Last week my back decided to cancel the show for me, so this week there was another Double Feature! Oh, wait, that means I get to pick two Favourites of the Week! I’m lovin’ it! ❤️
As usual, there was a whole bunch of great tracks in today’s show! I already loved the opener, Jardin’s “Another World,” and the second track, “Tears of the Kingdom” by Alex Sonata & TheRio, Giuseppe Ottaviani, and Tishmal was also very lovely! Later on we had new tracks by David Broaders (“Pink Clouding,” remixed by Suncatcher & Exolight), Maarten de Jong (“Babylon”), Elle Mariachi and Nicholson (“Unstoppable (Winner)”), Allen Watts & Driftmoon (“Power of the Universe”), Modeā & Victor Ruiz (“Contrast”), John Askew (“Afterburner”), Andrea Ribeca (“Into the Future”), Ralphie B (“Massive,” remixed by Alchimyst), and Paul Denton (“Siren”), but there were many more great tracks and it feels kinda silly to list them all? 😜
Alright, so, Favourite of the Week™, yes. For last week, it’s gotta be this track:
And for this week I pick:
Absolute bangers all around! I’d say it’s high time for you to finally listen for yourself:
I’ll be back next week, October 25, at 19:00 CEST+2!
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!
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!
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!
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:
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! 😄
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.
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.
