time. 😂
Here’s the show in its completeness, to enjoy on your own time:
The next show will happen on Tuesday, June 20, at 🕖 19:00 CEST/UTC+2.
Third show with the new streaming machine and still not a single issue that isn’t user error. I think I can finally conclude that I did the right thing here. 🤗
Another thing that makes me absolutely happy is this week’s favourite track: Tamberos De Carnaval from Mark Sherry and Smith & Brown!
On totally unrelated news: Tinlicker’s version of Children appears to have lost its appeal and is located somewhere around place #73. All good things must come to an end!
You can listen to this good thing however often you want, though:
The next show will happen on Wednesday, April 26, at 🕖 19:00 CEST/UTC+2.
The new machine still does a tremendous job, both at streaming and allowing me to play games. I’m very happy with it!
I am also very happy with this week’s favourite track: 2009’s “Find Yourself” by John O’Callaghan and Sarah Howells, given a reimagining by nobody else but Bryan Kearney. Absolute banger!
What I’m not so happy with is our good old friend, the corona virus. It has moved back into my vicinity but so far I have been able to evade it… let’s just hope I’ll stay as lucky as I have been the last week!
Anyway, that’s it for this week; you can enjoy the show again right here:
The next show will happen on Wednesday, April 19, at 🕖 19:00 CEST/UTC+2.
Last week I finally decided to get me a dedicated Windows PC for streaming (and maybe a little gaming because of course around 99% of the games I own on Epic and Steam are not available for macOS). I tried to compare different things but nowadays there is simply too much choice, is that weird? You go on Amazon, enter some search term, get several hundred results, and everything has either no ratings at all, or it has both perfect and horrible ratings, with one them telling you “this is the best thing since sliced bread” and the other one telling you “it killed my dog and ran off with my girlfriend.” How the fuck am I supposed to make an informed decision here? Choice paralysis is real!
Anyway. I knew I didn’t want a full desktop system as I don’t want to waste a lot of space for something like that, and I wanted something that has a GPU inside that can do hardware encoding of AVC and HEVC (more commonly known as H.264 and H.265) because that’s what OBS will be doing. I found something on Amazon that didn’t look too bad, and I purposely did not look at any comments because screw them, but I did manage to find the name of the GPU used in it, and I also managed to find a humongous table on Wikipedia that apparently had every GPU that AMD has ever made in it, and that told me that something called “Video Core Next” was supported in version 2.2, and so I had to look in another table what that even means, and then the information wasn’t even in that table but in the paragraph before the table which informed me that all version of VCN >= 2.0 support hardware decoding and encoding of both AVC and HEVC (among others).
It is very cute 😍 and it has Windows 11 pre-installed. Not usually my thing but I’m trying to be a simple consumer here so I went with it: pre-installed Windows 11 it is. I installed OBS and a couple of other tools and gadgets, attached all the webcams and the peripherals and the monitor and imported my scene collection into OBS. Most of it worked immediately, a couple things (like some plugins) were missing but that was easy to fix. Within a few minutes OBS was happily chugging along, compositing multiple sources into a nice 1080p60 stream which is also flawlessly encoded and sent to Twitch without any hiccups. Looks like I have one thing less to worry about!
And then I looked through my collection of games for something I could install and try and found Control, a game from 2019 which sounded like it had an interesting story and because it was already four years old it probably wouldn’t look too bad, I hope.
I was right, it didn’t. It did the whole ray-tracing thing and that really mixed well with my 4k screen and physical desktop resolution and my 1366 x 768 internal rendering resolution. The best thing about this game is that it has an assist mode, allowing you to take and deal more damage, up to immortality and one-shot kills. This is perfect for me! I like playing games for their story, I don’t need enemies with ever-increasing strength, I don’t care about any “rewarding system” the developers have cooked up, I don’t really want to deal with enhanced combat tactics and crafting items to improve my weapons performance or some such shit, I want to live and enjoy the story! I never was the best in first-person shooters and let me tell you, my reaction time has not been improved by turning 47! I couldn’t even finish Half-Life 2 back then because the last boss fight was more than I could handle (and I’ve tried for about 15 fucking hours that I’ll never get back) and in the end I had to watch a fucking YouTube video to find out how the game ended like a fucking pleb! Is that what you want, video game developers?! 😡 Screw you, give me a god mode and I’m happy!
Anyway, I digress. So today I was working from home and I used the opportunity to perform a long-time test of the new machine’s streaming capabilities. I fired up OBS, and REAPER, and QLC+, set everything to how it’s supposed to be during a stream and started streaming (using Twitch’s bandwidth test mode which takes the stream but doesn’t publish it).
Long story short: after 10 hours of test-streaming, not a single problem was found, not a single frame was dropped, frame time was consistently below 1ms and the machine itself didn’t even get very hot. The light stuff didn’t miss a single beat (DMX needs constant output otherwise DMX-controlled lights will simply turn off) which was also new and way better than it was previously using macOS. All in all a successful test! ✅
So then tonight the only failure during the stream came not from OBS, or Windows, or the hardware it ran on but my internet connection. It decided to drop out for a minute or two and left me slightly panicked but in the end it came back quick enough for things to not be ruined. So, live test also successfully completed: ✅
And that finally brings us to tonight’s show. Last week’s second-favourite has actually made it to the favourite spot this week: Addicted to Love by Driftmoon!
The rest of show has been great as well and you can listen to it right here, right now:
The next show will happen on Wednesday, April 12, at 🕖 19:00 CEST/UTC+2.
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.
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.
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! 🥳🎉
