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.
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.
It wouldn’t be Lunch Trance if everything worked, right?
So, four days ago, on Wednesday, I arrived home from work and sat down to finish preparation of the show and to set up the streaming, i.e. start Windows, and… wait a minute. The MacBook doesn’t turn on.
Probably just an empty battery. For some reason, since I installed Windows on this machine, when you turn off it burns through battery as if it were running at full load, even when turned off. Like, completely turned off. There hasn’t been a Wednesday since I started streaming where the battery was not completely drained from being turned off for a week so I had to remember to start charging it early so that I wouldn’t have to start streaming on something like 5% battery.
Anyway, attached the power cable, waited a bit… and nothing happened. The MacBook stayed dark.
Okay, I still have to do all the other prep work, let it charge a bit. Switched to the other MacBook (which at this point is 9 years old, has never seen Windows, and when I put it in sleep mode I can wake it up after a week and it still has 98% battery left), finished the playlist, and transferred everything to the DJ console.
Tried to turn on the MacBook again… still nothing. Okay, this is highly unusual. Maybe the cable and/or the charger are not working correctly? Switched everything around, every other MacBook works fine with the charger, and every other charger does the same amount of nothing to the MacBook.
The internet is, as usual, incredibly helpful by suggesting a single thing but on 600 different sites. I tried to reset the SMC, and the PRAM, and the whatever, and the I-don’t-care but nothing I did could persuade the MacBook to come back to life.
Wednesday’s show was out of the window at this point, not only because I didn’t have a streaming machine but also because at this point I was so frustrated by all this bloody shit technology that I was ready to move to the woods and live off the land for the rest of my life.
But of course I didn’t do that, any quite predictably so. Instead, yesterday I sat down and started OBS on my main MacBook, and I put together a configuration that would not depend on rendering Shadertoy websites at 60 fps in Full HD. I downloaded a couple of videos for the background, I attached all the USB cameras to the machine, configured the Advanced Scene Switcher plugin to do even more remarkable things than so far, and even created some scenes for the end of the stream. OBS’s performance on a 2021 M1 MacBook is still horrible: it has trouble maintaining 30 fps when looping a video, and I had a consistent 5% frame loss due to rendering lag. The video encoder itself gave no trouble, though; it didn’t break a sweat, and it didn’t drop a single frame.
Anyway. While — once again — a rocky start (and only four days late!), the show did not turn out to be a complete disaster so I’ve got that going for me, which is nice, so jot that down. One thing that is still missing are the lights, and I hope I will have taken care of that before next Wednesday.
Next show is going to be next week, on Wednesday, November 23rd, at 🕖 19:00 CET/UTC+1.
Story time! I have this wonderful 32” 4k screen (Samsung U32Jsomething) but from the start it has been behaving slightly weird: sometimes it would go black and lose connection to the MacBook (resulting in resolution changes and stuff) and after a few seconds come back and pretend nothing happened. I bought it second-hand so I thought, “well, you get what you pay for” and ignored it because it didn’t happen very often, and usually right after waking the computer up so it was a part of the ritual and thus acceptable.
Last night, however, it started doing it way more often, and most importantly, every time I started an EVE Online client!
Unacceptable!
I spent the whole evening debugging; I tried swapping cables, USB hubs, computers, everything. In every combination that included the screen, the screen exhibited the faulty behaviour. I didn’t really expect anything else, seeing that it did this already with a different MacBook years ago and has been with me for longer than the USB hubs I have been using with it but, you know, hope dies last.
Anyway. A new screen has been ordered (like, actually new this time) and it will arrive on Friday, when I’m in home office, giving me time to install it properly. 😀
However, that whole episode took away most of the prep time for the show I had scheduled for yesterday evening so the final track selection was a bit rushed when I got home from work earlier. Luckily we only had 14 new entries this week, all of which I played. Take a listen!
Next show is going to be next week, on Wednesday, November 16th, at 🕖 19:00 CET/UTC+1.
