Category Archives: Story Time

Lunch Trance – 2023-10-03 – Newsflash

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This week’s show was two shows in one, a Double Feature! As I was on vacation last week (and it was glorious), and as we have a company-wide audit on Wednesday and Thursday (with no telling how long I have to stay in the evening), and as there is a national holiday today, I decided to pack up all those tunes into a nice, extra-long show! And because I didn’t want to clash with lug00ber’s Tueday show I started right at lunch! Finally, after all this time, we had some decent Lunch Trance again! 🥳

And other people noticed it as well! The Panda™ himself, liquid_bongo, raided me and brought about 50 viewers! Thanks, mate, it’s really been a long time since we were playing at around the same time! ❤️

Of course, the only one unwilling to play would be the Windows machine. It lost its network connection once (but managed to bounce back) and then it decided to spontaneously reboot. I might take a look at the Event Viewer later to see if I can find anything that maybe I can change to stop it from doing that.

Okay, so, two week’s worth of show, all rolled into one. Does that mean I finally get to pick two Favourites of the Week? I have decided that yes, it does. 😀

And there were a whole bunch of nice tracks in there! Aaron Hibell brought us “Destroyer of Worlds,” Metta & Glyde contributed “Celestia” to the show, and BiXX and Natalie Gioia smashed it out of the park with “Beautiful Chaos,” and there was a new Maddix remix by an Armin van Buuren track, there was a new John Askew, and a John O’Callaghan, and Maarten de Jong, and Allen Watts… okay, apparently, picking two tracks is not easier than picking one! 😂

Anyway! So, last week’s Favourite of the week would be this one: “For All Time,” the Suanda 400 Anthem by Roman Messer! ❤️

And for this week I’m picking this one: Modeā and Victor Ruiz with “Contrast.” What a banger!

So, there will not be a show tomorrow but I will be back next week, on the regular day, which is the Wednesday, at the regular time, which is 19:00 CEST/UTC+2. And until then you can listen to the recording!

Download and Playlist →

Lunch Trance – 2023-09-20 – Newsflash

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Oh boy, rarely have I been so excited to play a show as I have been this week, after having finished the excruciating work on my overlay tool in order to bring you a new feature: cover art! 🥳

I used to type artist and title information by hand but now that cover art URLs have joined the fray, that is growing to be quite impractical; those URLs are long and unwieldy. I created a “crate” section in my admin interface where I could import all the records I plan to play (e.g. a JSON snippet generated by my chart generation tool) which would then allow me with the push of a button to transfer the data over to the text fields that are used to send the data to the backend, updating the overlay. I have to report that this worked flawlessly and without a single issue, except for my muscle memory… you see, I had to change the layout a bit to make it fit on the screen I’m using while playing and now everything is in the wrong location… 😄

However, absolutely in the right location was mayor — after his raid! Thank you very much, mate, and it was a pity that we didn’t get to meet in Bremen at Nordlicht!

So, let’s see what I have picked as Favourite of the Week tonight… last week’s Favourite was still a banger this week and we have a couple of new tracks entering the race! There was “Beachbreeze (Remember the Summer)” by Jan Johnston, Svenson & Gielen, remixed by David Forbes, and a new track by 0Gravity and Lucas Deyong named “Kamehameha,” and then there was “A Moment of Melancholy” by HIGHLANDR and remixed by Cold Blue, and there was Emma Hewitt’s and Roman Messer’s “Fallen” which I still like very much, and you can already see this isn’t easy, and then there was also “Rapture” by Asteroid (which I already mentioned last week), but I think this week’s Favourite of the Week absolutely has to be this track by Hel:sløwed and Amber Revival: “If You Only Knew.”

Luckily I pressed the 🔴 button about 10 seconds before the show started so you can now enjoy the show again right here. And be sure to make it last because there won’t be a show next week (as I will be on vacation) but maybe I’ll squeeze in an extra show when I’m back because there’s a national holiday coming up on October 3rd. Let’s see!

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Lunch Trance – 2023-08-30 – Newsflash

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Yes, yes! That groove! That 🔴! 🥳

So, yes, today you will once again be able to verify all my claims about how good the songs were! And indeed we had a couple of nice tracks again, including a new Bedford™! ❤️ Oops, did I just give away the Favourite of the Week?

Other tracks I liked that you should most definitely check out are “Reinvigorate” by Jon Mangan, “Are You Not Entertained?” by B.E.A.R and Bryn Whiting, Allen Watts’s “Spectral” was also almost incredibly good, as was “Blitzar” by NrgMind, and then I also liked Mike Van Fabio’s “Entity.” However – and let’s be honest here — nothing beats The Bedford™, especially not when teamed up with Roman Messer and remixed by Alex M.O.R.P.H. ❤️

In other news (and rants) I started working on my OBS overlay tool again, and while JavaScript (well, its ecosystem mostly) is still driving me nuts, I have a number of ideas that I will be working on in the next weeks, I think… some things will make my life easier, and something will make your experience a bit better, I hope. But, we’ll see!

I’m also thinking about what to do with the show at the end of September that I’m not going to be able to play (because I’ll be on vacation again)… there’s a national holiday following my vacation and if the weather is nice, who knows, maybe I’ll take the new setup outside? I guess the weather will have a rather large say in this… 😄

Anyway, the next show is going to be next week, on Wednesday, the 6th of September, at 19:00 CEST! Don’t miss it!

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Lunch Trance – 2023-08-23 – Newsflash

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So… as I’m getting more and more into the groove of setting things up, some old habits are creeping back in: I have once again forgotten to hit that 🔴 button! 😥

Which means that I can only tell you about the nice tracks I have played for you today and you have (almost) no way of making sure I’m actually telling the truth! 😄

The only way to verify the niceness of all the tracks I played is now the playlist, and while the setup and the show itself ran flawlessly (well, almost, the Browser source for the overlay froze once — it has never done that before), the real kicker came after the show when I wanted to prepare this blog post: somebody over at nushell.sh decided that the “html” output formatter was now considered an “extra” feature that had to be enabled during the build and the Homebrew people are apparently not considering these extra features worthy of their energy so I suddenly found myself unable to create the playlist table! My initial reaction was 😠, followed by 😡, and then I simply went to bed. This morning I whipped up 10 lines of shell script that will probably do that job from now on… or maybe I’ll integrate it into my playlist export? 🤔 I’ll figure something out!

Anyway. This week’s Favourite of the Week was already with us last week — and it was already mentioned as a contender for the Favourite of the Week — and as none of the new tracks made a comparable impression on me this week, I still get to pick it! This week’s Favourite of the Week, dear listeners and readers: Andrew Beyer, Gabriel & Dresden, and Sub Teal’s “Other Eye!” ❤️

Unfortunately you cannot download the show anywhere but you may take a peek at the playlist:

OffsetArtistTrack
00:00:00SolarstoneSeven Cities (DIM3NSION & DJ Nano Remix)
00:06:16D.O.DSo Much in Love (Armin van Buuren Remix)
00:10:17Ilan Bluestone, Oliver SmithBlue Eagle
00:14:44Andrew Beyer, Gabriel & Dresden, Sub TealOther Eye
00:20:18Energy 52Cafe Del Mar (Cosmic Boys Remix)
00:24:37Chakra, The Space BrothersI Am (atDusk Remix)
00:29:10Jean Luc, Nick JayAyla 2023
00:31:47Ben GoldLlévame A La Playa (Ciaran McAuley Remix)
00:36:33James DymondLayan Bay
00:42:19Tony De VitThe Dawn (Mark Sherry Remix)
00:48:20Armin van BuurenSpace Case
00:52:16Cold BluePath Control
00:58:19DriftmoonFeel the Waves
01:02:27Allen WattsSpectral
01:06:48Dash Berlin, DubVision, Emma HewittTime After Time (Ashley Wallbridge Remix)
01:08:48LostlyThat Next Place
01:12:31Mark SherryTriquetra (Peetu S Remix)
01:17:19Tony De VitDon’t Ever Stop (BK Remix)
01:22:21Stoneface & TerminalAccess
01:26:10DJ Sakin, Talla 2XLCNomansland (David’s Song)
01:31:00Tom ExoBright Star
01:35:35Pete DeleteSapo (Find the Frog)
01:40:01Craig ConnellyNathan’s Song
01:46:12AsteroidFlow State
01:51:43Falling Off Maps, Simon PattersonThe Neon Cross
01:56:28Ana Criado, Raz NitzanMeet Again (Ferry Tayle Mix)
02:00:49LostlyAs You Leave
02:04:26Marty Cassidy, Renegade SystemBuck Wine
02:08:07Andy NewtzWhen It’s Time
02:12:45B-Stylezz, Le ShuukKonje
02:15:41Paul DentonCurtain Twitcher
02:19:16ZahzahAdonis

Lunch Trance – 2023-07-19 – Newsflash

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Will there ever be a week again where all setting up for this show is completely, 100% uneventful? I really hope there will be because I’m not sure how much more of this stress I can handle…

But I really should start from the beginning. I have small collection of shell and Python scripts that collect HTML, extract JSON from it, and convert that to CSV. This collection is situated on my server, and runs several times a day.

On my workstation at home I have a project with the chart generator tool and it needs the JSON data generated by the script collection. For easier handling, I rsync all the data files from the server to my workstation when I want to generate the charts for a new week.

So, on monday I rsync’ed all the files, ran the tool, and was met with an exception. A short investigation yielded the result that the JSON file had a length of 0 bytes. Well, that’s no good!

I took a look at the accompanying HTML file and it was full of data… and it looked different, like, structurally. It finally happened, Beatport changed their website! (On a sidenote: the website now is actually usable, before you had to wait forever for pages to load but now it’s way faster than that!)

The script that extracted the JSON lived on the server so I hopped over there and changed the script to match the new format of the HTML. It’s way easier to work with now! Easy change.

I had to change a whole bunch of files, though, so I whipped up a bit of shell:

for h in *.html; do
  j="${h/html/json}"
  ./extract-json-from-html.py < "$j" > "$h"
done

This script will extract JSON data from an empty JSON file and write the results (which will be empty) to the HTML file.

Sounds wrong? That’s because it is wrong. It is even maximally wrong, the kind of wrong where you not only waste time and other resources but also lose the possibility to fix your mistakes because you mangled/deleted your source files.

I didn’t notice, though. I fired up the rsync script on my workstation, restarted my chart generator and was expecting different results — but… nope. The JSON was still empty. What?

Oh… oh, I see. Fuck.

FUCK.

“Fuck.” – Geralt of Rivia

Not only did I manage to delete the HTML files on the server, no, I went right ahead and removed them from my workstation as well! 🤦

I was angry and frustrated after that and had to step away from the computer so instead of shredding everything that uses electricity I went to have some dinner. During dinner not only did I feed my body, but apparently also my mind. “Hmm, didn’t I add a new disk to my NAS a couple of weeks ago? Yes, I believe I did!”

How is that relevant? Well, you see, the NAS is where Time Machine makes its backups to. And before I added the new disk the space on the NAS was full and I couldn’t make any backups but since I added the new disk I can finally make backups again! (You really, really should have backups.)

The directory where I rsync’ed the files to regularly was also being backed up so at this point it was a breeze to go back to earlier in the day and restore all the HTML files, saving the day and the show. I regenerated the JSON files, changed the chart generator to parse its data from the new JSON structure, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Phew, what a story! Anyway, Favourite of the Week? Easy! Time Machine! ❤️ Oh, I have to pick a track? Oh well, Nhato it is, then… 😁

The rest of the Nhato EP is also still in there, and it’s all in one single, easy-to-listen-to block! 😄

Playlist and Download →

Lunch Trance – 2023-07-05 – Newsflash

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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! 😀

Playlist and Download →

Lunch Trance – 2023-06-28 – Newsflash

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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:

Playlist and Download →

Lunch Trance – 2023-06-20 – Newsflash

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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!

Playlist →

Lunch Trance – 2023-06-14 – Newsflash

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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.

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Lunch Trance – 2023-05-24 – Newsflash

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I have been playing a lot of Death Stranding this past week and I really had to tear myself away from it in order to prep this show but all is well that ends well, I have heard!

Once again, I had a hard time picking a Favourite of the Week; we had many cool tracks, by Above & Beyond, Chris Element, Daxson, Sean Tyas, John Askew, Giuseppe Ottaviani, and so many more… in the end, I decided on this track by Peetu S: Mental Component!

Give a listen to all the other tracks I played, right here from your browser window!

The next show will happen on Wednesday, May 31, at 🕖 19:00 CEST/UTC+2.

Download and Playlist →