Hey guys, welcome back to Dan week. I'm gonna be answering some of your questions today. You
left a bunch on Floatplane, so let's get to it. A bunch of people ask who the f*** is Dan Besser?
It is me. I'm that. My title here recently changed. I'm no longer the infrastructure and
technical specialist. Now I am a technical architect, whatever the hell that is. Basically,
as a technical architect, now I'm responsible for designing systems that are kind of more
company-wide. The documentation system and kind of the data management stuff, and that involves
a lot of liaison with every single department and kind of interfacing with everybody's different
workflows to kind of find a system that works for everybody. A lot of process management and kind of
continuous change improvement and working through procedures and things like that that
people should be using. It's very much more like higher level conceptual stuff and then
some implementation as well. Then you tack on other things to that like when show is tacked on
to what my job is and stuff like this and short circuits and everything like that and doing
infrastructure rebuilds and things like that are mostly handled by Sean. So now I'm assisting with
those rather than it being like core duties. Core duties are process improvement and change
management. Logan's Media Hub asks, what got you into music or audio? I'm not entirely sure.
I started classical training and piano when I was quite young and just kind of eventually
accidentally found this neat little program. I think it was called Anvil Studios, which let
me make little doodles and things like that. And I was always doodling on the piano and that kind
of just spurred things along. My dad was a guitar player and hung out with a lot of bands back in
England and I don't know. It just kind of continued from there. Gordon Freeman, well known scientist
and professor asks, what kind of music do you listen to? Most of the stuff that I listen to is
kind of down tempo electronic, although it seems to change constantly. Basically, I'm not necessarily
into one kind of music. I'm always looking for a section in a song that triggers what I call like
the cheesecake brain. You know, your brain loves fat, salt and sugar and cheesecake kind of has
everything. So your brain's just like, blah. And so there's always like one little nugget inside
of a song that I kind of like. I really enjoy metal, but only like the really intense stuff that
kind of has a lot of pig squeals and stuff like that. For example, AXCX, if you know them, they're
pretty stupid and great, but like them a lot. As for what I use for reference tracks, I kind of have
a nice Spotify playlist that goes through everything. Mostly they're tracks that I've listened to a lot
where they have really weird things in them, or they're varied enough to kind of keep things
interesting. A big one that I keep going back to is The Wheel by Song, which is kind of a nice
varied song. The start kind of is quiet, and then it kind of gets more intense after that. I've got
some BTS in there, which is also interesting, you know, like what people would listen to a lot.
Pop Music Austin has better production quality, or at least simpler production than a lot of other
kind of indie artists or smaller bands. So that can kind of give a nice general feel to
what things are going to sound like, but often a good mix can make up for a bad speaker kind of
thing. So there's another one in here called Pink Lemonade by James Bay on extremely high-end
systems, especially if you're using something lossless like Deezer. What that'll actually show
you is that the song wasn't mixed very well on. It's kind of bad. You can really only hear that
it's bad on super high-end systems. I've got a pair of HD 800S's, and you can immediately kind of tell
that something's wrong with that song. Another great one to listen to speakers on is I'm Sorry
by Madonna, because for some reason, whatever remaster they did, the S in Sorry is extremely
sharp and painful. I have a playlist of reference tracks, and perhaps we'll make that public,
and then we'll post that. Mad Economist asks, what's your dream speaker setup? I think my
dream speaker setup is actually a nicely treated room. I've already even got a pair of NS10s,
and I have the HS8s, also a Yamaha, but my room is bad, and you know, you put any speakers in
there. You get a pair like a Bluetooth speaker. It's big, and it'll probably sound okay, especially
if your room is sort of wide, but short. That's bad. You want like a long and thin kind of thing,
and then you also have to position your desk properly, and you have to make sure the speakers
are far enough away from the wall, and you also have to have like reflection things like a scout
room. If you had a six-foot room, that's bad, but there's some calculators online that allow you to
decide your room and find your modes and nodes, and what frequency they're going to interact in,
and then you can kind of place your desk there. But a lot of the time, you don't have a choice. So
Nat for Sale asks, what's your favorite game release in the last five years or so? I really
enjoyed Bellattro for a while. I enjoyed Helldivers 2. BG3 is also fantastic. The new Armored Core
that came out a year or so ago. I find myself, I'll play a game for a little while, and then I'll
kind of just move on quickly. I wouldn't necessarily say I'm the biggest like sweaty gamer or anything
like that, and there's not a lot of stuff that catches my attention for a long time. The title I
kind of keep returning to though is Thumper, which came out in 2016, unfortunately. I think right now
I'm global rank like 50 or at least top 100, which is kind of interesting. It's a really fun kind of
rhythm horror game. I really like rhythm games and that sort of thing, but often they can just be
a little bit too technical and not necessarily fun. This is kind of a nice mix of both, and it's the
only game I've ever played that I've like, I get, and then I'm good at, and then I can score consistently
at. So yeah, that's pretty damn good. Pick it up please. As for game OSTs, I think there's a really
good YouTube channel. I think it's called 8-Bit Music Theory, and it seems like Nintendo titles
often have some of the best. I think for a lot of titles, I'm more into like the fun stuff rather
than the atmospheric stuff. When I'm writing my own OSTs and things like that, I'm always trying to
make them invisible in a way, but sometimes if the music is like bright and front and center,
then that can kind of get onto your brain more, and it's just kind of like more casual and cool.
I like that sort of thing. And Nintendo games seem to really push for that type of thing,
where the music is front and center and really part of everything. A Fishkin04 asks,
how do you stay on task? For me, it's kind of difficult. You know, I've got ADSL, AADHD,
I guess, you know, broadband, and it's difficult. It is really difficult. There's a lot of stuff in
my life. I have basically blocked every single hour of the entire week to things, and there's
maybe a couple hours left that I haven't found placement for. For me, I've tried notebooks,
I've tried calendars and things like that, and it all just kind of doesn't work. You know,
to-do list, task things, apps, everything, it doesn't work. Google Sheets for me works really well,
because it's cell-based, you can kind of lay things out and reorder them really easily.
The biggest thing that I found was countdown timers. There's a great program that you can
get on Windows called Time Left. It's kind of free. You can have one countdown timer,
and you can set up a bunch of automations and stuff like that. For me, ADHD, one of the big things
is time blindness, or at least a malformed perception of time. And so there's a lot of
mental bandwidth of like, when do I leave? When do I have to do this thing? How long do I have?
And so say I'm taking my lunch break at noon. When I look at my clock there, I can see exactly
that I have 24 minutes left, or like two hours and 40 minutes and 30 seconds, which allows me to go,
okay, now I don't have to think or conceptualize how much time is required to do a task. And I can
go, okay, well, this is probably going to take an hour and 15 minutes. So yes, I can dive right into
that. Everything is kind of planned, and it removes a lot of mental bandwidth of time management,
and knowing how long I have to do something. If I have to go to bed at 10 p.m., I know that
I can play video games for two hours, and then ignore the timer and go to bed at 2 a.m. anyway.
Casper Explorer asks, does Dan play any instruments besides piano? I guess I play accordion,
which is a type of piano, I guess. I also play the saxophone. Lisa stopped playing that stupid
saxophone. It's alto for me. I guess baritone as well. They're both in E flat. Does synth count?
Yes, it counts just for you. I play the computer. Mirawin asks, why did you want to work at LMG?
So I had been in the music industry for about seven years, I think, before that point, and the
ceiling is pretty small. If you can think about the pool of people who are professional engineers,
it's pretty small, and it's also pretty incestuous. I think there's maybe three or four studios here
in Vancouver, and generally you have a senior engineer and a junior engineer. So I was acting
as a junior engineer, and so what? That's like one of eight people. I'm not going to be going to
move to work for a big studio. The guy I trained under had been working as an engineer for longer
than I'd been alive, and then, okay, well, you think about the big concert. It's like, okay,
who's Beyonce's engineer at a concert? That's going to be like one person. Where do you go
in that kind of space? I mean, I was lucky enough to get into a studio at all. You see all these
people coming out of recording college and stuff like that, and they're, okay, well, I want a job
now. And, you know, how are you going to get a job? I actually started there as a camera operator,
and eventually moved up into engineering and things like that, because I had been doing it
forever. I'm mostly self-taught, and I'm still bad, and I wish I was better, and it's just practice
all the time, and I don't know how to get to that next level. It's very difficult. It's kind of like
a black art, almost very, very strange. We did a lot of live concerts too, so live sound mixing,
and that whole kind of thing turned into a full production house. So that's kind of,
I grew from just a camera op to the technical director of like the whole studio. We did
concerts every weekend because our main booth was set up for live orchestra, so the main recording
room could seat about a hundred person orchestra. In 2019, pre-pandemic, I did 192 concerts,
which was a lot. And then I also moved into developing our own like online streaming platform.
