dj – Page 3 – Cubicgarden.com…

The incidental contact high mix

NHS Nurse with mask and halo — Found on a wall in the Northern Quarter of Manchester, modified by me

My first new mix for 2022 and it comes at a time as Covid19 variant Omnicron has come, peaked and is likely going to move us things from Pandemic to Endemic? Who knows…? Lets hope!

Regardless of this all, I was thinking about the incredible people who helped us all through the pandemic and kind of been forgotten, while also flicking through the new book dictionary of obscure sorrows. I came across the incidental contact high, which is described as “a innocuous touch by someone just doing their job, that you find more meaningful that you’d like to admit.”

Anyway, its really good mix with lots of new tunes, a bit of pace (134bpm-ish) and a good feeling throughout. I’m loving Protoculture’s Music is more than mathematics and the unique remix of Shnorkel.

Enjoy the mix on mixcloud or on my own mixing site.

Here is the full playlist.

Love Technology – Protoculture
Orenida (extended mix) – Gouryella/Ferry Corsten
Collider (Jorn van Deynhoven remix) – Thomas Bronzwaer
Music is more than mathematics (extended mix) – Protoculture
Feel it (extended mix) – Cosmic gate
Shnorkel (Thank you city remix) – Ido Ophir and Miki Litvak
Go (extended mix) – Protoculture
Tiger (extended remix) – Jerome Isma-Ae & Alastor
Tears (protoculture remix) – Dakota
Alone (extended mix) – Maarten de jong
Headliner – Jorn van Deynhoven

The ravers ravenous retro revenge mix

With my thumb getting better, I’m doing more mixes again on the good old pacemaker device. This one was part of a much longer mix but the start was a bit crappy so cut it off and included the last 80%.

The ravers ravenous retro revenge came about after watching the Matrix Resurrections. There was lots of parts (seen it a few times now and still score it 8/10) but I found this line fascinating.

Morpheus: Nothing comforts anxiety like little nostalgia.

I have a lot to say about nostalgia but I decided to do a mix where it feels like the mix is being taken over by the rave. Does it work? I’ll leave it for you to decide. Maybe I should have called it R4 instead?

Listen to the Ravers ravenous retro revenge mix, on mixcloud and my own cloud.

Enjoy!

Electric Sunrise – Mental Overdrive
Air conditionné – Julian Jeweil
Silence (Jerome Isma-Ae Extended remix) – D-Nox, Baya, Lenn V
I want you (Forever) (Full on mix) – Carl Cox
Opium (Quivver remix) – Jerome Isma-Ae & Alastor
Open up – Leftfield
Sleeper in metropolis (Club mix) – Anne Clark
Rewind (Makkas remix) – Emma Hewitt
Charly (Alley cat mix) – The Prodigy
Feel the beat (JS16 dark mix) – Darude
The storm – Interitus Dei
Back to earth (Rave mix) – Yves Deruyter
Unchainied – Diego Morrill
The sky – Summerland

A giant adventure in Ireland mix

I got away for the first time during the pandemic. It was an adventure taken on my motorcycle. I of course took the pacemaker device out for the first time in a long time, so I did a mix while in hotel rooms. I did start a mix with key parts of the journey but it was long and didn’t really work together. Instead I took the Ireland part and skipped a few tunes to make this frankly great mix. Its quite different starting with some classic Orbital and ending at Home. Along the path, there’s lots of new tunes which I haven’t used before. What I like about this mix is the gel of the tunes and mixing. I also quite like the vocals in the mix which add something special to the whole thing.

Enjoy the mix, which is a new entry in journey with pacemaker mixes on my mini mixcloud (where you can hear it at super high quality and download it.

Belfast – Orbital
Eye – Ma5Haria
Suru (Martin Roth Nu-Style remix) – Super8 & Tab
Pǝsnɟuoɔ (Confused) – Laurent Garnier
A break in the clouds (Main mix) – Holden
Chordplay – Oliver Smith
Are you one of us (Cabriolet Paris remix) – Kyau & Albert
Dust in the wind – Arnej
Laguna – Protoculture
Polarize (Second sine remix) – Snejider
Avenue (Club mix) – Paul Van Dyk
Floyd (Extended mix) – Jerome Isma-Ae & Alastor
Home (Cosmic gate remix) – Paul Van Dyk Feat. Johnny Mcdaid

Updated on Sunday 26th September, a giant adventure in Ireland is now number 98th in the tech trance chart.

