Why I'm now on Spotify

Here's an important question. If you like music but don't listen to much radio how on earth do you find new music? Or even remember old music that isn't your favourite band?

I am old enough to remember (and really miss) swapping mix tapes with friends. There was also Pandora. Remember that? You'd give it a song and it would generate a playlist of music with the same characteristics as the seeding song - a fantastic way to find new music which was shut down presumably because someone had to pay some license fees somewhere.

I used to spend a lot of time in music shops and have a large CD collection. Remember when digital media came in circles? Anyway. For me, the best time for buying music was back when I was a student and a glorious music shop called Fopp opened in town. They had a sensible pricing policy (none of this £4.99 nonsense), a huge collection of decent music, and they actually played music you could buy in store. Seriously; the number of times I'd be in HMV and would like the music playing and nobody in-store could tell me what it was. In Fopp, it was being played by the staff themselves and the CD would be by the till - wouldn't even need to talk to anyone.

Happy days.

I was also working in a student radio station during this period and between the two I discovered and bought a lot of music. But then Fopp over-extended and imploded, and the adult world happened and it all went horribly wrong.

Like most, I've been listening to music via streaming services for some years but despite its obvious popularity I've managed to avoid having a Spotify account. I've had a Google Play account for ages, which also strips the ads from YouTube (a huge benefit to me) and because I got an Amazon Prime account I also got their music service bundled in. Between these two that really seemed like enough music to be going on with - they both have large collections, and while there is the occasional notable hole it kept me more than happy enough to avoid yet another streaming service.

However, since I've been working from home I've been able to listen to a lot more music (when I'm not in a damned meeting...) and I've notice that an alarming amount of the time, I'm just hitting "go" on my repeating playlist. So, despite having pretty much all of music from all time available to me I'm actually listening to about 15 songs on repeat because it means I don't have to think about finding something new.

That brings me back to the opening question - how do I find more music? Spotify has a "radio" feature which is remarkably like the fondly remembered Pandora service. You give it a seed song, start the "radio" and it plays a load of stuff that is kinda like it. It's a bit hit and miss (nowhere near as good as my memories of Pandora) but it's more than usable and it is also exposed through the Sonos interface if you know where to look. As far as I can see, neither of Google Play (or YouTube Music as it is now) nor Amazon Music has this feature, and certainly not through Sonos.

So at the cost of another monthly subscription, I've finally got a music discovery service. I think I have listened to more new music in the last two months than I have in the last five years so it is definitely working for me. Next up, I need to look at the Spotify playlist features and see if this can be used to resurrect the old world of mix tapes...

And lo, I have Windows 10

I’ve been meaning to upgrade my gaming PC to Windows 10 for some time but it didn’t manage to be the most important thing on my todo list at any point. Partly this was fear of the unknown - I knew Win10 was going to be a shift in UX and also thought it likely to break at least one peripheral. My attitude to an operating system is that it should do its job quietly and not get in the way and, frankly, I didn’t feel inclined to invest time in adoption pains. That’s time I can spend more profitably sleeping or looking out of the window.

Microsoft, it seems, had other ideas. They pushed the Win10 upgrade through their patch management system and I fell victim to the auto-upgrade problem. It’s a dark, stormy night. The wind is shaking the windows, drowning out the drumming of the rain. I’m sitting in a partly lit room, curled up comfortably and reading something on my tablet. In the corner, my computer is on, untouched for the past hour. I glance up and a chill runs through me. On my monitor is the ominous message “75% upgraded”.

I could write extensively about the aggressive way Microsoft have pushed Win10. I could complain at length about it arriving on my computer unwanted and the abuse of trust around using a security patch mechanism to automatically install a complete operating system without my input. I could compare the techniques used in release of this system to the way malware is spread. But others have done all that. Instead, I’ll focus on my experiences now it has arrived.

It’s fine.

Sorry, that was really dull but honestly it sums it up. The installation process was really simple. I had to track down and turn off the P2P patch sharing stuff (uncharitable, but I wasn’t in the best mood at this point) and some of the information sharing stuff (Win10 is horribly intrusive) but otherwise it just loaded up as New Windows with no real fuss.