I used a system called MUX, which is on the back of AWS, and then we have player integration,
and VODs, and live streams, and all that sort of stuff. And then a team of editors, including
myself, who would edit the footage and kind of get it going during the week, and studio maintenance,
and everything. It was a tiny team, basically just the two of us, and we had the head engineer,
and then myself, who did everything else. If there was a fire, then I had to put it out,
and there was always like 15, 20 fires at the same time I needed to get out of that environment.
That's one of the reasons why I started working at LMG, and it's really nice here because if I
die in a car accident, the business doesn't fail, like someone can do the job, and that
is kind of nice. I can take vacations, and I can take weekends off, and I still do WAN shows,
so my Fridays are still destroyed, but now I get Saturdays back, and having a social life is
sort of possible. I'm gonna knock on wood for you dying. Don't die. Don't die. I'm gonna knock
on wood for you dying. No, no, no, no. Sammy gets me. I love you, man. Shrishach asks,
what are your interactions like with Linus and Luke outside of the WAN Show? I would say it's
pretty similar, to be perfectly honest. Obviously, there's a little bit of heightened antagonism,
I think, on the WAN Show set, but I mean Linus takes that elsewhere outside of the WAN as well.
It's maybe a little bit more friendly and jovial than the WAN Show set. It's kind of heightened a bit
to boost the entertainment thing. Like, I would never really jump in with quips or digs kind of
outside of the WAN Show. Wouldn't necessarily be appropriate for kind of like a business working
relationship, but sort of, you know, water cooler, you know, he makes fun of my car, that sort of thing.
Luke is less like that, but of course on the WAN Show, we don't have as much antagonism,
kind of fun place to dig at him, and he can dig back, and it's good. It's like
cathartic in a way, but very similar, very, very similar. Curse-Rotted Great Wood asks,
what kind of questions are you allowed to answer on the WAN Show? Are there any guidelines and
stuff like that? WAN Show questions are a bit difficult. There's not really been any training
on it. You kind of build up an intuition after doing it for a long while. That's one of the
reasons why we initially wanted just a single host, or at least Linus did. Originally, the plan
was to have four or five rotating hosts so that we would only lose like one Friday each. Having
repeat questions every single week is very irritating and kind of boring, and because we got, you know,
two, three hundred merch messages every single week, being able to know what those three hundred
messages were for the last few weeks is really useful to be able to keep the show interesting.
I'm always looking for something that can spark a discussion, so that intuition isn't perfect.
Sometimes I think questions that would be really interesting are actually really boring, or Linus
won't engage with, or Luke won't engage with. It's just kind of like, yep, okay, next question.
Another stuff that I think is a little bit innocuous, and that I would expect a yes from,
actually sparks a 40 minutes of tangents and things like that. Some of the stuff that I would
kind of archive and not really push through are maybe anything with a link, anything that seems
overly antagonistic. Obviously, I answered a question about wages ages ago that I thought was
pretty innocuous, and that caused an entire spark of controversy as well. So generally anything
business related to anything that would be me speaking for another person. So if somebody asks
like, what does Sammy think about this? I would probably respond to that and say like, I don't
know, ask him. And then next question, right, just kind of like throw it away, dumb answer kind of
thing. I think the intuition now is basically don't say anything. And that's really sad and it
makes me sad because I'd like to have a more engaging discussion and like respond with
heartfelt things or give information about the business. But everybody seems to misconstrue that
and it makes it disappointing to be able to engage with things. How do you think Chewy did
when he was doing the merch messages for the charity stream? I think it was pretty good.
I'm trying to train him as a replacement for the wanshoes. Right now there's no
replacement so I can never take a Friday off. That's dangerous because again,
bus factor of one, if I get hit by a bus on the way to work, right? Then there's no, yeah.
Thanks Sammy, wishing for death. He's so mean. Right. And I think he did okay. There wasn't
too many merch messages during the day stream. This may be 20 to 30, maybe 50, something like that.
