Radio Free Fedi Fest is a streaming festival happening over at https://party.radiofreefedi.net/ through the month of July. For those of you who don’t know, Radio Free Fedi was an internet radio station focusing on music from the Fediverse. It was a one-person-operation so unfortunately they shut down the station, but there has been a few pop-up events to keep the community happy. And this festival is one of those.
So yesterday I played. My original plan was to use my battery powered streaming rig and have a low-key outdoors stream, but the weather was not on my side. So instead I did an indoor-AV-green-screen-stream playing tracks from Subsupra.
The playing went great but my streaming box was struggling so the beginning got a bit delayed. It was reasonably hot in the studio, but not summer-crazy-hot, but my Blackmagic Atem Mini Extreme Iso (jeez what a name) was not having it. I think they put too many features in a little box, and when you turn it all on at the same time the cpu gets too hot. I have two things I want to try to fix this. One is getting some fans to cool off the box, and the other one is to use a separate box for the actual streaming.
I am lucky enough to have both a big box and a small box. So I could try using the big box for all the switching, green screen keying, monitoring etc. Then I could run one hdmi cable from the big to the small box and use the small box just for the actual streaming. Let’s see how it goes.
Yesterday I had to think quickly so at the last second I booted up OBS on an old laptop that I was just planning to use as a screen and used that to stream. That was OK but not perfect. The quality was lower than I wanted to, and at one point it just shut off. The battery is broken so I think even with the power connected it had a moment of too little power. Luckily it only went to sleep mode, so we were back very quickly.
Luckily even if the video quality was less than I hoped for the audio worked out nicely so people could hear the music well. And as always the positive energy in the chat was fantastic. I had the chat loaded up on my phone on stage so I could see the comments coming in in real time. I definitely want to do more streaming, something I say every time because it is always such a great experience. Also I am having so much fun with my live set these days, blending composed tracks with improvisation and remixing.
I have uploaded the full concert to my Hyper8-powered video page so you can watch and listen in even better quality. I wish you all a nice summer!
Much love, Kristoffer
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