I was always scared of tresor mix

Tresor I had the absolute joy to see Laurent Garnier at the Manchester International festival recently (July 2021). During his video there was lots of references to different things in his career including Manchester and also Berlin. There was a distinct moment when I turned to my sister and whispered, I have been to many clubs in Berlin during the first 15 years of the fall of the Berlin wall, but Tresor scared me and I never went because of the fear. I had heard too many stories of this hard techno/gabba club and the crazy things which could happen in the darkness of the disused bank vaults. Do I regret not going? A bit, but it was genuinely a little scary especially with me not speaking German. Maybe this is why Victoria resonated with me. Its certainly a stronger almost techno mix with no let up in pace and heavy beats. Look out for the Acid Trax! Its a classic killer! Imagine dancing in a vault in the dark to the raw sounds of the TB 303!

Enjoy the mix, which is another entry in the locked down, mixing out album of mixes. Also linked on my DJ blog.

Acid drops – Meanwhile, back in communist Russia
M.I.L.F – Laurent Garnier
Trick – Carlo Ruetz
Opium – Jerome Isma-Ae & Alastor
Beat (Da Boxx) – Laurent Garnier
Energy Flash – Joey Beltram
Acid Trax (album version) – Phuture
System hack – Carlo Ruetz
Intruder – Armin van Buuren vs M.I.K.E
Shnorkel – Miki Latvak & Ido Ophir
Pǝsnɟuoɔ (Confused) – Laurent Garnier
Rheinkraft – Oliver Klein
Subrasumstimulation (Johnson mix) – Oliver Lieb
Interstate Emperors – Jeffed

Wednesday 18th August

Its been a while but getting some good responses to this mix.

My own mixcloud, finally?

I have been for a long time looking for an alternative to mixcloud. I have tried many things including some self hosted solutions like navidrome, subsonic, madsonic, airsonic and ampache. They have all been good except they are best for private sharing. I really wanted to use funkwhale but it was so geared up for single tracks it just didn’t make sense to run a node with my own mixes on it. There is so much I could suggest for making these software/services better for DJs rather than musicians. A DJ version of funkwhale could be pretty cool, especially seeing the amount of DJs using Youtube and paying for Mixcloud premium to mix live during the pandemic. ~~Heck you could even use web-monetization too~~ (just done).

So with all this and finally thought I have the bandwidth and the storage, I just need a site and some simple software which can share the music files. So I decided to actually setup WordPress with it looking at the local file system (which I can easily have tons of storage). I was going to explore the static file generators again but decided to get something going.

Over the last few days between helping someone out with Linux and cryptocurrencies, I setup WordPress on my RaspberryPi 4 using Yunohost again. As its pretty much static, I think it makes sense.

So here is my own mixcloud site, which I’m still populating, but the latest mixes from my locked down, mixing out album are up complete with artwork. Expect to see more changes over time including a better audio player, more mixes and more everything.

Its not exactly a mixcloud replacement to be fair and my plans to use the .cue files and make better use of playlists, is put on hold for now. I’m sure there is audio plugin which will make use of them. Love to have UPnP and Subsonic apis access from wordpress, but I dream?

Do enjoy and let me know what you think could be improved.

Little update

Following my point about making it work for DJs and mixes. One of my biggest bug bears is playlists. I have been through many of the wordpress plugins for audio playback and I can’t find one which allows me to specify points in a long mix, when different music is played. Its simply a tracklist but all of the ones I have seen and tried are focused on single tracks. Meaning slicing the mix into pieces instead of marking out areas. None of them seemed to support CUE files or things like Ogg vorbis chapters. If there is one I should be looking at, do send it my way because it seems like such a simple thing to do, but I guess theres not enough interest to make it?

Another update

I have retired the old Mix site and replaced it with a new better one.
Learn more about the changes and WebMix.

Pattersons pandemic run mix

Here is the first mix of the new year and its a Simon Patterson special. If you liked the previous Patterson’s panic attack. Its likely not going to play in certain regions as its all the same artist and mixcloud thinks I’m uploading a whole album.

