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!

Yes, yes! That groove! That 🔴! 🥳

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: