Things are hectic here. Lull in the battle at the moment so taking a minute to update for posterity. :-P

We sold the Haus! Wrapping up the last details today, hopefully, then we will be paid out and done. The folks moving in are starting a family and I think the Haus will serve them well. Some last-minute fixes notwithstanding, the place looks great and cozy, for being such a large house.

We are currently living the bright life in a nice apartment overlooking everything downtown. Much smaller space than we left, but we (including the cats) seem to be happy with it. I should use the jaccuzi more but otherwise it's nice. We had to move across the hall to a slightly smaller apartment but it's still pretty swanky.

Got my laptop back from Dell. They replaced the mobo, gpu, and various other hardware bits, as well as a brand new shell and keyboard free of scratches and chips. Great timing as well, since the warranty expires in January! Also, they won't extend the full warranty given the age of the laptop, so it's a great new start with fresh hardware as we move out of coverage.

Been good to have the newer machine back. I absolutely adore my old Alienware M14 R4 but now that Nvidia deprecated the GPU, it's harder to do anything in Windows. (Linux has a more recent driver than Windows for it but still.) It was good to learn more of the moving parts behind OBS and streaming in general, and to trim the fat off of some of my scenes and such.

Thinking about evolving my presentation a little as well. I would like to be able to give more focus to the artists I play individually. Other streamers have used various tools to do so, and I'm gratefully not totally reinventing the wheel there. SO MUCH GOOD NEW MUSIC. Easier to weed out problematic artists right out the box. For the record, y'all can play what you like, it's your show and your time. I personally am motivated not to give free attention and advertising to assholes. But at the end of the day DJing is its own artistic method with its own expression. I wish well for anyone bringing music to folks. Just don't be a dick.

My newer laptop is in the shop. That's fine because its super awesome warranty expires in January. So getting some last minute touch ups and problems fixed. However, that relegates me to my old faithful, Alienware M14.

Here's the happy fun times stuff: that model uses the Nvidia GT 750M video adapter. That chip has been deprecated in the newest version of the Nvidia drivers, and thus OBS as well. With modern OBS I can no longer use my GPU on this laptop for compressing RTMP streams. (Never trust asshats in the comments who say "just update your drivers....")

After a LOT of time trying to figure this out, I finally came to this as a solution. Since I'm using Windows 10 on this laptop, I had to install the Nvidia 425.31 drivers. AFAIK, that's the last driver set to support the Kepler chip in the GT 750M. I also had to download FFMPEG 4 shared build zip from the Gyan archives. From there, I replaced the DLLs from the ffmpeg build to the OBS 64bit folder. Now OBS 27 is willing to place nice with my old GPU.

Just posting this here for reference.

Opted for completely uninstalling and reinstalling a fresh OBS. I also installed the StreamUp plugin, which is kinda rad, and also reenables my Scene Folders. Really helpful for how I organize my scenes and sources. (I often find it helpful to do scene-as-source so I can put filters on my cam and easily transition between the effects.)

Music provided by twitch.tv/swu_bunker, ALWAYS an amazing stream from them.

Streaming from Temphaus has been okay. There's a bit of connectivity hiccups occasionally, particularly since I can't connect with a hardline. I'm using Beam (beamstream.gg) to multicast to Twitch, Kick and now LFG.TV with a "local" stream hosted at Beam itself.

What's the point of multicasting? Options.

Twitch covers our music licensing for streaming. But at affiliate level they take about 50% of sub revenue, and then chop about 20% out of that for the licensing. Truth be told, it's STILL cheaper than if I got myself a blanket music licensing setup for streaming under my own name. There are songs and artists we aren't allowed to play but that's always been the way with music streaming and online DJing.

Kick is still a rogue platform. They give a 95% cut of subs to the streamer, but there's no "walk-in" traffic for DJs to grow there.

Beam is a newer platform and has a positive vibe to it. They have some good ideas but again, unsure how the music licensing will play out there. IIRC they offer an 80% split on subs.

LFG.TV is the new kid on the block. Still lots of info to be gathered about them but they are specifically for DJs. There's some hope there.

I think I'm going to be doing back-to-back with Whimsical Blasphemy on Sunday afternoon / evenings on Kick! More info soon.

Multicasting has been going well enough using Beamstream to split the stream to Twitch and Kick. I finally got things set up where I can see all three chats at the same time easily. But I have been wanting to do platform-exclusive streams as well.

Go give Whim a follow at https://kick.com/whimsicalblasphemy today!

Yeah, I know, everyone has a shitty attitude when you try talking about it. But I got it to work.

My primary laptop (Windows 11) bricked on me. While it's in the shop, I'm using my old laptop (Linux Mint). So I installed Lutris, updated the Vulkan stuff for Linux, made sure my driver supports my Kepler Nvidia chipset, and installed VDJ in Lutris. Took a little bit of tweaking but nothing major, if you're good at hunting down error solutions it was NOT difficult or arcane. It seems to run fairly stable.

I had to manually map my DJ2GO2 Touch USB controller. Which hilariously required me to install Windows 10 on a Virtualbox in Linux so I could download the map XML from VDJ. Back outside the virtualbox, I opened VDJ with Lutris and manually built a new map. (USB channel names don't seem to get interpreted the same way in Linux vs. Windows, so the regular map wouldn't work.)

The DDJ-400 still needs to be manually mapped and I'm not really looking forward to it. But once it's done I will put links somewhere so people don't have to reinvent that wheel.

Installed OBS 30 as the latest version depricates the Kepler NVENC stuff (I blame Nvidia, not OBS). The old Alienware laptop has a Geforce 750 mobile card so I had to run an older driver than I'd like. The new Vulkan stuff doesn't work with Kepler chips, so had to run the 470 version. Once I got everything settled, I was able to do a window grab of the VDJ video output in OBS, route the audio out properly and it looks good. Stress testing to come tonight.

Twitch and Kick streams you can find me hanging out in:

• twitch.tv/djart3misia
• twitch.tv/viktornovatron
• twitch.tv/opheliadarkly
• twitch.tv/joevirus
• twitch.tv/thenewordermelb
• twitch.tv/djrecoveryrate
• twitch.tv/djellafine
• twitch.tv/spy_hapa
• twitch.tv/radiointhew00ds
• twitch.tv/mxoread

I'll update this list soon, it's all people I regularly tune into. Good company and music.

Socials:

• https://mp3j-sark-shop.fourthwall.com
• https://mstdn.party/@mp3jsark
• https://bsky.app/profile/mp3jsark.bsky.social
• https://pixelfed.social/mp3j_sark
• https://mewe.com/mp3j_sark.44

Streaming Platforms:

• https://www.twitch.tv/mp3j_sark
• https://kick.com/mp3j_sark
• https://beamstream.gg/mp3j_sark/profile