The next evening I sat down to see what had really happened behind the scenes. First step was going through the security and privacy options. The defaults here were horrible (everything seems to have access to everything, including cameras and microphones) but the menus themselves were clear and it was easy to turn it all off. I also came across some advertising options - it seems in the brave new world of Windows it’s a good idea to have (targeted) advertising on your lock screen. Fortunately, both the targeting and the advertising can be disabled (separately) and so that went too. The start menu was a mess, but simple enough to remove the new and exciting rubbish and simplify back to the applications I’m actually going to use.

Next up, there is Cortana. I like the idea of Cortana and I quite fancied playing around with her. Unfortunately, in order to be helpful she looks at everything you do and sends it all off to Microsoft HQ so they can tune her electronic brain. So she had to die. Killing her off was actually harder than it needed to be - stopping her talking to Microsoft wasn’t too hard, but that left her zombified husk on my task bar and I had to work out how to purge her from there too.

Having finished with my electronic holy water, I moved on to my own customisations. I found that Steam, Chrome and Office all worked fine which is the majority of my use of that computer immediately. Also, my automatic backups (I use Macrium) continued to work and mapped drives were still mapped.

So far, so painless. I hadn’t needed to reconfigure anything and the new interface hadn’t caused me any real suffering. Time to check the two things I feared would break - the main reasons for putting off the upgrade in the first place. My joystick and my game recording setup.

First off, the joystick. My basic fear was that the (already shoddy) performance of the drivers would be even worse under a more modern operating system. My fears were confirmed when it failed to load properly. To Google! Fortunately, I wasn’t the only person looking for help (this thread was very useful) and - much to my surprise - Mad Catz had released some beta drivers for Windows 10. The Win7 drivers were released in 2011, whereas the Win10 drivers came from August 2015. And they worked. Probably better than the older drivers (I didn’t, for example, suffer any blue screens while installing them). I’d lost some of my settings, but that was easy to replicate and it was fine.

I did notice a problem on boot. Win10 boots faster than the USB devices which caused problems with my stick. This was easily fixed by disabling Fast Boot. It didn’t seem like the best solution, but it worked.

Next up, game recording. Astonishingly, this also Just Worked. Mostly. I had to re-enable some of the output devices in the sound menus, but I got everything going just by double-checking the everything in my original post.

Windows 10 is fast, stable, not overly ugly, and very easy to install. It’s a change to the user interface, but not one that particularly gets in the way of just using the computer. It’s a pig for privacy, but you can turn all that nonsense off. So, overall a surprisingly good experience. 9/10. Would have my computer hijacked and a new OS forcibly installed again.

Streaming gameplay with two sound cards

Another post on this. I'm not convinced my previous suggestions work very well and I've found a better way to do this by making use of a few pieces of free software.

So; round two.

The setup

I've been through this in detail on a previous post, so this is just the highlights.

• game audio through primary soundcard (the default Windows device)
• Skype audio through secondary soundcard
• input from a microphone

The problem

All the streaming software I've seen mixes microphone input into the Windows default sound. I need to also mix the output of another sound card to capture game audio along with both sides of a Skype call during multiplayer gaming.

The solution

The outline is:

• create a virtual input sound device
• mix microphone and Skype output into that device
• set the virtual input sound device as the "microphone input" in the streaming software (in my case, XSplit Gamecaster but this should work with any similar software)

But... how?

To create the virtual audio device we need some extra software. I used VB-Audio Virtual Cable (a donationware alternative to theVAC which costs $25 upwards). Find the downloader (there is a download link under the "VB-Audio Virtual Cable" heading) and install it and magically you'll have some new audio devices appearing in your Windows Sound dialogue.

Next you want AmaMix. The download contains a load of visual stuff, but you only need to worry about AmaMix which lets you route audio to different devices. Make sure you run it as Admin or it will just crash with no indication as to why.

