Author: Donn Durante

Posted on

This DJ: Pinterest Boards and YouTube Playlists

Featured Image for Article: This DJ: Pinterest Boards and YouTube Playlists

For a while now, I’ve had a Pinterest board dedicated to the DJ culture. This morning, I read an email from Serato announcing their Serato Pyro release for iOS. One click led to another and I ended up on YouTube watching a video about Pyro under the hood. It was a longer video so I was going to flag it to watch later. I decided that I had so many DJ-related YouTube videos in my “Watch Later” list that it might be better organized if I just create a channel playlist for it. Don’t know why I didn’t think about it before.

Maybe because I only started just playing around with YouTube channels a couple weeks ago. It started when I created a “Pick Me Up” playlist of songs/videos based on the “Inspire” playlist I have set up in Google Play Music.

That then gave me the idea to create a separate YouTube playlist for my DJ mixes using iTunes Visualizer as a video background. I wrote about that in an earlier post.

Posted on

Pan-fried Trout Fillets with Leftovers

Since I took my mid-career retirement last year, I’ve been working on the habit of cooking dinner every day I have off. This gives Caro a break and encourages me to try new recipes and practice my cooking in general.

Last night I was planning on trying Pork Hamonado:
http://panlasangpinoy.com/2016/01/25/simple-pork-hamonado/

…which looks like a variation of one of my favorites Filipino dishes growing up. We ended up changing plans after assessing the leftover situation. We had a few servings of chili leftover from the day before and there were also a couple filets of fresh trout that hadn’t been cooked yet. (Caro made a trip to Fisherman’s Dock in Mandarin a couple of days ago but she only cooked one of the filets that evening since we also had oven-baked buffalo chicken wings for dinner before the Super Bowl.)

It made more sense to work with what we had instead of making a trip to Publix for some pork shoulder and pineapple chunks (needed for the Pork Hamonado).

IMAG1270-COLLAGE
Pan-fried trout with salt, pepper, garlic powder and dried parsley flakes

To keep things simple, rather than looking up a new recipe for the trout like I normally would, I just pan fried the trout with salt, pepper, garlic powder and some dried parsley flakes.

I liked how they turned out but Caro thought they were too salty for her taste. I’ll need to find somewhere in the middle next time. I guess I could just add more seasoning to my personal serving once at the table.

We served the trout with brown rice, baby peas and a simple salad of romaine hearts no dressing. The chili was reheated and we finished that off as well. Hodgepodge combination I know. When you’re hungry, though, it doesn’t really matter.

I’ll try the Pork Hamonado recipe on my next day off.

Posted on

Creating YouTube Versions of My DJ Mixes

DJ ReCreator I m Beautiful Mix YouTube
YouTube version of “DJ ReCreator: I’m Beautiful Mix”

During my mid-career retirement in 2015, I had a chance to revisit and spend time on hobbies such as DJing. I dug up old recordings from CD burns, MiniDiscs and even cassettes 🙂 I also added a few newer mixes using mp3s, time-coded vinyl and Traktor software. Everything was converted to mp3. After finding a site to upload my mixes, I compiled a collection of my recordings and made them available on MixCrate.com.

http://www.mixcrate.com/djrecreator/dj_mixes

The whole process was fun. I got some initial engagement in terms of likes and downloads then things tapered. Interesting how fleeting things are these days with all the “noise” and options out there for our on-demand generation. Anyway, I got pulled into starting my next career chapter and stopped spending as much time on the DJ stuff.

Recently, I had the idea of expanding my reach by using YouTube…but how? I’ve seen many YouTube ‘videos’ that were primarily music with a static image as the video. I didn’t want to go that route. So I thought about ways I could add motion to my mixes so they could be uploaded as videos. The challenge was to do it without making it such a big production. iTunes has the Visualizer built into the player and I enjoy watching the hypnotic movements as the tracks play. Doing a little research and testing, I tested a few screen recorders and then made YouTube videos using screen recordings of iTunes Visualizer while my mixes played. The first batch of videos is now uploaded to my YouTube channel. They’re not getting much attention. Maybe they never will. It doesn’t bother me too much because I enjoyed the process of testing an idea and figuring out out to pull it off.

 

View The Resulting Videos:

How I did it…

  1. Downloaded Bandicam Screen Recorder as a trial to test. It worked better than the other free software I tested and it had good reviews. A few trial runs is all I needed. I went ahead and purchased the registered version of the software for $39 because I didn’t want the large www.bandicam.com watermark to be included with the video output.
  2. Loaded my mixes into iTunes as single song playlists so that I could record the visualizations without having to worry about captures bleeding into the next track in queue.
  3. Read Google’s recommendations for optimizing video uploads: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/1722171?hl=en
  4. Aligned the iTunes window and Bandicam’s screen capture frame so it was a 16:9 aspect ratio (1280×720 recommended). I didn’t want the screen recorder to capture my mouse movements so I chose not to do full screen.
  5. I read an article on cool tricks for controlling the visualizer display in real time: http://www.instructables.com/id/Cool-Itunes-trick-VISUALIZER/
  6. As cool as visualizer can be, all the videos looked too similar so I began manually changing the visualizer theme in sync with the music as it recorded.
  7. I uploaded each video via the interface in my YouTube account. While each video uploaded and processed, I added descriptions with track names and a link to the corresponding mix available on MixCrate.

If the opportunity presents itself, I may actually take the time to produce videos for my DJ mixes and not just screen recordings. Baby steps.