Its a very heavy trance mix which whips along at a speedy 138 bpm and never lets up for 50 solid minutes.

Try going for a run with this mix playing, avoid those people and wear a mask.

Here is the playlist for Patterson’s pandemic run mix, enjoy!

F16 – Simon Patterson
Latika – Simon Patterson
Brush Strokes – Simon Patterson
Smack – Simon Patterson
Whites of her eyes – Simon Patterson
Panic attack – Simon Patterson
Opulence – Simon Patterson
Dissolve – Simon Patterson feat Sarah Howells
Strip search – Simon Patterson
Taxi – Simon Patterson
Us – Simon Patterson

https://www.mixcloud.com/cubicgarden/pattersons-pandemic-run/

Replacing Mixcloud with Funkwhale

For a long while I have been threatening to leave Mixcloud in favour of hosting my own mixes. I looked around and thought funkwhale looks great as its a federated network for music. With some help from JonT, I started to scrape the metadata I stupidly forgot to keep for myself.

I installed Funkwhale on the Yunoserver but spent too much time trying to work out how to mount my NAS on the Yunoserver. I gave Navidrome but decided it wasn’t right as there was no way to listen without logging in, so went back to Funkwhale and got things up and running.

Seems Funkwhale might not be the best solution for the mixes, plus the developer is looking for new maintainers recently. Its really setup for single tracks not mixes. I could upload mixes but my plan to use cue files, won’t work. The only place to put playlists is in the comments. I also need to do more digging as I can’t change the year of the mixes. More importantly, the public sharing is a bit broken for me. You should be able to listen to the radio but its not working for me

As I get my head around it all but you can subscribe via RSS and if you’re using Mastodon or other fediverse applications, you can subscribe to this account: @digitalitalicmixes@mixes.cubicgarden.info.

Enjoy, I’m one step closer to self hosting my mixes.

The mayday lockdown night dance

Taking some hints from my previous live mix, I decided to make some changes and do another mix. This time not live, so its at the perfect volume now. Enjoy the mix which is up to 135bpm with lots of hands in the air trance for your listening pleasure… enjoy!

Gouryella (From the heavens mix) – Ferry Corsten presents Gouryella
Arise – Victor Ruiz & D Nox
Follow me (Jerome Isma-Ae Extended remix) – Jam Spoon
Call the galaxy taxi (Martin Roth Nu Style remix) – Plastic Angel
Stellar – Driftwood
Floyd (extended mix) – Jerome Isma-Ae & Alastor
Borealis – Dj Eco
Breathe (Blake Jarrell remix) – Anna Nalick
Freedom (extended mix) – ARTY vs Muvy
Grotesque – RAM & Alex M.O.R.P.H
Soundbar (extended mix) – Giuseppe Ottaviani
Numb the pain – Will Atkinson
Everythings been written – 8 Wonders
Tears (protoculture remix) – Dakota
Hello (Jerome Isma-Ae remix) – Above & Beyond
The Legacy 2.0 (Alphazone remix) – Funabashi pres. Saltwater
Valhalla (tonerush remix) – OneBeat

The mixcloud metadata take down

I mentioned a while ago how I was slowly migrating away from Mixcloud as their business model is starting to impinge on people listening to my mixes and I’m not so keen on that. I already mentioned trying to get Funkwhale working and using cue files.

While looking through my mixes I noticed I really didn’t do a great job with some of the metadata. While I had spent most of my time adding to the metadata to Mixcloud (not ideal)

In Mixcloud (once logged in) there are some human friendly urls which I was able to grab images from. The key one being the upload edit page – https://www.mixcloud.com/upload/{username}/{mixname}/edit/ for example https://www.mixcloud.com/upload/cubicgarden/follow-me-into-the-fading-moonlight/edit/

Follow me into the moonlight edit page

My plan was to manually copy the times into my newly written cue files but while talking to Jon about it, he said give him 5mins and he could knock up a script to pull the values out of the HTML page. I thought about it before but using XSLT, however noticed there is a lot javascript rendering making things difficult.

Jon’s quick script written was just what I needed.

