Speaker 1 (00:09):
Hey Frank, happy March,

Speaker 2 (00:12):
happy March. You know, this was up fast February even though I guess it was longer than normal.

Speaker 3 (00:18):
Yeah, January continue to go as long as humanly possible. And then February was like over before it stopped and they've already been started. I mean, and funnily enough, we actually already put out a podcast in March. Can you believe that?

Speaker 2 (00:30):
A time more. I am really bad at this podcasting stuff. I never know what they were recording on, what they were recording for, what day people listen on, who knows.

Speaker 3 (00:43):
It's a, it's a new month. And while we are recording for the first time in March, you are now listening to the second podcast of March. But you may have been watching Frank for the first time in March because Frank has entered the live stream community.

Speaker 2 (00:57):
I have of my gosh, you're counting that as I guess the ads a part of the family, the merge conflict, family of shows. Um, I called mine the Frank show because I'm very unoriginal with titles, but it was, I had a fun Saturday, so I decided I'm not going to work today, but somehow I ended up in a chat room watching, um, the famous seven sharp nine, um, doing some F sharp talk in the morning. I had so much fun in the chat room, I decided to go crazy James and do my own Twitch programming stream.

Speaker 3 (01:33):
Great. So I'm very, very proud of you because I know that you, I forced you to do some live shows for merge conflict. We've recorded some shows live actually in the past. And that was more like, Hey, hop on this Skype call and like, we'll magically make it happen. But you successfully, it seems like I, I was, I was out of town so I didn't get to see you, which is very sad. Uh, but you have successfully entered it. So I'm very curious how it all winds, uh, and, and what you're thinking about for the future.

Speaker 2 (02:04):
Ooh, okay. Um, well, uh, number one, I think it went well. It was a real blast. But I gotta tell you, I freaked out a little bit in the beginning and I realized I am so accustomed to when I speak into a microphone and take a short pause, James starts speaking like, yes, that's what happens.

Speaker 3 (02:28):
That's true. Yes. You have a, you have a partner in a speech, microphones, microphone, talk, microphone. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:36):
It's, I don't know if you exist, who you are, what, what's happening, but I know if I talk into this microphone and pause, someone will respond to it. It's very convenient. It's a very intelligent person on the other side. Um, but it was weird. Uh, when you do a show like this, it turns out it's a very solo feeling thing and which is quite the opposite feeling I had from just hanging in chat rooms, which feels like a very social thing. But when you're on the other side of them, Mike, wow. It feels very, uh, very solo. I think that's why got to work on putting the chat window up huge or doing something I don't know. Or just pumping in old recordings of your voice.

Speaker 3 (03:18):
It's fascinating because I sort of compare it to being a, like a news like radio news individual. But like, you know, there's so like NPR, there's so low, uh, news correspondence where they are reading the news and technically you are performing to a bunch of individuals but you don't see them, at least on Twitch, they can type to you but still your doing things and you don't get that feedback. It's not like presenting in front of a crowd, there's not people looking or giving you visual cues and sometimes the chat is very, very quiet, especially when you're just getting started. Um, cause that can be one of the biggest attractors as like, Hey, I hit record and stream and

Speaker 2 (04:03):
[inaudible]

Speaker 3 (04:03):
now what? Like what do I do if nobody shows up?

Speaker 2 (04:07):
Yeah. Well you nailed it. And I was just thinking this through now. Um, I started out presenting and that's how I started all my community work and all that kind of stuff and I realized, yeah, I can't, I couldn't look anyone in the eyes like you just said. Um, so you are performing for an audience. And so I think as the person on the stage, you still have to do an equally good job, but it's a much harder thing. Uh, not being able to take cues from the audience, seeing if a joke lands like I think there was a 22nd delay in the chat, it was bad. So here I am doing my standup routine and I have no idea if it's going over well or not or if people are just dying.

Speaker 3 (04:55):
It's true. When you first get started on Twitch or on some of the other services, you don't necessarily have the latency that you would like. Once you become an affiliate or a partner, they will drop that down. Uh, and my connection, it's only a few seconds if anything at this point as far as the delay goes, but even still, regardless, a few seconds can seem like a lot of time.

