Here I bring you the lastest episode of Sparks of Life. You might notice that is very similar to my last mix, RNG, and has the same intro as one of my old mixes (I can’t quite recall which right now). Still, I ended up with what I mix my best mix yet, I love it.

So anyway, I leave you with the tracklist. Enjoy!

Tracklist:

Cheers.

Tracklist:

liam K - RNG

01 - Above & Beyond - Good for Me (liam K's Intro Edit)
02 - Gary Proud - As One (Original Mix)
03 - Tomo Pralle - Homesick (Temple One Remix)
04 - Dave 202 - We are One (Instrumental Mix)
05 - Matt Bowdidge - Slip Back (Original Mix)
06 - Magnus - Velvet (Original Mix)
07 - Devilect & John dubs - Flaming Hearts (UCast Remix)
08 - Serhiy Klimenkov - Chavash (ReOrder feat Dave Deen Remix)
09 - Matt Bowdidge - No Room to Breathe (Original Mix)
10 - Sly One vs Jurrane - Everything to me (Giuseppe Ottaviani Remix)

Initially, I named this mix as TSOL004, but due to a mix up with my posts and due to the fact that my subsequent mix got accepted for rotation on DI.fm, I decided to give that mix the name of TSOL004. I fucked up, perhaps, but I wanted to keep continuity there.

Now here, I’m posting that mix under this other name. Just for the record, I call every mix I make as Irrational Sessions, and eventually one of them get to adopt other names, that’s why you might see the numbers jump 3 or more spots in the numeric sequence.

Tracklist:

01. Ilya Soloviev – Reflections (Original Mix)
02. Ralphie B – Bullfrog (Original Mix)
03. Sunny Lax – Always (Matt Skyer Remix)
04. Cloudriver – Daylight (Right Face Remix)
05. Estiva – Les Fleurs (Juventa Mix)
06. Adam Foley – Fourteen Falls (Original Mix)
07. Arisen Flame – More Than a Feeling (Uplifting Mix)
08. Digital Sundown (Original Mix)
09. Arkadi – S500 (Dark Mix)
10. Juventa – For That Special Girl (Original Mix)
11. Estiva feat. Josie – Better Days (Daniel Kandi Proglift Mix)
12. Chris Metcalfe – First Encounter (Original Mix)
13. ReOrder – White Sands of Ibiza (liam K’s Almost Dub Edit)

Enjoy.

This time, I’m taking this one to in a very very dancy direction. When I was mixing TSOL004 I ran onto a bunch of tracks that I couldn’t fit on that particular set, along with other tracks that came after locking the tracklist. So, since I can’t stay with a surplus of good music, I put them together, along with 2 old tracks, to make this MONSTER of a mix.

As usual, I’M LOVING this new mix. It’s perhaps my most dancy set after TSOL001, to the point I was thinking on making this TSOL005, except I repeated a couple of songs, which totally defeats my intention of always including new songs on that line of mixes.

Here’s the tracklist for those interested:

01 – Mad Eye – Sorrow (Mango pres. Shoreliners Remix)
02 – Paul Webster – Forever Today (Tom Colontonio’s Remix – liam K Dub’s edit)
03 – Henrik Christensen – New Life (Original Mix)
04 – Activa feat. Will Atkinson – Access
05 – Thr3shold and the Visitors – Sektor V (Original Mix – liam K’s NO GUITARS edit)
06 – Daniel Kandi – Promised (Emotional Mix)
07 – Arisen Flame – More than a Feeling (Uplifting Mix)
08 – John O’Callaghan and Giuseppe Ottaviani – Liquid Fire (Temple One Remix)
09 – Protoculture feat. Shannon Hurley – Sun Gone Down (Aly & Fila Remix)
10 – Gary Proud – As One (Original Mix)
11 – Impulsive Drive – Blue Skies (Bjorn Akesson Remix)
12 – Aly & Fila – Rising Sun (Bjorn Akesson Remix)

Enjoi!