#!/usr/bin/env python3

import csv
import sys
from collections import namedtuple
from typing import List

import bs4
from bs4 import Tag

SongInfo = namedtuple('SongInfo', ['number', 'artist', 'title', 'time'])

def load_html(filename: str):
    with open(filename, 'r', encoding='utf-8') as fo:
        return ''.join(fo.readlines())

def extract_song_info(song: Tag):
    try:
        number = song.find(class_='section-number').text
        artist = song.find(class_='section-artist').text
        title = song.find(class_='section-title').text
        time = song.find(class_='section-time')['value']
        result = SongInfo(number, artist, title, time)
        print(f'Extracted {result}')
        return result
    except AttributeError:
        print(f'Error with item {song}')
        return None

def parse_table(input_html: str):
    soup = bs4.BeautifulSoup(input_html, features="html5lib")
    songs = [row for row in soup.find_all(class_="section-row")]
    return [x for x in [extract_song_info(song) for song in songs] if x is not None]


def save_to_csv(file_name: str, songs: List[SongInfo]):
    with open(file_name, 'w', encoding='utf-8') as fo:
        writer = csv.writer(fo)
        for song in songs:
            writer.writerow(song)


if __name__=="__main__":
    if len(sys.argv) != 3:
        print('Usage: extractor.py [input_html_file] [output_csv_file]')
    html = load_html(sys.argv[1])
    songs = parse_table(html)
    save_to_csv(sys.argv[2], songs)
    print(f'Saved to {sys.argv[2]} successfully - Done!')

With it and the HTML pages, which I almost got with Chromedriver, again thanks to Jon, but I couldn’t be bothered to sort out the cookies, etc. I quickly wrote a quick /dirty bash script and fired up a terminal.

#!/bin/bash
./extractor.py $1.html $1.csv
# Verify
echo Details for $1

I thought about modifying Jon’s script to generate the cue files directly bypassing the csv file but decided I should just get them all done. Because I still need to get funkwhale going.

I did notice the edit page doesn’t include genre or the year of the mix, but I can live with that, for now… Scraping web pages is certainly a throw back but its better solution that what I originally was thinking.

This will teach me to sort out my own house of data!

A better way to listen to mixes online?

For a while I have been thinking about leaving Mixcloud. Its nothing personal, I think its a great service for djs but its clear their business model is starting to interfere with the listening experience.

I had a thought about what Mixcloud do for me and decided these are the key things.

Hosting the full mix with limited rights problems (unless you do something like play a track from the same author twice)
The community of people and djs in one place
Ability to see the actual tracks within the mix

With this in mind, I thought I’d see what else was out there as I’m lucky enough to be sitting on a large enough internet connection to host my own mixes and become a node on a larger decentralised network. If it was build like the fediverse, that could solve the community side too? After looking around for alternatives I found a new upstart called funkwhale. You may have seen I mention it recently in a previous blog.

Maybe 1 and 2 could be solved but what about 3?

The last part of the puzzle seemed to be the track problem, as you want seamless playback but get an idea of what you are listening to. Mixcloud does this via metadata, which you can create via a slider over the audio waveform. Some DJ systems create this for you like the Pacemaker for example but that metadata is lost in translation I found. If only there was a standard way to define areas of a mix without slicing the audio mix up?

For example, here is a ambient mix I liked recently.

Its by Tonepoet and even they have gone through the effort of adding this metadata to their personal site complete with timings. I do a similar thing but without the timings (which I really should have added since I had them all and entered them into Mixcloud manually.

I looked a number of things including a bunch of playlist formats including pls, m3u and xspf. Even looked at smil and asx to see if they would help, but their problem was player support. The issue seemed to be they all treated their smallest objects as physical files rather than subsets of files. I did buy into xspf thought it was close with this extension.