Speaker 2 (05:21):
Yeah, I can imagine. Oh, and I had no idea. I thought that was purely technical limits. I had no idea that that was actually some kind of throttle or something like that. Um, but as he said, um, it was most scary in the beginning, but once people started chatting and responding to things, I would say, um, things were, uh, things felt more, you know, lighthearted, easier, that kind of stuff. I also started taking a few moments, which I really debated out and I'll get your opinion on this. Is it good to take a break and just read the chat room and respond to the chat room or do you try to do that continuously? I think I personally found that taking a break and reading the chat room worked better for me.

Speaker 3 (06:05):
I tried to do both. Um, it depends because sometimes I get in the flow of coding and I'm doing some stuff and the chat will just kind of go and I think it's okay to say, Oh, okay, I'm going to, let's see what, let's see what the chat is up to, you know, and you kind of, you make them part of your stream. So I always try to do it while it's happening because there is some time sensitive information. My favorite part of streaming is when people in the chat room, um, fix my code or help me out. And then that's a real time paired programming, uh, mechanism, which I think is really great. But then sometimes we're on a topic or I'm coding and then the chat just goes all off just in different markets and that's when it's good to stop, take a breather. And, um, I, I sort of think of it like, Hey, a bunch of my friends are gathering around and sometimes people are having side stories and you want to kind of catch up on them and that and that's okay.

Speaker 2 (06:56):
Cool. Cool. Yeah, I think I can work with that. I think the chat rooms kind of the most fun part of it. I like it. I like using the Twitch stream as kind of a social excuse, not trying to do a perfect, uh, YouTube, you know, that's the gold standard and videos these days. I'm not trying to do a perfect YouTube, but you know, just trying to kind of have fun with the community and hang out with people on a Saturday. I got to pick what day to do these because I think maybe I'm jumping to the end here, but I think I've decided that I'm, I want to do these PR probably weekly. Um, yeah. So how do you pick which day to do it on? That's hard. People have schedules and such.

Speaker 3 (07:38):
Yeah, I, I kinda run it just like how we run the podcast the same day, same time every week go. Uh, even if you're doing it multiple times a week, it's good to have a nice little schedule. There's panels at the bottom of your Twitch stream where you can tell people like when you're streaming and doing stuff. Um, I, I pick Fridays because it's sort of my 10% time at work. Do you know about 10% time

Speaker 2 (07:59):
that Oh no. I think I heard about that first with Google. They gave you like open source time is a kind of like something like that?

Speaker 3 (08:09):
Yeah, similar. I took this from, um, some of my friends and Heather and some different, different people at different companies and similar to a Google data mine in 20% time or something like that that they did. But the whole concept was go and do something for X amount of time that you're passionate about but still applies to the company. So it may not be the project that you're working on, but you're building a skill, you're contributing some other way. So for me and my team, I like to say here's 10% time, which is four hours for all intents here on whatever day you want. But I like to say Fridays because it's quarter descended the end of the week and people leave early anyways. So take four hours and go, maybe learn something, do something. And I've been dedicating that to Twitch time. That's been good for me. And that works well for Pacific and East coast and Australia, but not necessarily Europe if they're going to come watch me. But that's how I picked my time and I, I put it on my calendar and I say, this is my Twitch time from noon. I put from noon to five because like once lunch starts, it gives me some ample buffer rooms. So people don't schedule meetings with me, but that's how I picked it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what time, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what works. Whatever works for you. That's what's important in the Twitch streaming.

Speaker 2 (09:25):
Oh, see I was taking the opposite tack cause uh, there were some, uh, nice UK people watching and so I was like, I'm going to work around their schedule. And then I remembered how terribly off Pacific time is from a GMT time. Like, Oh gosh, our schedules just don't line up. So maybe I'll do a morning show. I like mornings. Those are fun. Oh boy. Um, so I did, um, I picked a funny topic. I don't want the show to be all F sharp, but I decided I'm just gonna start with F sharp just because it's fun. No one else really does it that often. And I had a, like I said, just been watching an F sharp show that morning. And so I decided what's fun, what's right in open source library, let's write a tool. So you know, you know our problem making this podcast as coming up with the topic. So I was like, I'm going to come up with the first topic I think of writing this tool that I've wanted for a while.