And Chewy would be perfect because he's already the community manager and already knows how to
not start controversy. So he can pretty much say whatever he wants and we've worked together
a few times on dealing with the fallout from **** dead, I've said. FancyPingo asks,
what's the most frustrating thing about running the wanshoe? Right now it's been the computer.
There's been decades of bugs with that computer. A couple streams ago it just hard freezes right
before the show, right? I can't do anything. It takes a stream down. I can't trust my equipment
and it makes wanshoe extremely stressful the whole time, every single time. Fridays are not a good
day for me. I don't, it's awful. Every stream is like the computer failed again and I built another
one and that failed in the same way. We put a $13,900K on a test bench and I ran some
Cinebench and benchmarks and things like that. It was failing after 15 seconds, after one second.
So I gave that to Labs because it didn't make any sense why this was happening and then we
built another system on AMD and I was running Cinebench, Furamark, MSI, Buster, Prime95,
eight Chrome tabs full of 8K video and live streaming simultaneously and playing back audio
in Reaper and it ran for two hours straight just humming along and I was also doing some
Photoshop work too. So the computer was 100% everything, 95C perfectly two hours. So that's
been in service now and it hasn't failed yet. The stream cart exploded on the last stream we did this
Wednesday or last Wednesday I think it was. Right before the stream the whole computer
exploded so I put the wanshoe to computer in there and then now we're building an identical
system out of AMD which is going to be like our streaming cart and probably combined within a way
kit because we need to figure out how that works a little bit better. It needs to be easier.
Dr. Raccoon asks, you use VMIX. How long did it take you to kind of grasp it? VMIX is very similar
to any kind of streaming platform. It's very similar to OBS except it's a little bit more advanced.
It costs money. It's about $700 for the 4K one but VMIX has a lot of features that OBS doesn't
and it also doesn't require any plugins. It does everything in the box. It also has a bunch of
advanced things too like web scripting and integrated tally lights. We can turn any phone
that we want into a tally light for anything. It's great. One of the things about VMIX is it has
four sub mixes so it's like four OBS instances in one that can all talk to each other. That takes a
little while to grasp but the same thing can be applied to OBS in that the way that you lay out
your scenes and sources in a very particular way so that if you make one change in one place
it propagates everywhere. Also some techniques like sending in a married audio and video mix
or just sending in a single pre-mix like I do with Reaper. It can simplify workflows as well
and make it more stable and you just kind of find these things that make your life easier eventually.
So it's a long ongoing process but the whole kind of setup is I don't know took a year or so to kind
of get it down pat. Lucky Falcor asks what is the part of the streaming setup that you're most
proud of? I would definitely say the audio routing system. It simplifies everything. It means that I
can get set up in like five or ten minutes. I don't have to worry about Linus's mic level.
Luke and Linus can whisper and everything will kind of be fine and Linus can also
scream into his microphone and there's no clipping in it. It's all really stable. McCreed asks where
do you get your sense of humor? Trauma. Just lots and lots and lots of trauma. Cheeky Pran asks
what was the biggest what the f*** that you've had at LMG? Why are we doing it this way? It
was almost immediately after I started. I looked at the ShortCircuit set and I think I asked
Andy like how often do you tear this down and he basically said oh no never. It was really
interesting coming from my kind of well-oiled production machine at the studio where we could
get a live band live stream setup. The whole thing tested. All the cables routed in about
two hours with two people. Nobody here is lazy and they all seem to like working. I'm lazy and I
don't like working so the less work that I have to do the better. Wyzen Daniel asks what is a typical
day for you at LMG? That is pretty difficult to pin down. I do a lot of random stuff. I mean even
before this Sammy I was crawling up around in the ceiling in the in the lab here pulling cables that
I ran when we first started moving in here. Yesterday I was playing with some of the Q-SYS system
and doing audio routing for the Dante system for Smash Champs that's coming. You know I'm doing
tech support and things like that. I'm fixing people's problems. It's just all over the place
and it's really weird. So following me around for one day would not be an accurate representation of
what I do and thankfully quarterly goals and things like that have been restructured so that
my role is now much more fungible and like malleable to kind of do what the business needs rather than
doing tasks which would actually be a huge detriment. KCBANews asks well please show us
your home audio setup. I am actually doing a LTT. We're doing an upgrade at the end of the month.
