Jayce
Fully Optimized
- Messages
- 3,056
- Location
- /home/jason
It's no secret that weddings cause a huge magnitude of stress, because naturally everybody involved wants things to go right. A lot of people would much rather pay somebody who's done “xyz†service dozens of times before than to attempt it on their own... and for good reason. Considering our rather short engagement (7 months), along with a home renovation that we were taking on by ourselves entirely, we were a little strapped for cash. After I continually received price quotes of 1500-2500 for 4 hours of DJ'ing, I decided that handling this task on our own might add a nice unique feeling to "our" wedding, so I began to explore this avenue a bit more.
I had asked quite a few people about this, and quite honestly I think I even posted here at one point. The general opinion was most people were saying the music has to be a home run hit and it shouldn't be messed with. I'm here to tell you today... we did it ourselves, and we rocked the house. Continue on for the full (and long) story...
It all started with the fact that I've been working on this home renovation for a few months... redoing the bathroom from ground up, new flooring in several rooms, paint, trim, new doors, etc. My Ubuntu 12.04 powered desktop downstairs would sit for hours running playlists through Clementine with my stereo blaring loud enough so I could hear it upstairs over top of the nail gun, drills, and sanders. As the wedding approached, I couldn't help but to think – how is this any different? After all, the last wedding I was at I think the DJ spent more time talking with me about mountain biking than he did up at his Macbook-powered DJ setup. His playlists were just running through the tracks one at a time just like mine were.
Okay, so I may be getting a little ahead of myself. What do you get out of a DJ that you wouldn't get from your own home brewed setup? Well, you get the voice of course... somebody to introduce your wedding party, etc. That's definitely important. I talked to my brothers and they were willing to handle that task, so I was able to check that off the list. This worked out nicely because my brothers are musicians, so they were going to be playing live music during the ceremony with no real task to do afterwards. Things fell into place quite nicely here. You also get the obvious "know how", seeing as though a DJ would clearly know how to make things flow. But I kept asking myself... I'm an anal son of a gun when it comes to things like this... maybe I COULD spin it off? Now... let's be logical here... what else is there? Well... I couldn't come up with anything else at this point... so I decided to move forward and see what happens.
Looking through my music library, I realized just how wide of a music interest I had. I may listen to Pearl Jam and Pink Floyd continuously throughout the day, but I found quite a lot in there. Anything from Celine Dion to Marvin Gaye and back over to The Temptations and Mariah Carey. (I know, crazy right?) A few downloads later of additional tracks I wanted, I set up some mock playlists. I Googled around to find what music other users had played at their weddings. After all, this may be my wedding and I'll undoubtedly want to hear specific music, but it's not music appreciation night where people should be forced to listen to my stuff repeatedly – it should be a music library that's relevant as well.
I wanted things to flow with little fuss, which of course adds to the headache. As an example, my wife wanted us to walk in to “I Gotta Feeling†by Black Eyed Peas. After listening to the song a few times thoroughly, I realized there was a perfect part in the song to begin our walk into the reception. But how could we time it accordingly? That's where Audacity came in. I ended up taking the full track, chopping only the section I wanted, and exported it as “I Gotta Feeling – Chopped.†Couple that with our first dance song and we had the perfect 3 track playlist.
Black Eyed Peas - I Gotta Feeling
Black Eyed Peas - I Gotta Feeling – Chopped
Eric Clapton - Wonderful Tonight (Live version)
That way my brothers could just hit “next†when they were ready to announce our names, thereby playing the exact song at the exact time. Thanks to Clementine's transitional behavior, the tracks don't magically stop and start bluntly. They transition and blend into one another, which with a typical full length song, you would hear some degree of a pause. Since the 1st song was ending mid-track, and the 2nd one was starting mid-track, the transition left almost zero notability when they swapped. Couldn't have asked for a nicer switch.
Moving along, I set up some additional playlists in accordance to the events of the evening. I had a “Dinner Music†playlist, which contained all sorts of music. It was mostly slower laid back songs that played. A few of them off of the top of my head:
Pearl Jam – Yellow Ledbetter, Thumbing My Way
Mother Love Bone – Stargazer
Candlebox – Breathe Me In
Pink Floyd – Comfortably Numb, Wish You Were Here, Us And Them, Have A Cigar
Incubus – Wish You Were Here
Stone Temple Pilots – Wonderful
Alanis Morissette – Head Over Feet
Red – Best Is Yet To Come
Train – Calling All Angels, Drops of Jupiter
Jack Johnson – Better Together, Breakdown
Oasis - Wonderwall
There were also some songs by Bush, Keith Urban, Skid Row, Mumford and Sons, etc. Some of the additional tracks also contrasted the “style†of the music above quite well, which was nice because it added a lot of variety. What's above is just what I recall offhand. Overall I probably had about 50 songs on that playlist, some of which we never got to because we flowed into the “Dance Music†playlist before we knew it. The dance playlist had all sorts of dance music on it, oldies and modern alike. Anything from 1950's jams to LMFAO's Party Rock Anthem. On this playlist I had about 75 songs, which was just barely enough. We only had a few tracks remaining by the time we packed it up, so I would say to over prepare as much as possible if you plan to handle this on your own.
Oh yeah! The gear. You need speakers and everything, right? I Googled around for local music stores and called each one asking if they provided rental gear. I was after a standard PA system, similar to what you'd typically see at a wedding. Most places had something on hand that fit the bill, offering them for about 100 bucks for 2-3 days. I ended up going with one place in particular who was 125 for 4 days, which included a microphone, two self powered PA speakers on stands, a mixer, and equalizer. They also spent about 30 minutes with me showing me how to use the setup, playing music straight off of a phone. Only difference is I'd plug the 3.5mm jack into my computer and let the software do the playing.
Thanks to the flexibility of the facility, we were able to have the entire day before hand to set everything up. This was nice because I was able to get the speakers set up and dialed in through the equalizer without any added pressure. That said, I had everything done in about 30 minutes, but a lot of that was thanks to the music guy spending time showing me how things work, plus the fact that I hooked it up in my basement the night before for additional testing. Note: Additional testing is super important. Lesson learned: Do not unmute the microphone when mic volume is maxed... the feedback will pwn your ear drums. SO glad I found that out the day before and not on game day when it would have been an epic failure in front of ~100 people...
So, how exactly did things flow? Well, I could say they flowed perfectly, but I'll highlight the synopsis here. My brothers did their acoustic guitar/harmonica playing during the ceremony (which was awesome), at which point when we went for pictures, they went to the reception and fired off the “Dinner Music†playlist so people had some degree of background entertainment, then came back out for family pictures. Once we arrived, we exchanged the subtle “nodâ€, at which point they swapped over to playlist #2, which was the 3 song Peas/Clapton playlist I highlighted above. Things transitioned perfectly and once done, we went back to playlist #1 (Dinner Music) which continued where we left off.
When dinner was about 3/4 done, I pulled out a projector (just unplugged the monitor and used the projector as my monitor) to show everybody a video I had been working on for months. It was a video that highlighted the stages of our relationship, from our first picture together on up to the quick 3 day beach trip we had taken 2 weekends prior. I had also utilized Kazam Screencaster, as I would zoom in with Google Earth to highlight different points in the country that were important to myself and my wife coming together (mostly because while we live on the east coast, Denver CO was very relevant to us getting together). Gimp was also in the mix, which is where I made a few custom slides of text throughout the video. This was the first time anybody besides myself had seen it. There was music to it as well and different video segments in there. It turned out perfect, and was proudly put together with Kdenlive and presented to everybody with the help of VLC Media Player. Once done, we swapped back to the “Dinner Music†playlist and let it run for another 15 minutes. After that, we kicked off the “Dance Music†playlist with none other than the B52's – Love Shack. Oh yeah.
The night continued with no fuss, issues, snags, etc. I felt confident in my computer running this setup, which has a semi complex drive setup that I felt was pretty bombproof. 60GB SSD for Ubuntu, and 2x1TB (mdadm RAID1 mirror) for /home. I did however have a secondary computer set up under the table with 12.04, Clementine, VLC, and all of the music/playlists ready to go in case something blew up, but everything was fine. The thing I loved most about this setup was... we did it. It was ours. It was our show, our time, our game, our rules. Any time I wanted, I just pushed the slider up for the microphone and began talking until I hit optimum volume while simultaneously bringing down the music channels just enough so I had slight background music while I spoke. That's how we made our own announcements. It was a lot of fun, and it was nice having some degree of control.
I'd like to highlight that this didn't come without a serious degree of vigorous testing and a huge magnitude of stress. Granted, a lot of the stress was probably from other things, such as our home renovation that I was working on 8-9 hours a day despite having a daily full time job, but it worked out due to the extra time we put in before hand. Was it worth it? Absolutely. Would I do it again? Absolutely. Would I recommend it to just anybody? Eh, not quite. The only reason I felt super confident in it was the fact that I knew Clementine and I had used it thoroughly for months prior with zero hiccups before I even decided to use it as the centerpiece application. Its default behavior was perfect. The only thing I changed was the transition time from one song to another. I clocked it back a bit so there was less “awkward silence†time in between each track. Overall, I was very pleased with how everything fell into place.
In conclusion, all points of the wedding that involved any sort of software was brewed up with open source software.
