So I decided as a way to both motivate myself and get the word out about National Novel Writing Month I would do a series of live writing events in which I would live stream as much as possible while I write my NaNo novel. I had originally planned to start early this afternoon (11/3/14) but ran into a whole bunch of issue.
First up was my music playlist. A lot of the music I have on my old writing playlist is commercial and I plan to post all of these videos to YouTube. That meant making a playlist that wouldn’t get my videos flagged. So I spent a couple of hours downloading the music library for OCRemix.org (a most amazing video game music remix site) and then selecting tracks for my streaming playlist.
Once that was done it was time to set up the Hangout. Unfortunately while it was extremely easy to stream my writing window it was a complete pain in the ass to stream my music at the same time. I ended up installing a piece of software that created a virtual sound device that I could send my music player’s audio stream to and then select that as my microphone in Hangouts. At that point I thought I was done. Then I discovered Hangouts audio quality is pretty terrible. I could have just stuck with it but I really wanted the whole experience to be as good as I could make it. That meant switching venues. On to Twitch.tv!
Twitch is typically used to live stream someone playing video games. I’ve used it for this before and it’s actually easier to work with than pretty much any other streaming site I’ve used (including LiveStream, YouTube Live, Justin.tv (RIP), and Hangouts on Air). The audio quality is excellent, I don’t need any special software, and I already have a stream casting program from my video game streaming days. Viola!
So now everything is set though it took FAR longer than I wanted it to. It’s been a long and frustrating day but my work has paid off. It is now time to do my very first live writing event for NaNoWriMo!
If you read this in the next hour or so you can join the live stream on Twitch here:
http://www.twitch.tv/fuzzynerdcorner
Once the stream is done the video will also be uploaded to the FuzzyNerdCorner YouTube channel here: