This thing still on?

 

Tonight was Maht's FIFTEEN YEAR anniversary as a DJ at the Velvet. 

A  Mahtiversary, if you will. 

So everyone wore boxes with his face on them. 

 

Here's to the guy who kept the lights on. Keep up the good work.  ::::-)

A little technical support

I’m putting this together because it made me crazy for a week and now that I’ve fixed it, I feel I should share this with others.

I use SAM to broadcast my Friday set at the Velvet. Recently, I had to do a system restore and after installing SAM, I could not get a encoder programmed more than 24 lousy KB/S, mono.

That makes for a really poor quality show. I uninstalled and reinstalled to no avail. Tried importing LAME and other mp3 dll’s, but that didn’t do any good.

But then, there’s this wacky setting:

See, my backup broadcasting program is an old copy of Winamp with the DSP plugin, so maybe I should be looking at the DSP on this.

Hurrdurrdurrr...the dsp_sps.dll was unchecked. Once that was in place, I was able to program the encoder correctly for broadcast at the quality I wanted.

Lemme just say, I could not find this advice anywhere online, so I’m posting it for anyone who’s had the same issue. I felt like a dope for not seeing it earlier, but it’s buried in settings I generally don’t dick with. You can see there’s still an error for the dsp_sc.dll, so no idea what’s going on there, but this fix worked for me. It’s important to make sure you do this for the mixer and not any of the inputs (deck A, deck B, etc.).

You can also see I’m working with an old version of SAM here (4.3.6), so not sure how it looks on the newer versions. I've helped a lot of other DJs with setup, so it was embarrassing I was having this problem for as long as I did, but hopefully, this should save someone some heartache in the future (namely, me).

Écoute Et Répète

The Listen and Repeat series has moved here, if you were looking for that sort of thing.

Happy New Year

There's a "winter mix" where I am (not as fun as it sounds--too few cashews), and it seems a perfect way to end the year that was 2017: huddled inside, worried the power might go out.

And we've seen a lot this year! Once again, Maht had his Mahrathon earlier this month and it was a record-breaker. Everyone should be proud of how people came together for 26+ hours of music and giving.

It takes a village and our little virtual village has weathered a lot this year. Between fires and floods, everyone was able to come together and help each other out. Welcome to our new members and warm wishes to those of you who stuck it out with one of Second Life's oldest clubs.

From all off us at the Velvet to all of you out there, wishing you a safe and healthy 2018.

Mahrathon 2017 is live

A legacy's a garden that you will never see
You plant the seeds now that will bloom some later day
A little finite action ripples across eternity
Just as a gift of charity works in the same way

A child in a village now has eggs and milk
They get the food they need to be healthy and grow
Others spin great textiles of wool or silk
Means of production gifted by someone they never know

A month's worth of coffees turns into bees
That meilitate and pollinate the food they eat
A cow or ox now pulls the plow as the farmer needs
The seed animal births more, both for hide or meat

The seed is a flower with petals unfurled
Provided by money that comes from two worlds.

So, I'm back.

In winter I get up at night
And dress by yellow candle-light.
In summer, quite the other way,
I have to go to bed by day.
With my new schedule, five to two,
Both are things I get to do.

Bundle up at seven

Temperatures continue to dip
Down and down they go
And then there's ice. Careful! Don't slip
And maybe sleet and snow
So now the winter's coming fast
Be it good or be it ill
I'll will have to say, at last
There's finally something normal

The ballet is from The Hard Nut, the Mark Morris version of "The Nutcracker". Production design was by Charles Burns.