Speaker 3 (10:23):
I did. Yeah, that's the best sort of thought. SOC is open source. That's really huge cause I watch um, Suz Hinton all the time and she is big in the JavaScript IOT space. There's always working on projects, getting people to do pool requests, reviewing the pull requests, getting people active. And it's the same on my channel. Right. I used to do a bunch of little topics here and there and then I said I'm just going to pick up a project and continue to work on it. And that's mostly, it worked well for me except for now I've been working on that project for a year, which is good and bad because I don't work on it any other times. I only work on it on the stream. I think that's kind of cool because if had you been watching, you can kind of see this progression and the things I go through and integrate new features. So I'm glad that you pick something. And did it go well? Like did you feel

Speaker 2 (11:08):
good? Yeah, it went way better than I thought. Um, so I was worried about some parts, uh, as in like actual coding complexity. Like it was things I haven't done before. I knew the majority of it was, would go pretty easily, but I was worried about that one spot and totally I slowed down. I had builders for probably a good solid half hour, you know, for slowly working through and figuring out how to use the library I was trying to use, I was trying to use the um, F sharp compiler service in this tool itself, right. In an F sharp. It was a very meta thing. It was kind of confusing to keep explaining on the stream because there were white type systems everywhere. It was a little confusing, but, um, it ended up working out really well and I ended up, um, copying and pasting code from old projects to help get me through those tough little parts. But it's funny, um, of all the responses I've gotten from people and out of all the clips people were taking, they seem to like the parts where I was struggling the most. And I find that annoying. I don't like that. I don't like struggling. Not my favorite part.

Speaker 3 (12:17):
No, but that's for a viewer sort of the most important part

Speaker 2 (12:21):
you think so it's terrible. Like, cause I'm nervous. Like I'm like, Oh God, what if I can't figure this out? Normally I'm lucky if I can't figure something out, I can spend four hours on it, but I'm not going to spend four hours on it on the stream. So, Oh, little nervous there. But thankfully actually, um, um, um, some help from the chat room. So that was always appreciated. So the chat room was doing its job. I have high expectations for the chat room.

Speaker 3 (12:51):
That's good. And that's what the chat rooms there for. I mean, to be honest with you, they are the interaction. Uh, so you're pretty successful. But let's tear into this and let's go back to the beginning. Someone's brand new, your BR. I mean, we've talked about some of the stuff I've used, but I don't think you've ever gone any further than that. What did you do? How did you get started? What's your setup? Because what I want to do on this podcast is demystify that you need to have all the crazy tools, cameras, decks, lights, widgets, popups, things to do stuff.

Speaker 2 (13:28):
Oh yeah, I didn't have any of that for sure. I kind of want some of it, but I definitely didn't have any of it. Um, and I totally, just for context here, jumped in. So I had been wanting to do a kind of twitchy thing for a while. I think I used to joke on this podcast that when I'm writing code myself, I narrate it in my head anyway. I think that's, I'm always practicing for a presentation. Like someday I might have to present this code or explain this code to someone. So might as well explain it to myself while I'm coding it. And so I think I've always kind of enjoyed narrating while I code. And so this was a perfect outlet. And yet James, I never did it because all those things he just said, um, I didn't know how to do any of them.

Speaker 2 (14:12):
I was embarrassed about like what my apartment would look like. I wanted to put up, I don't know, drapes you're supposed to like green screen, green screen. Yeah. I guess I could've just put Hawaii in the background or something like that. But they say like in YouTube, like every item in the scene is supposed to have significance. And I'm like, it's kinda the opposite for me. These are all very insignificant items to me. Please don't read into any of this stuff anyway, jump on in. So, uh, I knew one thing, I knew I needed software to do the screen recording and all that and I remembered that it was called OBS. So I typed OBS into my computer and my computer said, I have OBS. So I clicked run OBS and it crashed. And I was like, great, but you know. Yeah I know. Um, but, um, I run Catalina and so I'm accustomed to this many apps that worked for decades, no longer work.

Speaker 2 (15:17):
So, um, went to the OBSI download the newest version ran, ran first time, second time. And um, you know, I don't, I don't know if like the UI has improved or if I've gotten smarter slash wiser over the years or I don't know what happened, but I found the software to be absolutely delightful. I like setting up scenes. I liked adding things to it. I like moving things around. Uh, I kept playing with the resolution of my screen because I knew I wanted big fonts. But do you want to scale up your fonts or do you want to scale up all the Chrome? Because if you open a different window then you want the native resolution to be different. I had fun. I really love OBS. James.