The extension element allows non-XSPF XML to be included in XSPF documents. The purpose is to allow nested XML, which the meta and link elements do not. xspf:playlist elements MAY contain zero or more extension elements.
<playlist version="1" xmlns="http://xspf.org/ns/0/" xmlns:cl="http://example.com">
  <extension application="http://example.com">
    <cl:clip start="25000" end="34500"/>
  </extension>
  <trackList />
</playlist>

Close but not quite right and player support for extensions was going to be low. This is when I rethought the problem with something like .nfo files and found .cue files. Here is an example…

REM GENRE Electronica
REM DATE 1998
PERFORMER "Faithless"
TITLE "Live in Berlin"
FILE "Faithless - Live in Berlin.mp3" MP3
  TRACK 01 AUDIO
    TITLE "Reverence"
    PERFORMER "Faithless"
    INDEX 01 00:00:00
  TRACK 02 AUDIO
    TITLE "She's My Baby"
    PERFORMER "Faithless"
    INDEX 01 06:42:00
  TRACK 03 AUDIO
    TITLE "Take the Long Way Home"
    PERFORMER "Faithless"
    INDEX 01 10:54:00
  TRACK 04 AUDIO
    TITLE "Insomnia"
    PERFORMER "Faithless"
    INDEX 01 17:04:00
  TRACK 05 AUDIO
    TITLE "Bring the Family Back"
    PERFORMER "Faithless"
    INDEX 01 25:44:00
  TRACK 06 AUDIO
    TITLE "Salva Mea"
    PERFORMER "Faithless"
    INDEX 01 30:50:00
  TRACK 07 AUDIO
    TITLE "Dirty Old Man"
    PERFORMER "Faithless"
    INDEX 01 38:24:00
  TRACK 08 AUDIO
    TITLE "God Is a DJ"
    PERFORMER "Faithless"
    INDEX 01 42:35:00

Perfect, so I took one of mixes, Quiver in the underground and turned the .nfo file into a .cue file.

REM GENRE Tech Trance
REM DATE 2019
PERFORMER "Digital Italic"
TITLE "Quiver in the underground mix"
FILE "Quiver in the underground mix.mp3" MP3
TRACK 01 AUDIO
TITLE "Activator, I know you can (That kid chris mix)"
PERFORMER "Whatever girl"
INDEX 01 00:00:00
TRACK 02 AUDIO
TITLE "Air traffic (Erik De Koning remix)"
PERFORMER "Three drives"
INDEX 01 02:07:00
TRACK 03 AUDIO
TITLE "Chinook"
PERFORMER "Markus Schulz pres. Dakota"
INDEX 01 07:25:00
TRACK 04 AUDIO
TITLE "Opium (Quivver remix)"
PERFORMER "Jerome Isma-Ae & Alastor"
INDEX 01 10:32:00
TRACK 05 AUDIO
TITLE "Surveillance"
PERFORMER "Jordon Suckley & Kutski"
INDEX 01 15:24:00
TRACK 06 AUDIO
TITLE "Nitric (Division one remix)"
PERFORMER "Hybrid system"
INDEX 01 19:02:00
TRACK 07 AUDIO
TITLE "Circa-Forever (Galen Behr & Organ Nilsen remix)"
PERFORMER "Rapid eye"
INDEX 01 23:55:00
TRACK 08 AUDIO
TITLE "Opulence"
PERFORMER "Simon Patterson"
INDEX 01 30:05:00
TRACK 09 AUDIO
TITLE "J'ai envie de toi (Protoculture remix)"
PERFORMER "Armin Van Buuren presents Gaia"
INDEX 01 35:10:00
TRACK 10 AUDIO
TITLE "Z.I.T.A (M.I.K.E's progressiva mix)"
PERFORMER "Hiver & Hammer with Funabashi"
INDEX 01 39:30:00
TRACK 11 AUDIO
TITLE "Kubrick (Extended mix)"
PERFORMER "Jerome Isma-Ae & Alastor"
INDEX 01 42:01:00

Tried it out on a number of media player and they all worked except Plex.

There is a very good chance if I was to run my own funkwhale node/server I could set it to index .cue files and playback the mix in a seamless way like Mixcloud? Theres only one way to find out really… Get Funkwhale installed!

On a side note I am slightly kicking myself now because I entered all that metadata into mixcloud but never stored it myself. I’m going to need to go through 90 of my own mixes and convert my .nfo files into .cue files.

I have the SQLite Database for my pacemaker device with the actual real timings but I need to identify which mix is which one (another thing I should have done, as changed the names of the mix depending on many things). I also hoped mixcloud’s developers guide would come to the rescue but it looks like maybe a GDPR request is my only option if I want the metadata for my mixes?