Sometime life takes turns that no one expects, and this is one of them. I wish you all well, and maybe soon both of us will be playing again, but never together.

Thanks for all your support over the years. It has been a great pleasure to play for you all.

-Bart

In June, the demand on the streaming server (an old iMac that I had which was idle) was able to handle things very nicely. As with all software upgrades, they swell up to take all processing power. I started with Wirecast 4.01 which is very easy to setup and get going, and it has worked great. I have 3 video sources that it is handling (2 webcams and 1 screen capture) I was sending audio via the Mac Pro which is running Logic Pro 9 (Agogee Ensemble is the converter) and a MOTU 8Pre to handle the mic inputs. I have 6 mic sources ( 2 mics on vocals, 2 mics on guitars and 2 mics in a Blumlein pair configuration to pickup the room and whirl’s squeeky chair) and one pedal board source. This is all mixed down into 2 stereo channels and sent over to the iMac. This has worked very well.

Wirecast 4.1 came out over the summer, I tried it, but the video results were not good, I was getting quite a lot of frame loss and had to go back to 4.01. This has since been fixed in 4.1.2, so I tried this configuration over the weekend.

The audio now falls out of sync, although when I was testing this. I did not see this problem initially. I understand Wirecast now uses VBR (variable bit rate) which could be the cause of this new issue. So I may have to once again return to 4.01 and wait until a patch comes out for this as well.

In the meantime I have been looking into ways to replace the webcams (I mean they do a decent job for the cost of them I couldn’t ask for better video – they are Logitech C615′s and have a camera mount on the bottom of them (the C910s do not). There are several problems with webcams. First, they have a wide camera angle and it is not possible to change this. Second, on the Mac Logitech got lazy and has never released a driver and supporting software which will allow you to control the camera, so it will blow out the whites in studio lights.

So I have been over to http://www.aja.com picking up two pieces of free software, one is called AJA DataCalc and the other is AJA System Test. The former will tell you who much throughput you need to drive an HD video / audio stream, the later will actually measure the performance of the system, and has options to tell you the disk read/write speed, frame rate your machine will support and the maximum number of video streams your machine can support.

I will need to have 2 HD video sources in order to pull off the next round of “upgrades” to the system, and to do that and record without frames dropping, I have to move up to a RAID in order to get the 55 MB/sec this will require (per video stream). And that is to support recording a 720p @ 30 fps. This is close to the performance of current WD Cavier Black, but there is headroom needed, and if I decide to add more video sources, then I need a design that will support that as well.

More on the RAID design next time…

Freight Train,

Death Letter

First we have been dual streaming with Ziffy Zarf whenever we can and whenever he is available. Ziffy is an awesome harmonica/guitar player and astonishingly brilliant vocalist. You can catch his solo shows on Saturday, 4PM SL at Fogbound. Or you can catch us dual streaming with him on every other Sunday afternoon at 2 PM at Sailor’s Cove in SL (Check the calendar for details).

Last night Whirl and I opened for the legendary Cosmic Haystack and his band at Tunez in SL, its been too long since we partnered up in this way, and its good to be back!!

We also played last night at Rockin Roost and again at Good Vibe Acoustic Lounge. I have to say my fingers are tired :)) So much so, I didn’t practice this morning.

We haven’t introduced any new songs recently, because I have been concentrating on learning the next phase of fingerstyle guitar, yes I am a Noob at this, but its very challenging and very fun all at the same time.

The one thing we did do last night was I have been working on the audio system and setup a “Blumlein pair” of microphones in an attempt to add a stereo image to our sound. I couldn’t be more pleased with the initial trial, we need some tweaking, but I think overall its pretty good and want to thank Aitolda Cooljoke for this suggestion to record in Mid-Side. Because we play as a duet it really helps.

Ill record the next gig and post the songs for you to enjoy here!