It’s something new every week, isn’t it? Last week it was QLC+, this week Audinate’s Dante Virtual Soundcard has been messing up. Restarted everything, twice even, unplugged cables, replugged them, multiple times, and at some random point that differed in no observable way from any other point in time it suddenly started to work. At least it managed to stay running for the rest of the show (unlike QLC+ which had to be restarted during the show! The bastard).
Anyway, music! Yes. We had music today! Lots of. Much wow!
Okay, for realsies, though. Which track have I chosen to be Favourite of the Week today? Why, this gem by Photographer, of course: Subway.
But this show had a lot of other great tracks by other artists as well, such as Greg Downey, Above & Beyond (of course), Kenny Palmer, Andrew Bayer & Audrey Brazelle, and many more!
The next show will happen on Wednesday, May 10, at 🕖 19:00 CEST/UTC+2.
Oh boy, the first issues finally appear but they are not where I thought they would be: today it was QLC+’s turn to unbehave. It simply terminated itself at some point, no dialogs, no visible errors, no nothing, just a disappearing window and missing lights. One would assume that I would notice that faster but apparently it takes a while to realize!
Another—unfortunately expected—disappointment was another remix of Ben Nicky’s & Distorted Dreams’ “We Come 1,” this time by Trey Pearce. The chat and me were quick to agree, Trey didn’t add anything of value, this song is still a train wreck that needs to be taken out back and shot into the sun.
However, I expected one track to be absolutely delightful and it did not disappoint: Above & Beyond’s new track “Angry JP8” and it is, of course, the Favourite of the Week.
You don’t have to take my word for anything, though, just listen to the show yourself!
The next show will happen on Wednesday, May 3, 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.
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:
Enjoy!
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. ❤️
Enjoy!
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. 😄
Enjoy!
The next show will happen on Wednesday, January 25, at 🕖 19:00 CET/UTC+1.
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?
Enjoy!
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!
Enjoy!
The next show will happen on Wednesday, January 11, at 🕖 19:00 CET/UTC+1.
