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Converting Rekordbox History to Usable Text

One handy feature of the Pioneer DJ/Rekordbox ecosystem is the built in saved history of everything you play. This is really nice when you want to post a list of tracks you played in a set online. You can very easily export the history as a playlist in text format, but if you try to copy and paste that it comes out all garbled with a lot of extra characters. The problem comes down to the encoding of the text file.

The playlist export files are actually in utf-16le. Here’s a command that can be run in the macOS terminal (and most unix I imagine) to show you…

file -I BRC_2023_Fauxliage_Tues.txt
BRC_2023_Fauxliage_Tues.txt: text/plain; charset=utf-16le

And to use the content how we want, we need to convert it to another format. It can be converted to the very common utf-8 like using either iconv (included in macOS) or the simpler dos2unix command (install from homebrew).

iconv -f utf-16le -t utf-8 BRC_2023_Fauxliage_Tues.txt > BRC2023-utf8.txt; mv BRC2023-utf8.txt BRC_2023_Fauxliage_Tues.txt
dos2unix BRC_2023_Fauxliage_Tues.txt

That will get our file into the right format but we probably want to format it to show less information.

This clever command will output only the 2nd and 3rd columns (title and artist respectively) with a bit of text formatting …

awk -F'\t' '{ printf "\"%s\" by %s\n"  ,$2, $3 }' BRC_2023_Fauxliage_Tues.txt

The output is something like this…

"Track Title" by Artist
"Losing Ground (Extended Mix)" by Sultan + Shepard, Tishmal
"Enough to Believe (Jamie Jones Remix)" by Bob Moses
"Hate Street Dialogue (Original Mix)" by Rodriguez, The Avener
"Do It (Original Mix)" by D.Y.A
"Days Of Innocence (Dream Mix)" by Rhode & Brown, Benjamin Fröhlich

This saves a ton of time!

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Ciao 2021!

Pulling from tracks I’ve collected over the past few years, this is a lovely selection of musical treats for all ages and any occasion. This was our soundtrack for the final hours of 2021 as we bid a fond farewell to a year we won’t soon forget. It’s two parts light, one part dark, a splash of love, a sprinkling of admiration, mixed and shaken fiercely over ice.

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Sanctuary Sound, July 3, 2020

We put together a live streamed “party” with 8 or so DJs, and made an afternoon and night of it. That sort of thing is more fun than one might think, but we’re still looking forward to when we can do it in person again.

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We’re ok, but not satisfied.

The world has fallen apart and we’re doing our best to keep the things most important to us together. The people closest to me are all doing ok, and I’m very grateful for that. Things could be much worse, but that’s not enough. The people we have elected and put in charge of our greater well being are letting us all down.

All that said, life moves on, and we are adapting to our terrible and ridiculous situation. We are learning how to be together from afar, and learning what and who are most important to us. I am happy that I’m able to share some music and bright some days.

The Battery in San Francisco invited me to do a live DJ stream through their Facebook page, along with my good friends Bósa. The video is up on Facebook and on Twitch, but this is the complete audio from that night. I had a great time, and was able to share some new music I’m excited about.

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A Party Apart

My good friend Nick Stene had to spend his birthday staying distant from his friends and loved ones. In his honor we had a party apart from one another with 6 live streamed DJs and a group of 40 or so friends.

This was my first live stream (video and audio went to Twitch) and I had a great time doing it. These are some of my favorite new tracks and I’m jazzed to share them.

Follow me on Twitch!
iDALLAS! on Twitch

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They’re Listening

My wife reports that the robots (Alexa, Siri in our lives) are listening to her when she doesn’t expect it more recently. Anyone else noticed that?

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My nomination for the most brogrammer word of the decade: “performant”

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Books I read in 2018 (in full or in part)

One of my new year’s resolutions for 2019 is to read more books. I read a lot every day, but it ends up being a lot of articles rather than books. Some of the articles have good depth, but most are effectively just time-wasters, like most things in life. Books can also be time-wasters, but I usually feel like I got more out of the experience.

So, as a base line, here’s what I finished in 2018:

  • The Stand by Stephen King – I first read this in about 1989 when I was fully into his books. I read the extended version this time. I technically finished this in the last few days of 2017, but I want to include it as part of 2018 anyway.
  • Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters with Reality and Virtual Reality by Jaron Lanier – The newest book from the “godfather of virtual reality”. This is a fun book for anyone, but especially good if you are interested in tech history or VR.
  • Porcelain: A Memoir by Moby – A sort of techno version of one of those “rock n roll memoirs”. Pretty good read with a lot of cool history of the early days of the techno DJ scene in NYC.
  • On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King – Non-fiction and partly memoir, but mostly focused on the amount of work and focus it takes to write professionally. I love Stephen King’s way with words and got a lot out of this. I’m not a writer, generally, but this applies to pretty much any creative work I think.
  • Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel – I finally got around to reading this, years after it was cool. The best compliment I can give it is it was better than I expected. None of the ideas are mind-blowing these days, but it’s pretty quick and has some good ones.
  • Shadows of Self (Mistborn, #5) by Brandon Sanderson – I love the Mistborn books and this is one of the “Old West meets Victorian England” ones. Not as good as the original three, but fun.
  • Burn by James Patrick Kelly – One I picked up in the Humble Book Bundle: Super Nebula Author Showcase. I’ve been wanting to explore a wider variety of Sci-Fi and this is one of the ones I’ve read from it. It has some really cool ideas about the nature of life in the future, and what makes people happy.
  • Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen by Donald Miller – A marketing book I ran across with some straight forward ideas. The premise is that people are the hero in their own stories and they are looking for a guide to help them on their way. It uses examples from movies and seems like a reasonable way to think about messaging. I actually only read it about 85%, and feel like I got it.

I’m also currently reading a few:

  • Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge – A novel set in the future where wearable computing, augmented reality (AR), self-driving cars, and ubiquitous government surveillance are common place and almost everyone is continuously networked to everyone else. It’s far from utopian but it’s not really dystopian either. It presents all of this as just a setting for what’s ultimately a high tech heist sort of book.
  • Better and Faster by Jeremy Gutsche – This was a recommendation from a friend a couple years ago and I’ve been reading it off and on. It has some good ideas.
  • The VR Book: Human-Centered Design for Virtual Reality by Jason Jerald – A text book sort of format that aims to discuss all aspects of VR technology and design. If you haven’t guessed, I’m pretty into VR right now.

So, that’s not a very long list of books. It’s only 8 that I actually completed in the whole year. I’m pretty sure I can beat that in 2019 and my plan starts by converting some of my article reading time (mostly in Pocket) to book reading.

According to my Pocket reading stats, I read 2.9 million words, or the equivalent of 39 books, in 2018. I probably only skimmed some number of those, so maybe it’s only really 25 books worth. That’s still triple the amount of words I read in book form.

Any book recommendations to kick off my 2019?

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Reading: Building a StoryBrand by Donald Miller ( )

Currently reading: Building a StoryBrand by Donald Miller, ISBN: 9780718033323

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I finally read Zero to One. It’s not mind-blowing stuff, but I got some good ideas from it. After Peter Thiel’s recent political moves, I wasn’t sure what to expect. It’s overall reasonable and thoughtful stuff, even when discussing issues like the environment.