Audacity – The application that chopped necessary music tracks
Gimp – For making some custom slides in the video
Kazam – Allowed me to show a moving Google Earth based video feed of relevant locations in our relationship
Kdenlive – The application that put together the entire video
VLC – For playing the video I made
Clementine – The music application set up with various playlists
Ubuntu – The main operating system handling everything
It was our day. We had one solid shot... and we rocked it.
I had asked quite a few people about this, and quite honestly I think I even posted here at one point. The general opinion was most people were saying the music has to be a home run hit and it shouldn't be messed with. I'm here to tell you today... we did it ourselves, and we rocked the house. Continue on for the full (and long) story...
It all started with the fact that I've been working on this home renovation for a few months... redoing the bathroom from ground up, new flooring in several rooms, paint, trim, new doors, etc. My Ubuntu 12.04 powered desktop downstairs would sit for hours running playlists through Clementine with my stereo blaring loud enough so I could hear it upstairs over top of the nail gun, drills, and sanders. As the wedding approached, I couldn't help but to think – how is this any different? After all, the last wedding I was at I think the DJ spent more time talking with me about mountain biking than he did up at his Macbook-powered DJ setup. His playlists were just running through the tracks one at a time just like mine were.
Okay, so I may be getting a little ahead of myself. What do you get out of a DJ that you wouldn't get from your own home brewed setup? Well, you get the voice of course... somebody to introduce your wedding party, etc. That's definitely important. I talked to my brothers and they were willing to handle that task, so I was able to check that off the list. This worked out nicely because my brothers are musicians, so they were going to be playing live music during the ceremony with no real task to do afterwards. Things fell into place quite nicely here. You also get the obvious "know how", seeing as though a DJ would clearly know how to make things flow. But I kept asking myself... I'm an anal son of a gun when it comes to things like this... maybe I COULD spin it off? Now... let's be logical here... what else is there? Well... I couldn't come up with anything else at this point... so I decided to move forward and see what happens.
Looking through my music library, I realized just how wide of a music interest I had. I may listen to Pearl Jam and Pink Floyd continuously throughout the day, but I found quite a lot in there. Anything from Celine Dion to Marvin Gaye and back over to The Temptations and Mariah Carey. (I know, crazy right?) A few downloads later of additional tracks I wanted, I set up some mock playlists. I Googled around to find what music other users had played at their weddings. After all, this may be my wedding and I'll undoubtedly want to hear specific music, but it's not music appreciation night where people should be forced to listen to my stuff repeatedly – it should be a music library that's relevant as well.
I wanted things to flow with little fuss, which of course adds to the headache. As an example, my wife wanted us to walk in to “I Gotta Feeling†by Black Eyed Peas. After listening to the song a few times thoroughly, I realized there was a perfect part in the song to begin our walk into the reception. But how could we time it accordingly? That's where Audacity came in. I ended up taking the full track, chopping only the section I wanted, and exported it as “I Gotta Feeling – Chopped.†Couple that with our first dance song and we had the perfect 3 track playlist.
Black Eyed Peas - I Gotta Feeling
Black Eyed Peas - I Gotta Feeling – Chopped
Eric Clapton - Wonderful Tonight (Live version)
That way my brothers could just hit “next†when they were ready to announce our names, thereby playing the exact song at the exact time. Thanks to Clementine's transitional behavior, the tracks don't magically stop and start bluntly. They transition and blend into one another, which with a typical full length song, you would hear some degree of a pause. Since the 1st song was ending mid-track, and the 2nd one was starting mid-track, the transition left almost zero notability when they swapped. Couldn't have asked for a nicer switch.
Moving along, I set up some additional playlists in accordance to the events of the evening. I had a “Dinner Music†playlist, which contained all sorts of music. It was mostly slower laid back songs that played. A few of them off of the top of my head:
Pearl Jam – Yellow Ledbetter, Thumbing My Way
Mother Love Bone – Stargazer
Candlebox – Breathe Me In
Pink Floyd – Comfortably Numb, Wish You Were Here, Us And Them, Have A Cigar
Incubus – Wish You Were Here
Stone Temple Pilots – Wonderful
Alanis Morissette – Head Over Feet
Red – Best Is Yet To Come
Train – Calling All Angels, Drops of Jupiter
Jack Johnson – Better Together, Breakdown
Oasis - Wonderwall
There were also some songs by Bush, Keith Urban, Skid Row, Mumford and Sons, etc. Some of the additional tracks also contrasted the “style†of the music above quite well, which was nice because it added a lot of variety. What's above is just what I recall offhand. Overall I probably had about 50 songs on that playlist, some of which we never got to because we flowed into the “Dance Music†playlist before we knew it. The dance playlist had all sorts of dance music on it, oldies and modern alike. Anything from 1950's jams to LMFAO's Party Rock Anthem. On this playlist I had about 75 songs, which was just barely enough. We only had a few tracks remaining by the time we packed it up, so I would say to over prepare as much as possible if you plan to handle this on your own.
