Happy New Year from the Beanpot!

It is now 2024 and we did get off to a pretty rough start. I suspect this is a familiar story for many of you.

I had every intension of doing a couple of live shows going into the holiday break, but a virus ripping through the house as well as the extended family had other plans for us. Suffice to say, when I started feeling better, others started experiencing symptoms, so I couldn’t exactly start pounding the bass in the house while we all convalesced. The goal for the week quickly became one of relaxing, eating well and staying away from the sauce.

Things are looking up now. We are all feeling better so it is time to start planning the events we couldn’t deliver over the holidays. There has been a growing interest in a Yacht Rock, Soft and Classic Rock sesh. If timed right, we hope to have a larger-than-usual audience. Of course, I’m chomping at the bit to do another House set. I have about a month’s worth of downloads to review to see what slaps.

What has proved to be a very positive development is the use of vMix as an OBS alternative. I wrote about this in a previous post here. Still, this doesn’t solve all problems, especially when streaming on Mixcloud on Saturday nights as this is a very popular time slot, and my experience tells me Mixcloud’s CDN isn’t quite up to the task. After a lot of stress-testing and experimentation, I think I have a solution!

The plan moving forward is to simulcast the events on both Mixcloud and Twitch. Beanpot Studios definitely has the bandwidth for this. Not only will this provide me with a real-time comparison of the two streaming services, but I will be able to reach a larger audience, drive traffic to Mixcloud where the artists get paid, or drive traffic to Twitch if Mixcloud continues to have issues. In cases of the latter, I will also record the stream locally. If Mixcloud dumps out too much, we won’t need to rely on their recording, and instead extract the audio from my own recording to later upload to Mixcloud. This promises to provide a more consistent listener experience, allowing me to publish more shows. The best part? I’ll be able to preserve the video from each show for later use!

Another cool development is the use of AI. I primarily use this to create the art for each show. You can see various examples at the top of each recent post here on DJM1K.com, and at the top of this article. This is a truly exciting technology that I plan to start using for crate curation as well. At this stage I’m leveraging Microsoft’s implementation of ChatGPT and Image Creator. These are both built into the Edge browser now and can be quite fun to play with.

In closing, I can say there is a lot in store for ’24. Keep an eye out here, follow me on Mixcloud (djm1k), Facebook (djm1k), Insta (djm1kmixcloud) and Twitch (djm1kmixcloud) for info on upcoming streams.

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