So it looks like I temporarily broke things. Note to self – when messing with .htaccess, make sure you put it back when you’re done!
Anyway, while I’m here I might as well ramble about stuff.
It’s hot – very hot. Maybe not quite as hot as it is in a few other places in the country, but since I’m not there, I’m here, I don’t really care ;)
The last couple of months have kind of been a bit of a roller-coaster, both insanely busy and stressful, with a couple of calm weeks in the middle, before diving in to it again.
There have been one or two eventualities in the last week that have had a huge impact on me – very much for the better. But I’m not really going to talk about it here because with some things you just need to kind of ride the wave and see where it takes you before drawing any conclusions.
In random randomness, at about 3am this morning (don’t ask) I managed to set up live streaming from my music computer to the world. Why would I do that? Because I CAN! And all sorts of odd notions tend to occur to me when I’ve been up more than 20 hours after only four hours sleep the night before ;)
I originally tried using Darwin Streaming Server, but whilst the server side was really easy to set up, I couldn’t find a Windows based broadcast source application that I could figure out. I also wasn’t very happy with the codecs provided by the tool I had the most luck with: RAT. It was requiring 512kbps upstream bandwidth to stream a single stereo source. Definitely far from ideal, especially since I’m on 1500/256 ADSL.
So I turned to IceCast. It turns out that I’d already installed the Icecast server on my host anyway, so all it took was a bit of fiddling with the config file, and I had that side sorted. For the stream source, I used OddCast standalone, which Just Worked[tm], and was almost immediately streaming away high quality low bandwidth vorbis streams to the server.
I then spent an hour or so playing music to the person who had been responsible for me being up that late in the first place :)
It was a very strange feeling playing in my music room, and knowing that someone on the other side of the world was listening to me – it was kind of unsettling, but rather exhilarating at the same time. I think part of it was the fact that I knew I had an audience, but was not able to see or hear them to gauge reactions. It’d be like going on stage blindfolded or something…..
I’m not entirely sure what I’ll actually use it for, but it’s a technology that has always intrigued me with its possibilities, particularly for Cumulo-Nimbus – and it just occurred to me as I’m typing this that there’s potential uses for Conflux too.
One of the musical uses I’ve considered, is broadcasting my Tuesday night music making sessions – so that people can tune in and hear the whole process. It’s probably not the most thrilling thing to listen to, but I think it’s an idea worth playing with. Doing something similar for Cumulo-Nimbus when Nick comes round is also an idea – as is staging live concerts.
To do the “listen to me/us record music” idea I’d need to set things up slightly differently though. Currently I run OddCast straight on my music computer, and capture the “What U Hear” output of the sound card. That gets absolutely everything, and is pretty much exactly what I hear in my headphones, or through the monitors. But the trouble with that is that is that when recording any external audio except guitar (which is recorded directly from the POD via USB and bypasses the soundcard entirely) I need to use the “Auxiliary 2″ output. So I’d have to use another computer to do the streaming.
There’s also another consideration – exactly what would I broadcast? Do I just take the audio straight off the mixer? I don’t think that would be very interesting – or do I set up another microphone to capture the room noise as well? How do I mix between the two? Do I try to offer two different streams and let the listener alternate between them? And of course the big one – is it worth doing at all?
However, all those questions aside – I have actually already recorded a piece with an audience. The same victim as last night got the dubious pleasure of listening to me record a piece from scratch this afternoon. She assures me she enjoyed it, but I suspect she was just being polite ;)
I’ll post the resulting piece once I’ve cleaned it up a bit. It’s short – another one less than 2 minutes, but it also only took 30 minutes to do, and was very spur-of-the-moment.
In related stuff, I’m thinking of renaming my Tuesday night music stuff to simply “Mabinogi’s Music” and adding in any other random stuff I do – like today’s effort for example.
Anyway, that’s enough rambling for now – oooh, hang on – one more thing.
On top of the incentive trip in a couple of weeks, I’m now being sent on some training in the USA immediately after Berlin. I’ll be flying pretty much straight from Germany to Chicago, spending a few days there, then going to Dayton, Ohio, before leaving via LA.
So I will be flying literally around the world in the first half of February – for some reason that impresses me more than the destinations themselves at the moment. Maybe I’m just easily amused ;)
Ok, now I’m really done rambling!