Oh yeah! The gear. You need speakers and everything, right? I Googled around for local music stores and called each one asking if they provided rental gear. I was after a standard PA system, similar to what you'd typically see at a wedding. Most places had something on hand that fit the bill, offering them for about 100 bucks for 2-3 days. I ended up going with one place in particular who was 125 for 4 days, which included a microphone, two self powered PA speakers on stands, a mixer, and equalizer. They also spent about 30 minutes with me showing me how to use the setup, playing music straight off of a phone. Only difference is I'd plug the 3.5mm jack into my computer and let the software do the playing.
Thanks to the flexibility of the facility, we were able to have the entire day before hand to set everything up. This was nice because I was able to get the speakers set up and dialed in through the equalizer without any added pressure. That said, I had everything done in about 30 minutes, but a lot of that was thanks to the music guy spending time showing me how things work, plus the fact that I hooked it up in my basement the night before for additional testing. Note: Additional testing is super important. Lesson learned: Do not unmute the microphone when mic volume is maxed... the feedback will pwn your ear drums. SO glad I found that out the day before and not on game day when it would have been an epic failure in front of ~100 people...
So, how exactly did things flow? Well, I could say they flowed perfectly, but I'll highlight the synopsis here. My brothers did their acoustic guitar/harmonica playing during the ceremony (which was awesome), at which point when we went for pictures, they went to the reception and fired off the “Dinner Music†playlist so people had some degree of background entertainment, then came back out for family pictures. Once we arrived, we exchanged the subtle “nodâ€, at which point they swapped over to playlist #2, which was the 3 song Peas/Clapton playlist I highlighted above. Things transitioned perfectly and once done, we went back to playlist #1 (Dinner Music) which continued where we left off.
When dinner was about 3/4 done, I pulled out a projector (just unplugged the monitor and used the projector as my monitor) to show everybody a video I had been working on for months. It was a video that highlighted the stages of our relationship, from our first picture together on up to the quick 3 day beach trip we had taken 2 weekends prior. I had also utilized Kazam Screencaster, as I would zoom in with Google Earth to highlight different points in the country that were important to myself and my wife coming together (mostly because while we live on the east coast, Denver CO was very relevant to us getting together). Gimp was also in the mix, which is where I made a few custom slides of text throughout the video. This was the first time anybody besides myself had seen it. There was music to it as well and different video segments in there. It turned out perfect, and was proudly put together with Kdenlive and presented to everybody with the help of VLC Media Player. Once done, we swapped back to the “Dinner Music†playlist and let it run for another 15 minutes. After that, we kicked off the “Dance Music†playlist with none other than the B52's – Love Shack. Oh yeah.
The night continued with no fuss, issues, snags, etc. I felt confident in my computer running this setup, which has a semi complex drive setup that I felt was pretty bombproof. 60GB SSD for Ubuntu, and 2x1TB (mdadm RAID1 mirror) for /home. I did however have a secondary computer set up under the table with 12.04, Clementine, VLC, and all of the music/playlists ready to go in case something blew up, but everything was fine. The thing I loved most about this setup was... we did it. It was ours. It was our show, our time, our game, our rules. Any time I wanted, I just pushed the slider up for the microphone and began talking until I hit optimum volume while simultaneously bringing down the music channels just enough so I had slight background music while I spoke. That's how we made our own announcements. It was a lot of fun, and it was nice having some degree of control.
I'd like to highlight that this didn't come without a serious degree of vigorous testing and a huge magnitude of stress. Granted, a lot of the stress was probably from other things, such as our home renovation that I was working on 8-9 hours a day despite having a daily full time job, but it worked out due to the extra time we put in before hand. Was it worth it? Absolutely. Would I do it again? Absolutely. Would I recommend it to just anybody? Eh, not quite. The only reason I felt super confident in it was the fact that I knew Clementine and I had used it thoroughly for months prior with zero hiccups before I even decided to use it as the centerpiece application. Its default behavior was perfect. The only thing I changed was the transition time from one song to another. I clocked it back a bit so there was less “awkward silence†time in between each track. Overall, I was very pleased with how everything fell into place.
In conclusion, all points of the wedding that involved any sort of software was brewed up with open source software.
Audacity – The application that chopped necessary music tracks
Gimp – For making some custom slides in the video
Kazam – Allowed me to show a moving Google Earth based video feed of relevant locations in our relationship
Kdenlive – The application that put together the entire video
VLC – For playing the video I made
Clementine – The music application set up with various playlists
Ubuntu – The main operating system handling everything
It was our day. We had one solid shot... and we rocked it.