It's not an AMD upgrade but it's a magnetic cable management upgrade. I believe Sammy was first.
I'm up next which you'll see my full recording setup there which we have to rip out. I currently
use a studio console with a 24 track mixer and things like that and that's all gonna go because
it sucks. I have like this much room for a mouse and keyboard. My mouse pad is actually like taped
to a clipboard so that I can use my mouse. Yeah it sucks so I want the thing gone and I'm building
a custom desk with Sebastian right now so you'll get to see everything. It'll be pretty cool and
hopefully hopefully it doesn't look too bad. Dab Jam 1990 asks what's the most non-tech hobby you
have. I was doing cross stitch for a while. Yeah that's kind of fun. It's very cathartic and chill.
I'm doing one called crippling anxiety right now. Oh yeah I also like draw and doodle and things like
that. I do stippling. I've never really been able to transfer that to digital art so I guess
analog art. Yeah acoustic art. Phoney Tony asked what happened to the Fold 3. Do you still daily
drive it? Where is it? What's going on? I tried to daily drive it for a while and it just wasn't
working for me. It's a stupid phone and I don't like Samsung phones anyway. They're really locked
down and stupid and dumb and I hate them and they're bad so I gave it to my dad. He runs it now.
You can't say that to a Korean. I mean Long live Samsung. Sorry Sammy. I'm crying right now.
Bay Princess asks what is your ideal DAC? I actually really like the JDS Labs one. Jake got one
out for a video that we were doing. I think like the audiophile fake products or something like that
and that was amazing. So I like a DAC that is loud, transparent, cheap and simple. If you're
talking more about interfaces and stuff like that, like an ADDA, I don't know whatever's in
your budget. Literally none of it matters. Just use your laptop. It's totally fine. And lastly we
have a question from Tordek here. Christmas album remaster when? I don't know. Should I answer this
honestly or should I give a dumb answer? The honest answer is if I were to do that it would have to
be work sanctioned. I did do a track that was like a Christmas song that I wrote in the style
of the Christmas album. And the problem is that there's a little bit of overstep and overlap
there between what the company does and what I would do in my free time. So it needs to be company
sanctioned otherwise it's a conflict of interest. So maybe never, maybe a new Christmas album,
maybe some sort of agreement there, but I think it probably doesn't need it too much.
So for 3000 likes you'll do it. For 3000 likes you'll make Luke allow me to do it.
For 3000 likes we'll ask Luke. We'll ask Luke, yeah. And he will say, gotta get the f*** off Dan.
Thanks for tuning in. Not yet Dan. We actually have a speed run. Oh speed run, okay. Yeah,
it's gonna be one minute of the million bread questions. Oh yeah, bread questions. Oh god.
Favorite type of bread? Favorite type of bread? Sourdough. If you had to pick a type of bread,
what would you pick and why is it sourdough? It's sourdough. Bread? Yes. Favorite bread phones?
Brioche. Everyone's asking your favorite type of bread. I want to know what you put in slash
on your bread. More bread or beef. How do you get me to buy a blood plushie? Plushie, oh my god.
I felt how soft they are. You can think of me. Pressed against your cheek.
Uh, Dan, what would you do a bread tasting as a full pain exclusive? Dressing the loafs
beforehand in wigs slash glasses slash hats and giving the names before tasting is my
recommendation. Sounds a little horny but that's up to you Sammy, absolutely.
What happened to the bread? Uh, it got eaten by rats.
Should a wancho be more or less bread based? I think that meme is dead.
Bread than deep bread and if so, how often and what kind?
Bright bread every day. And that's all the time we have. I was enjoying that. That's fine.
You know what, just for you, we'll do the last two. All right, two more, two more, two more.
How hard is it to bring in all that bread Dan? Oh, there's so much cake.
I think they meant money but it might have been cake. Oh, I don't know, my wallet's fat,
just like my carb intake. What kind of bread have you experienced in life?
What kind of bread was your favorite? What kind of, what are your favorite bread toppings?
Do you like to toast your bread toppings? What are your top five bread and topping combinations?
I'm not repeating that. A yeast infection, I don't know.
Thanks for tuning in. I guess the next one will be a desk rant or something like that.
I also did one about my car, which Linus makes fun of all the time.
Yeah, I don't know. Have a bread-y day. Bye.