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:
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 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.
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:
Enjoy!
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.
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19:00 CEST/UTC+2.
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!
Screw you, give me a god mode and I’m happy!
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.
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, 