AmaMix is pretty easy to set up. Hit Config and it will give you a dialogue which lets you choose both the secondary sound card output and the microphone output as sources and the new VB-Audio device as your target. There are also options for boosting the inputs and generally fiddling with them until the levels are as you want them.

If you can't find the output of your sound card go to the Sound dialogue and select the Recording tab. Right click and enable disconnected and disabled devices and it should appear.

Finally, in your game streaming software select the VB-Audio device as your microphone input. Now, when you want to stream (or record) you just need to remember to fire up AmaMix along with your streaming software and everything should be ready to go.

I hope this helps someone!

Streaming your game with multiplayer audio using XSplit and two sound cards

Catchy title, no?

When streaming a game, XSplit Gamecaster allows me to take the sounds from that game and mix in a single vocal input, however I have two sound cards to allow me to use a mixing desk to manipulate the levels of a Skype call against the game sounds (I posted before about the details of my audio setup on my gaming machine). The XSplit options work for me when streaming or recording single player footage with commentary, however there are problems when it comes to capturing multiplayer gaming along with the group conversations as essentially there are two vocal sources (my voice and everyone else's voice). This leaves me having to choose two of the three audio sources and ending up with either the game sounds plus friends talking to a silent me or the game sounds plus me apparently chatting to nobody.

Why XSplit and Skype?

I am sure there are better capture programs than XSplit Gamecaster (the more-featured Broadcaster, for example) but they require more work to set up and at a quick glance do not offer the required additional options to solve this particular problem. Whatever its shortcomings, Gamecaster does a fantastic job of getting streaming and recording set up with minimum fuss.

The choice of Skype for communication is because that's how my regular group communicates. Again, there are probably better options but this works for us at the moment. For this problem, it shouldn't actually matter as it is basically conversation out of a secondary sound card, which can be done with any chat program.

Also it is worth noting that this is all done on Windows 7.

My requirements

I game a lot but at the moment I record rarely, so any solution needs to both be easy to fire up (to encourage me to do it) and non-intrusive (so my normal gaming doesn't get any worse).

So:

• low impact on my normal gaming once set up
• easy to turn on when desired
• records game sounds and both parts of the Skype call
• I don't have my own voice echoed back to me through my headphones
• allow me to keep my current hardware configuration

How to do it

First, we need to get at the output of the second sound card. For Creative Cards, this will be a device called "What You Hear". The RealTek equivalent is "Stereo Mix". Hit the start button and look for "Sound". On the dialogue that appears, select the "Recording" tab. If the device isn't there, right click and enable disconnected and disabled devices. It should appear. In XSplit, select this device as Microphone Input.

At this point, if you are playing a multiplayer game with a Skype call you'll record game sounds and your friends' voices but your own voice will be missing.

Next, go back to the Recording tab on the Sound dialogue. Find your microphone, right click, properties and select the "advanced" tab. Disable exclusive mode (both boxes). Finally, go to the "listen" tab. When you install XSplit it creates a device called XSplit Stream Audio Renderer. Select it from the drop-down and check "listen to this device".

Done! Now, when you record again you'll find your voice is included in the mix.

If you look at the audio options in your system tray you'll see that you can set the levels on the XSplit Stream Audio Renderer which will let you balance your recording.

What is going on?

XSplit seems to create a software audio device (i.e. it doesn't physically exist) and record the output of that. Behind the scenes it mixes the Default Audio output and whatever is specified as the mic input into this device. All we have done here is add an additional audio stream to that device using native Windows options. I added the microphone to the XSplit device by hand and let XSplit handle adding the rest of the Skype call, but I assume it would work just as well the other way around.

Alternately

If you aren't using XSplit or you don't want to mess with one of its components you may want an alternative.

I am trying to mix three audio channels (game, mic and other vocals) when XSplit only allows me to specify two sources (default sound and mic input). In practice, XSplit lets me select any Windows audio input device as the "microphone input" and this gives me the option of creating a new (software) sound source and pre-mixing the microphone input and other vocal output. This requires additional software (such as AmaMix (free) or VAC) which is why I went with the above solution which only uses standard features of Windows.