Today’s show was very quiet. The chat was mostly empty, everybody was lurking, and it was all good.
The tunes, however… oh my, the tunes! , I’m tellin’ ya!
So many banging tunes but only one gets to be the Favourite of the Week! It was not an easy choice, let me tell you… Greg Oakland? Hel:Sløwed? Driftmoon? Ben Gold & Maarten de Jong?
It’s tough to pick a single artist so I simply picked four! Please, enjoy the Favourite of the Week: “Breathing” by Boom Jinx, Einar K, Nitrous Oxide, and Vintage & Morelli!
For the rest of the wonderful tunes, click some button in the thingy below!
I have been playing a lot of Death Stranding this past week and I really had to tear myself away from it in order to prep this show but all is well that ends well, I have heard!
Once again, I had a hard time picking a Favourite of the Week; we had many cool tracks, by Above & Beyond, Chris Element, Daxson, Sean Tyas, John Askew, Giuseppe Ottaviani, and so many more… in the end, I decided on this track by Peetu S: Mental Component!
Give a listen to all the other tracks I played, right here from your browser window!
The next show will happen on Wednesday, May 31, at 19:00 CEST/UTC+2.
This week saw a whole bunch of new tracks which in turn required a longer show to play; and in the almost three hours there were quite some contenders for the Favourite of the Week but of course, then can be only one…
And it’s this one! The Genix remix of “No Silence” by Andrew Bayer and Vok; what a lovely tune!
The rest of the show doesn’t have to hide, either. Check it out right here:
The next show will happen on Wednesday, May 24, at 19:00 CEST/UTC+2.
Something, something, life, curveballs. Last week a friend of mine died and of course it’s only now that I realize the tremendous impact he had on my life and the life of everybody around him… it’s gonna take a while to process all of it.
Picking a new Favourite of the Week was not an easy task, either. There were many good tracks in today’s show but there can only be one Favourite of the Week, right? Exactly. So, for this week I picked this wonderful track: “Meant to Be” by Foster & Nourey, remixed by Jaytech.
There were many other great tracks, though, and you should definitely listen to them all yourself. Right here. Do it. Now. Thank you.
Also, if you have people in your life that you like, tell them about it. Don’t wait too long or you suddenly won’t be able to anymore…
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.
Last show of March, and that also means last show of the first quarter of 2023. Yes, a whopping 25% of this year is already over. If you were planning to do anything specific this year, now would be the time to get your preparations well underway!
And that brings us, in a nice non-sequitur way, directly to the favourite track of this week. It’s this gem by Ronski Speed and Lucy Saunders, remixed by Ferry Tayle:
An honorable mention and a close second in my favouriteness (favourity? Favourationality?) was Addicted to Love by Driftmoon. Maybe it will be undisputed next week!
It may come as no surprise to you but I highly recommend listening to this week’s show again. Luckily modern technology allows you to do this completely at your own leisure.
The next show will happen on Wednesday, April 5, at 19:00 CET/UTC+2.
, I’m tellin’ ya!
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!
