Wow, January has passed like a flash, that sure didn’t take long!
We had a new remix of a Rank 1 track that I have been looking forward to since I started prepping this show, we had a new single by Kenny Palmer, and some Sam Laxton to top it off. I enjoyed this show very much, and now you can, too:
The next show will happen on Wednesday, February 8, at 
19:00 CET/UTC+1.
The new year seems to have picked up the pace because this week we again had more than 20 new entries, and some of them I even liked, like, a lot!
Apart from that there’s not much news… the cats still have some kind of truce that gets punctuated by tiny skirmishes every now and then, even though Monty gets more approachable and cuddly every week. Soon it’s going to be a year that he’s with us…
Time flies! It does when you have cats and it also did for me during the show! The first time I looked at the clock to see how much longer I’d be playing I was already more than 2 hours in. That’s a good sign that I enjoyed myself, and I really hope that if you watched, you did too, and if you didn’t, that you will, once you listen to it. 
The next show will happen on Wednesday, February 1, at 19:00 CET/UTC+1.
The Heating is back on, since Thursday last week. It’s almost indescribable how good it feels to be able to take a shower with actual warm water!
Chart-wise the new year seems to have started: 22 new entries, including a remix of Careless Whisper. I did not expect to play Careless Whisper in my show. Ever. 
The next show will happen on Wednesday, January 25, at 19:00 CET/UTC+1.
Heating is still out. It’s not funny anymore!
The charts of this week were looking weird—there were only two new entries! And instead of the usual slew of new entries we had many re-entries that were last on the show weeks or even months ago… I’m guessing that’s because all those tracks are really good (they are!) and people have been hearing them again during the bombardment of all the end-of-the-year shows and decided to buy them. Great choice!
We also now have another version of Children, this time by Made of Light, and it’s pretty decent, too! (The Tinlicker version is still on #13 in the Beatport charts, though… unbelievable.)
But why am I talking about this when you can just listen to it?
The next show will happen on Wednesday, January 18, at 19:00 CET/UTC+1.
2023 has started and at least some things are off to a very bad start: heating and warm water is still out because the facility management company is waiting for the manufacturer of the heating system because apparently said heating system needs a password that nobody in the facility management company has. I bet it’s “admin.” They should have asked me!
As there was no Top of the Week show last week I decided to simply play all 50 tracks of today’s show; next week we will get back to enjoying a smaller selection!
The next show will happen on Wednesday, January 11, at 19:00 CET/UTC+1.
It’s finally time to bring this year’s Lunch Trance shows to an end, and what could be more appropriate than an End of the Year show, with the 100 best tracks of the year? And yes, this includes Children—which made it to #9!
It was great to hear many tracks again that I last played at the beginning of the year which, let’s be honest, is not that far ago and yet, many of the tracks felt like old acquaintances that I was happy to meet again…
So, without further ado, here’s the 100 best tracks from 2022:
The next and first show of 2023 will happen on Wednesday, January 4, at 19:00 CET/UTC+1.
The past week has been a cold one. On Monday last week the central heating in our building went out; on Tuesday we were notified that parts need to be ordered, and we were given electrical radiators. However, no warm water! 
The new parts arrived on Monday, on Tuesday they were installed and the heating went on and then off again. The game repeated on Wednesday: heating and warm water for a while and then again: nothing. We’ll see what tomorrow brings!
The show itself today was a bit of a blur… I had the feeling that I didn’t really hear most of the tracks I played which makes me a bit sad… 
However, I am also looking forward to next week! There will not be a regular Top of the Week show next week, instead I will be playing an End of the Year show, bringing your hours, hours, and hours of the best tracks of the year! 
In addition I will already start before noon (in my timezone) and will play until long after it’s dark outside, torturing my old body in the process but hopefully bringing joy to all of you.
Anyway, here’s this week’s episode:
So, as mentioned, the next show will happen on Wednesday, December 28, at 
11:00 CET/UTC+1. It will probably be between 7 and 8 hours so you should have ample time to catch it during the day. The next regular Top of the Week will happen on January 4, 2023, 19:00 CET/UTC+1, just as usual.
This week’s show started very slow… it took almost half an hour for the first viewer to arrive! An eerie silence wafted through the chat…
Contrasting the silence in chat I noticed that there were quite a number of bangers in today’s show. While that is bound to happen every now and then for some reason today it was more noticeable for me, and I really liked that!
The next show will happen on Wednesday, December 21, at 19:00 CET/UTC+1. It may be the last (regular) show of the year, starting next week I’ll have four weeks off of work and I’m probably gonna use the time to slack around like mad!
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.