Sunday, May 27, 2018

The Beatcroft Social, from Glasgow and Shetland, 26 May 2018 - technical details follow (and music!)

This was an experiment, or I should say yet another experiment in the continuing saga of experimentation which is The Beatcroft Social.

We have the shetlandwebcams.com site up and running, and thanks so much to all of those who pledged cash to support the development of our coastal webcams project. Your merchandise is on its way! New hardware has been purchased and camera installation will be underway soon.

This week, though, and for the next few weeks, the audio (ie, me and my choice of music) has to come from Glasgow, where I am engaged in some building work...so with me using some dodgy west end of Glasgow wifi, a Macbook Pro, an AKG D230 microphone, an old Logitech camera, the iRigPre interface and a set of Koss PortaPro headphones, we set to work. I normally use DJ Pro to play out the music (which can come from lots of places - iTunes, Spotify, downloads, Mp3s, CDs, vinyl, cassette, Soundcloud) and using the virtual desktop app Teamviewer I was able to control, with almost no time delay, the Mac Mini with DJ Pro on it in Shetland. To connect my voice, grizzled countenance and occasionally my dog Dexter to our Tricaster system and assorted gubbins so we can vision mix all the webcams and relay them to our various worldwide servers, it was just the simple online web service VMix, accessed through the Chrome browser.  This requires no extra software or hardware.  It's like Skype.

To our astonishment, it all worked. Sometimes not brilliantly well, and there were a few glitches and dropouts. You'll hear all this on the Mixcloud audio. We're working to improve the sound of my voice, but the hospitals are all booked up...different microphone and possible 4G instead of BT wifi next week.

Meanwhile, The live video went out smoothly, for the most part, and Andy went walkabout in Lerwick with his iPhone to see if we could send in remote video and audio. That worked too. Next week we're really stretching the boundaries, but my lips are sealed...

Meanwhile, here is the link to the full video-and-audio show at shetlandwebcams. com, the 60N Radio tab.

And here's the Mixcloud audio: