After yet again a way too long period of no show making, I decided I couldn’t end my vacation without making one, so I tried to gather up some nice tunes to be able to entertain you for a couple of hours. I didn’t know what direction this show would take, hence the odd name.
The biggest hurdle for me when it comes to making shows is to find a suitable time to do so. I have a big family but not any room to have a permanently set up broadcasting rig, which means that I’ll have to find time when one of the kids are away so I can borrow a room to do so. This also means that my setup kind of differs from time to time, since I haven’t really found the optimal one yet, but I’m getting closer to find a good one.
Since I use a MacBook Pro as my machine of choice, I also can use the excellent product line from Rogue Amoeba. Their tools are in some ways a bit limiting, but they tend to do most of the tricks I need. You can watch my current toolchain used in Audio Hijack in the image below. The block called ‘SceneSat Audio’ takes care of the audio stream and sends it to our main relay. The ‘SceneSat Video’ block makes a little bit of magic with the audio stream and creates a video stream out of it all, which is sent to our video server and then can be republished quite automagically to other streaming platforms such as Facebook, Twitch and YouTube. I chose to only republish this particular show to Facebook, because it was hard enough to follow the action both there and on IRC. I didn’t have the time to do a proper soundcheck either, but it turned out pretty decent in the end anyhoo.
I had also planned to have a guest on air, so I routed in Skype as well, but haven’t really tested that functionality yet. That would probably be a good thing to do before the next show. In that sense, I guess I was lucky that my guest couldn’t make it, so I have some more time to test it before the next show. 😛
Overall, Audio Hijack is really working well, but the biggest issue I have with it right now is that I can’t apply a hardware toggle for the mic on/off and need to have the window open and flip that ‘Input Switch’ button whenever I want to talk or keep quiet. Not optimal, but it works.
Earlier, I’ve used Traktor Pro from Native Instruments, but that really is a bit overkill since I never do any real DJ:ing with beatmatching and other fancy-schmancy things. I’m more of a “press a button”-styled DJ, so I want something that is a lot simpler but still give me flexibility. Thankfully, Rogue Amoeba comes to the rescue with this as well, in the form of their relatively new program called Farrago. It basically is a soundboard with short-commands to trigger the different sounds/tunes.
One really nice feature of it is that you have by default two volume levels that can be assigned to the tracks. This way, it’s easy to set up a bunch of tracks for background play when I talk. This could also be a bad thing since the level I chose for them is 40%, which means that I sometimes forget to pause when starting to play an actual track. That happened during this show, but I don’t think anyone noticed it, so I guess it wasn’t that bad. 😉
It’s a neat little tool that really helps controlling the show pretty well, especially since it’s stable enough to handle when I drag in new tracks even when already playing a track. This of course happens in my shows, since I rarely plan ahead more than possibly 3-4 tracks and rely quite heavily on your requests, or my spur-of-the-moment inspiration… 😉
To summarize this post, I must underline the fact that if I had the possibility to do so, I’d make way more shows. Sadly, real life manages to make it quite hard to solve right now. However, now that the setup is getting more and more streamlined each time I do a show, I can set it up and tear it down a lot quicker, so the overhead surrounding a show might be less daunting, which could lead to me making more shows. No promises made, just my own wishes and plans, though. 🙂
Anyhoo, I hope you enjoyed the show and the extremely random music selection and I promise to try harder when it comes to making more shows in the not too distant future. Until then, take a listen to the other shows that happens to occur occasionally on SceneSat.