Speaker 3 (16:04):
It's a surprisingly amazing. Uh, and I've seen it evolve over the last few years that I've used it. And I went to a few talks at Twitch with the developers that work on it. Cause it's all open source and kind of, I mean it's free, so it's, yeah, it's, I don't know how people make money. I mean they're sponsors, right? They're sponsors, but uh, like Twitch and Facebook and lodge attack and stuff like their sponsor projects. And you can sponsor the project yourself, but it is kind of quite amazing. The full developer, huge M Bailey is, has his own Patrion feed and it's very apt to, to kind of working on it, but it's relatively spectacular that so many people use this wonderfully open source piece of software that is not the most pleasant thing to look at or to get a grasp of, but also not the most difficult. You know what I mean? For what it's doing.

Speaker 2 (16:58):
Percent. Um, I actually, I'll get into one problem I had with it later, but for now I want to think in compliments. Um, I knew I wanted like a couple of different scenarios, like, um, maybe a slide up for an intermission. If I want to take a break or a slide up, if I don't want to have my webcam on something to show or if I don't want to have my desktop on. And I was like, gee, I wonder how I'm going to create these different kinds of scenes. And then I looked down and there's this list called scenes and a button with a plus and I'm like, I'm going to hit that plus and it created a new scene and I was like, what do you want to add to the scene text? I'm like, yes, I want to add text image. Yes, I want to add an image. It was just simple. I loved it. Um, I feel like it would work well if you're doing um, edited videos too, as for capturing all your raw footage and all that, use OBS to record, not just stream and start making YouTube videos too. Not getting into that. That's way too much work, but real time streaming seems easier.

Speaker 3 (17:56):
Yeah, I use it in fact for doing all of my YouTube video as well, because you have your scenes and I, there's, there's scenes, but there's also collections kind of like profiles. I mean, so there's profiles. So I have a James stream, I have an intender stream profile, and then I have a video capture one. And each profile has the scenes in the settings of each of them. So by default you're some default untitled profile. Um, but yeah, it's really, really good because everything's at your fingertips. Like you can just log into your Twitch account. It just kind of works and you're the, the terminology makes a lot of sense. You're transitioning between scenes, uh, like a show, like a show, right? You have like, here's a commercial break and now it's on this ad. Or now it's like on the intro or it's on the out-tro. And these are kind of things that you're used to.

Speaker 2 (18:50):
Yeah. Um, maybe I can pick your brain for a moment. How do you deal with it with a, do you use a multi-monitor setup for doing this or a single monitor set up and how do you prevent, um, doing the whole inception thing to people? Like I would want to bring up OBS and change some settings, but

Speaker 3 (19:09):
it would create, you know, a mirror world. The evil mirror world. Yeah. So this is the, this is the trick in general. So, uh, Suz Hinton has a great blog post. I will put links into our show notes to my live stream setup. I have a get guest on get hub that I have. I usually keep it pretty uptight. Config files. I'm getting scared now. I dunno. It's, it's just a very much like, Hey, how do you set up your software? And like, here's how I do it. Um, Oh, okay. Let's see. That's not a blog entry. It is a blog entry. That's not a blog entry. That is exactly what it is. Um, and now Suze has a great blog post, um, about how she uses a single Mac MacBook pro to do it. And what she does is she only captures the top left of her screen, you know what I mean? And then she makes LDS like the bottom right or whatever off the side. And then whatever she wants to be on stream is on the top left. So she says here's the IDE which is going to be on the top left, which is cool. Now I use two computers. Ah tricker yes.

Speaker 2 (20:19):
So I thought you were going to say is multiple desktops. I thought that was going to be the more elegant solution here. So I'm really curious about the whole cropping thing. I guess that makes sense cause it's pretty simple. You can just move the cropping rectangles around. Now how exactly are you pulling off to huge or

Speaker 3 (20:38):
so the first question, the first question is why to computers and not just two monitors. I'm just, I don't even want to start. Just start James educate

Speaker 2 (20:48):
me.

Speaker 3 (20:49):
So the reason I don't use two monitors it because that's what I did when I started and the problem I have there is that my main computer is older. It just can't handle doing the stream. The video and coding, I'm capturing my GoPro that I use, doing all my mic input and also coding and compiling and deploying to emulators and simulators. It just can't handle it. And when my computer comes under so much stress, you start to drop frames just like playing a video game, you know what I mean?

Speaker 2 (21:25):
Okay, yep. This makes sense. This makes sense. So yeah, you want a media transcoding, whatever production, what's the word? There must be a wonderful like Hollywood term for that line terminal or something.

Speaker 3 (21:42):
Yep. Online terminal. I like that. Yeah, pretty much. And so what I have done is when I first wanted to stream video games, you need a capture card. So if I have an Xbox or an intended to switch, you can buy something called an El Gato HD 60. And there's a bunch of these, uh, some are internal PCIE and some are USB and you buy one of these puppies and um, what it does, you put HTMI in and it will show up as a, as a video source inside of OBS on your computer. So I have my main computer, which is OBS. It has my camera, it has my microphone and that computer has a capture card and the other computer goes into it and captures it.

Speaker 2 (22:27):
Okay. Okay. Sorry, you just capturing one window then and that's the other computer kind of stuff.

Speaker 3 (22:32):
Capture the capture the whole, anything that's on that computer, the whole thing, the whole, the whole shebang. So when I stream, I have two monitors on the left is my streaming computer, which is not capturing like the desktop, it's just in info is coming in and audio is going out. And then on my other monitor is the other computer and that's what's being captured.

Speaker 2 (22:57):
Whew. Okay. But to rewind, none of that's necessary. No. Um, yeah, a single monitor worked fine. I would pull it up. We had enter the mirror world. I'd change a setting and minimize it real quick. So you can do it all off of one screen too. Um, I guess if your computer can handle the compiling and transcoding all at the same time. Yeah. Okay. But then I did hit one stumbling block. Well, a couple, there's always a couple with me. Um, number one is I just had multiple Twitch accounts because like an idiot, I sign in with different online services and none of them reconcile with each other and I have no idea which one's called which. So I was just guessing at which are my Twitch accounts to use. That's fine, who cares? But then I would log into the account and I'm looking for a button, anything James, literally anything that says start streaming now or a record button, just throw me a bone here.

Speaker 2 (23:56):
Anything. And I'm like, how does this online streaming service not have the start recording button? And it was funny because I would open Twitch on my iPad and it literally had a start recording button. So I'm like, wow, how is the iPad version of more sophisticated than the web version? But that's the state of affairs. That's how things are. And it turns out, and I just guessed at this and I got right, you start recording from OBS itself, there's some magic server thing happening and you press the record button and magic happens and it just starts going live. And it freaked me out at first.

Speaker 3 (24:33):
It's very true. Yeah. So there's a big, uh, there's two big scary buttons that are right next to each other. Inside of OBS. I want to start streaming, I want to start recording. And you don't want to hit start streaming when you actually meant to record because then you're streaming and yeah, when you log into your account on OBS, there is a key, previously you had to enter this key, you would go to twitch.tv, get the key. This magical key allows anybody in any service to stream to Twitch as you. So it's that magical. Yeah. Yeah. You have to be very careful with it and you can reset it of course, but very careful now, um, you can just log in with your Twitch account and then may magically knows how to do it. Um, yeah. And then it just uses art T M P RTMP. That's what it is, is a standard protocol. Interesting. Standard protocol. All of them use it. YouTube mixer, Twitch, RTMP, all of them. Real time messaging protocol.

Speaker 2 (25:30):
So I must have gone through this setup once before. Um, thusly OBS was already installed on my computer because the API key was already in the settings. So I had the awkward task of going through my various Twitch accounts to figure out which one that was actually going to post to. So I had to reverse API key.

Speaker 3 (25:51):
Yeah. Now, now what you can do is you should be able to go into OBS settings and you can just select Twitch as a source. You can log in and then you'll see the chat room, you'll see all your settings inside of OBS has docked stations. It's amazing.

Speaker 2 (26:04):
Oh cool. Okay. So maybe I should reauthenticate or something in there probably. But

Speaker 3 (26:11):
no, that you just installed OBS, you had a key and you just streamed and you had a camera, right? You have a camera, a webcam, and the microphone you have is this microphone. You got that to show up and work I assume? Yeah, yeah,

Speaker 2 (26:22):
totally. Totally. Uh, so I lucked out on the microphone. I, I went through the OBS settings at first and I was pretty sure it was doing the right microphone. It's tricky on max cause there's some built in microphones. So you gotta be careful not to select that puppy. But James, as always, I did have in fact Mike trouble throughout the recording. Oh here's what happened. Kickoff. I'm super nervous because like I said, I said some words and I paused and you didn't speak. And that freaked me out at first and then I remembered, Oh yeah, I have to speak now. So that happened. And then, uh, some of the first things from the chat room was, uh, your audio has panned all the way to the right and so you're not coming in through the left headphone Lastic classic. I don't know what I did wrong. Um, I looked at the mixer and indeed the mixer buttons, hardware button was in mono versus stereo. So I played with the mixer. That didn't help things. I found one setting in OBS that seemed like a great place to set my option and it said I needed to restart the stream. And I said, I can't do that. Knock, not restarting this going full forward. Um, but now that I think about it, it's actually kind of find to restart a stream, isn't it? It doesn't really bother people too much.

Speaker 3 (27:46):
Uh, pretty much terrible. Um, okay. Yeah. So, so it depends because once the stream stops, sometimes it doesn't auto restart and they might see another ad and that becomes a problem. Um,

Speaker 2 (27:58):
Oh, ads. Oh yeah. Those things are pretty bad on Twitch. Okay. Yeah. So right.

Speaker 3 (28:05):
My, my assumption here is what has happened that most people, if you're getting started probably won't run into, is we use a mixer, uh, an audio interface that we have set to mano. And what happens here is when OBS picks it up, it thinks it's in stereo. So even though it's coming in in mono, um, it's only getting one side of it. So you need to go into the advanced audio mixer and say, make my microphone mono. There's a check box.

Speaker 2 (28:31):
Yes. And so I found the wrong checkbox. Basically there's two check boxes. I found the wrong one. Yes. But thankfully the chat room came and to save me and through some very slow twenty-second, late, late and see delayed messages, uh, pointed me to the right setting and I failed everyone's both of everyone's ears.

Speaker 3 (28:56):
So here's the pro tip here is if people getting started before you get going, there's a few things I would like to disappoint people to because Frank is absolutely correct. You can go to OBS, get your webcam, set up, a few things, go boom, right. Um, two things, two of my top top recommendations. Um, there is a twitch.tv, um, like stream tester. Let me see what it's called. If you just type twitch.tv stream tester, where's that Twitch Twitch stream test? Or hold on, let me, let me go through this Twitch stream. There's a inspector.twitch.tv. I'm gonna put this in here. Now this is cool cause what you can do is you can, you can stream to Twitch. It gives you a special code to append onto the end. It's like a test stream. And in the inspector, it will analyze your bandwidth up and down to make sure that all of your settings are correct and if you're dropping frames are not super important.

Speaker 3 (29:55):
So really, really nice. That's number one thing. Cool. So you can do that without worrying about accent and weight broadcasting. Got it. Exactly. Exactly. Number two, before you actually go and stream for the very first time, just do a test recording. Hit the start record button. Okay. Do five minutes of shenanigans, test out your settings, hit stop recording, watch that back and you'll know that's what your users will see. It's great. That's perfect. Um, I I probably should have done that especially we'll get into the other newbie mistake I made around recordings but w w we'll get there too. Um, I I still don't think I would've caught this one though cause what I have been able to tell it was mono not stereo. I don't know in your eardrums and your eardrums away, what have you comment on one side I wasn't using headphones.

Speaker 3 (30:49):
I might not have noticed that was one good thing over doing a podcast. No need for headphones because there's no one talking to me, so I don't have to hear anything. That's true. Yup. So that unless you're listening to music and then you would need that, what's your, what are your feelings on background music? Is that something you do on Twitch background? There's a debate. So funnily enough, uh, Clancy, James Clancy, he, he listens to music in his ear drums, but he doesn't broadcast that out to Twitch. No, see, I won't do that. We're a group. We're, we're either listening to it together or we're not. Yes. So I, James Monta Magno, I like music at a very low level. I have it out. I have the music, I like 1%. So very faint in the background. Just goes, I use a service called pretzel. It's pretzel.rocks. That'll be in the show notes there.

Speaker 3 (31:44):
And the reason I use this, because let's say you just use Spotify, um, you use Spotify and you're listening to music or use an iTunes and when you're streaming it's all going to be great. But then as soon as your stream ends and you have a video or you upload that to YouTube later, all of your audio is going to be censored because that is music that you're not allowed to rebroadcast. So shame on you. Sure. Okay. So all of your audio, anything at all that you say while the music is playing will be muted out? So that's the downside. If you want to have an archive. So I use pretzel.rocks, which has a bunch of different categories of chill music and EDM and hip hop and all sorts of things. And it's all MCA, a DMC, a free music and I pay, I don't know what is it? Let me see here. $5 a month cause two doesn't have some subscription. That's $5 or $60 Legion. That's pretty good. For me. $60 a year for free music is pretty good. I just like sodding. Just something

Speaker 2 (32:48):
royalty free music. I mean it's hard. Like if you search for a royalty free music, you go to the some of the worst ends of the internet. And so paying for a legit service actually works out pretty well. I would say I'm not doing it, but I'd hate to go to those other websites like, Oh, what virus am I getting today? Uh, so I'm not sure. Did you answer my question though? From an audience perspective? Uh, music or no.

Speaker 3 (33:14):
Oh, I think, I think relatively positive to be honest with you. Um, I always have as long as it's at the right level and it's not really distracting. Um, people have been really positive and all the music that comes from [inaudible] dot. Rocks. I have the one that is like, um, basically there's not a lot of, there's not a lot of heavy vocals at all. It's mostly just background music, like, you know, elevator music, but better. Um, so to me it's really good as long as the levels are really good and it's not interrupting your flow on like YouTube playback. Some people have complained, but not too much. There was one time where I did, uh, an actual presentation, uh, stream. So I had just done a presentation at work or something. I was prepping for a presentation. It was like, what's new in visual studio 2019 or something. I was like, I'm just going to do this presentation today and just sort of go off and answer questions at the end, like a, like a webinar and I had music on for that and people were like, it was kinda distracting cause you were actually doing a presentation. Whereas I'm just alive coding, not really doing a presentation. Some music is sort of helpful in general in that regard. So

Speaker 2 (34:28):
it's interesting because I noticed kind of for the first time shows on YouTube that I would swear swear on hot Bible that did not have music in the background. When I crank up the sound, they all have music in the background. So there must be something to it about it. It, I don't know, it just fills the void. Maybe it's a little creepy just having a voice without some kind of background home or something. I don't know what it is. That's why I was really curious to hear your opinions on it. And I like the fact honestly that you like music. I definitely don't need the music to program to, I concentrate better I think without it. But I always use music to get started programming. I don't need it like to continue though or anything like that, but just to fill the void so it's not a empty background. Yeah. So, um, you mentioned one thing earlier and I was curious about this. Um, I said I started a project on there and it's an open source project, but I honestly don't think it's going to be that useful to too many other people, but it's fun to work on and all that kind of stuff. Um, I asked everyone at the end, should I limit myself to only working on this during the stream? And I was genuinely curious. I wasn't sure what the protocol was and pretty much everyone said yes. [inaudible] stream only buddy.

Speaker 3 (35:56):
Yeah. Yeah. So you agree with that? I agree with that. I think that, I think that's nice because then people are, it's like listening to a podcast or watching a show. You don't imagine if you started watching a show and then magically episode two is just missing. And like what happened, you know? Um, and that's really, that's really the, the, the kicker there is, unless you're doing your own Porter class and you're like reviewing your pull requests in the beginning, but then why didn't you just live stream that, I guess, you know? And that's sort of what I think of is when I'm working on Hanselman forms, I would like to work on it a lot more. I could be way more done, but then I don't, because I want to just kinda, you know, make it happen as it kinda goes.

Speaker 2 (36:37):
I don't really, yeah, I'm not good at restraint James. Like when that pot podcast, when the show ended, I had so much energy and so many ideas for like what else to do with the app. I'm like, should I just do a second episode right away? And I'm like, no, Frank, stop, breathe, you know, let the episode like finish and be out there. And so, um, so I have multiple feelings here. Jameson, I want you to walk me through all of them. Okay. Number one. Um, is it okay to just work on something once a week? I've never paced myself like that. I obsess over things and then finish them and then abandon them. That's what I do once a week. Really. That's fine. Can I do it more than once a week?

Speaker 3 (37:26):
Yeah. You can do it more when you can. You can code every day if you want to.

Speaker 2 (37:30):
Okay. That won't annoy people if I'm just like, Hey, working on this project again. Nope.

Speaker 3 (37:34):
I think you have to be comfortable because when you live stream, it is a, you have to be aware that, Hey, I am live streaming right now, which means you, you do, you're a different person, a little bit on the live stream. Not completely, but you're doing, you're, you're engaging with the chat. You're at a different cadence in general and the video camera is on. So if people are upstairs banging around, you know, and doing whatever you were expecting a package and that, that's gonna happen on air and you just kind of have to prep yourself for it. But, uh, no, I'll, I'll, I'll watch a Adam who does this, like bought land, like, you know, game or whatever he's worked on. He's streamed for like 700 days straight. So just goes to town to go for it. Have a schedule, like if you're gonna, if you're gonna go Monday to Friday at 10:00 AM do it Monday to Friday at 10:00 AM, just go for it.

Speaker 2 (38:22):
Okay. I was thinking regular schedule, but then can you interrupt it every so often? But whatever. These are the little details I'll figure out along the way. I'm not trying to build an audience of aliens here, so just trying to have a

Speaker 3 (38:36):
little bit of fun because I think it honestly, it was so much fun. I enjoyed it. It would have been more fun if you were answering my questions in my ear. But aside from that, I had so much fun. Good that that, and that's what's important because all of the whizzbang features, all of the stream schedules, all of the things, the, you know, once you, once you have to enjoy it. Right? And I think that when I talk about how we got into podcasting or why a podcast or if people should start a podcast, I said, just go for it. Just start. And if you like the experience of it and you enjoy that, then all the other bits will happen later on. Right. We didn't have the best audio equipment when we started. We didn't have the best website, we didn't have the best way and we still don't have the best of everything.

Speaker 3 (39:21):
Right. But we've grown our collection because we enjoy it. Right? We didn't do it to make money. We do the podcast because we like it. I like to do the live streaming because I like it. I like coming in and all I know, you know, Janice Q and I know mortal and I know all these different people that are coming in my chat room. And then sometimes I meet them in real life and I'm like, Oh, that's the, the person behind the, the username, you know? And it kind of blows my mind like, Oh, that's cool. And it's like a bunch of people, friends hanging out, um, and coding and that's it. Making coffee. That's what I do. So yeah. And thanks everyone, uh, that listens to this show because you hope pay for them. Microphone. That made my audio. So go that much. It's true.

Speaker 3 (40:01):
Yeah. I think all my best content will still be with you James. But all my, all that nerdy F sharp content, I have a place to put it now. Good. I like that. Good. Well you can go to a twitch.tv/frank Krueger. Uh, yeah, I think it is slush. Frank Kruger. I believe that's the account I settled on. The, the the only one that's not slashed for Clara. I'm so perfect. So I tried. I don't think I have access to my own account. No. Uh, yeah. Well go check them out and go hit that fall. If you want to follow me. I stream on Fridays at 2:00 PM Pacific and that's at Jane's mountain. Magna Twitch dot. TV slash needs wants and I know everything is James wants a Magnus odds are there. Uh, in general. But yeah, I'll put some links to some of that stuff. If you have more questions about live streaming, getting started, hit us up in one of our Twitch chats or send us an email.

Speaker 3 (40:49):
Go to emerge. Conflict out FM. You know what you'd like to read more if this was interesting to you. I kind of put Frank on the spot since he just randomly got started, but I get so many questions about this all the time that I'm glad we actually had a got a chance to step back to the beginning part for you, Frank. Yeah. And thank you James for answering all the questions. I really should have asked you before doing it, but Hey, this worked out too. Exactly. And you just gotta get started. So there you go. Well, thanks everyone for listening. Hope that you enjoyed this week's episode. Of course, go to merge conflict. NFM like I said, you can hit the contact button, you can tweet at us and you know all the things you can now interact with both of us alive on the internet, on twitch.tv. So that's going to do for this week's merge conflict. So until next time, I'm James Monta mag. Now I'm pry cruiser.

Speaker 1 (41:34):
Thanks for listening.