"New" Music Player PC Build
My recommendation is that you watch this video with annotations on, as I caught a few errors here and there. It was late, I was getting tired. Oh, and as always...the whole video description awaits your click...
About The Live Broadcasts:
Inspired by fellow Youtuber weasel2htm ( / weasel2htm , I picked up a secondhand DJ mixer along with a microphone and set in to doing a live stream on blogTV. Since that time, my "studio" has been improved and enlarged with some ideas that are my own and others that came from many different folks. It is arguable whether or not this had made the broadcast any more enjoyable. After all, the same guy is still hosting it. ;-) The whole of my studio is a testament to what you can do with a few hundred bucks spread between eBay and thrift stores, and some lucky finds from the Curbside Discount store.
When blogTV merged with YouNow, my show was left without a home. It aired on Ustream for a while and now airs primarily on VaughnLive (http://vaughnlive.tv/uxwbill). The show airs whenever I feel like doing it, so only rarely these days is there ever an announcement or formal schedule. Most of the latest shows have been very late at night.
Though I've never worked in radio, I have been interested in it from pretty much the first time that I knew what a radio was. I used to play as a DJ in front of my dad's stereo when I was a kid. And while there have been some less than totally awesome bumps and drama along the road, it's still an absolute blast to do these live broadcasts when I hit a really good groove and the viewing audience is feeling it too.
The show's a train wreck of musical formats focusing mostly on stuff recorded prior to the mid 1990s. Although most of my shows are intended for general audiences, the VaughnLive site is 18+ and they do enforce this. Please plan your visit accordingly.
Dell Dimension 2300 Notes:
The Dimension 2300's first video appearance is here: • Two Trashpicked Computers - June 2011
Although I've never had to put a dime in it, the trashpicked Dell Dimension 2300 that I use to play music has needed a few repairs. The hard drive was found to be bad after I wiped it and the power supply later blew up quite spectacularly. I tried upgrading the RAM to the maximum of 1GB, but the system wasn't reliable, so back to 512MB it went. When the onboard sound lost a channel right before a show, a sound card was installed just to get things going again. I later found a sequin shorting out two contact points on the motherboard. Removing it restored the onboard sound to working order. Most recently, it got an upgrade to the fastest supported processor...a 2.2 GHz Pentium 4 with a 400 MHz front side bus.
Given its increasingly characterful behavior and the fact that I've more than gotten my money's worth out of it, I'm retiring the Dimension 2300. It will likely be repurposed for some other random job.
I was given a couple of Dell OptiPlex GX620 mini tower PCs and one of them will be the replacement music player PC in my studio. Though it's an older PC from a time when Intel's microprocessor products were not the best in the business, I still thought it worthwhile to invest in some upgrades. Even a newer PC would have required many of the same things, and there would have been the purchase price of said PC to further run the bill up. Therefore I feel that the $160 or so I put into this system is money fairly well spent--especially since I'll run it until it is no longer suitable at all for any sort of task or it happens to experience a major failure.
I'm into value computing in a big way, so to make a long story a little shorter--no, I don't want to hear how this computer is garbage compared to your hundred core, sixteen exabytes of RAM and eight hundred terabytes of disk storage equipped computer with its ten 4K displays. You're missing the point if you think I want that (and if I did, I'd be quite capable of speccing and building a fire breather system).
Operating system choice remains up in the air for now. I'm not opposed to Windows versions newer than XP, though neither am I crazy about them.
"Roach Palace" PC video: • "Roach Palace" Linux PC Overview ... and yes, I did use a Pentium 4 650 in it too!
VWestlife's Computers Again! Video: • Computers again! (better quality and a slightly different mix than the official video at • Slugbug - Computers Again )
However, any time you can watch someone using a shoe as a microphone...is there any other word than "awesome" to describe the video?