After so much trouble to find the right tracks, I’ve finally come up with the right arrangement for the new episode of Sparks of Life. I’ve been preparing this mix for about 3 months now, but I was missing certain key tracks to call it final.

As far as broadcasting these on DI.fm or any other radio stations, it is something out of my plans. I may still send my mixes to DI but I’m not expecting them to pick them up, I’m entirely going to have fun doing my own thing for the time being.

Enjoy!

EDIT:

The universe has a nice way to come around for irony.

A week after I posted this mix (the original is found here), I ended up finishing a second mix, which I initially called Episode 6 of the Irrational Sessions line. Perhaps not surprisingly, the mix got accepted for rotation on DI.fm, which is quite funny considering this wasn’t such a polished mix (or so I thought) as the original TSOL004 was.

Anyhow … I won’t fill you up with my never-ending rhetoric (cause then I truly can’t stop), just know that I interchanged the mixes, due to how they’ve developed to be (a consequence of my extreme lack of organization). The mix found here is the one currently being broadcasted on Digitally Imported, the name change was to keep uniformity of my mixes that are being broadcasted. Here’s the tracklist:

01. Mad Eye – Sorrow (Mango presents Shoreliners Remix)
02. Protoculture feat. Shannon Hurley – Sun gone down (Original Mix)
03. Pushout – For You (Ilya Soloviev Progressive Mix)
04. Henrik Christensen – New Life (Original Mix)
05. Activa feat. Will Atkinson – Access (Original Mix)
06. Thr3shold and the Visitors – Sektor V (Original Mix – liam K’s NO GUITARS edit)
07. Daniel Kandi – Promised (Original Emotional Mix)
08. Arisen Flame – More Than a Feeling (Uplifting Mix)
09. Gary Proud – As One (Original Mix)
10. Impulsive Drive – Blue Skies (Bjorn Akesson Remix)
11. Aly & Fila – Rising Sun (Bjorn Akesson Remix)

If you have access to the DI.fm’s forums, if you may, please rate my mix, even if you dislike it. I appreciate every single critique I receive, no matter how harsh they are as it helps me be a better DJ.

Enjoy.

For this time, I’m posting a new line of mixes that don’t necessarily involve anything special, it’s just me sitting in my mixing station putting songs together, with not much forethought. I decided to call these as “Irrational Sessions” (yeah, again, I suck at naming stuff). This is mix number 2, as there’s still another set that goes by this line of mixes, except I gave it its own name. More on this mix on its own post later on.

The idea is that I’ll have mainly 2 line of mixes, one being Sparks of Life, dedicated only to the “serious” side of things, while Irrational Sessions would be dedicated for more of just spontaneous mixing where I’m not tied to a fixed time frame or content (not that I care for that anyway). Due to that, this series of mixes might be a lot more common.

Here’s the tracklist, feel free to comment and bash me over it.

Yes, it’s kinda cheeeeeeeeeese.

liam K – Irrational Sessions 02

01. Julian Vincent feat. Cathy Burton – No end (Relocate Main Vocal Mix)
02. DJ Governor – Shades of Gray (Original Mix)
03. Arty Twilight – Tonight (Original Mix)
04. Mango – Friday Coffee (Paul Keeley Remix)
05. Manendra & Eva Kade – Always (Ahnken Sunset Mix)
06. The Thrillseekers vs M.I.K.E. – Effectual (Deep Voices Remix)
07. Dash Berlin – Disarm Yourself (Dub Mix) // aka Waiting 2.0, ughh
08. Espen Gulbrandsen vs Julian Vincent feat. Maria Nayler – Perfect Sky (Original Mix)
09. Nic Chagall feat. Jonathan Mendelsohn – This moment (Prog Mix)
10. Matt Darey pres. Urban Astronauts feat. Kristy Thirsk – Black Flowers (Josh Gabriel Remix)

To download click this –> FYUGLYLINK#!@#!@!!

I sent this mix to DI.fm about a month ago, but (at the moment of this writing) I still haven’t received an answer, so I’m assuming they haven’t accepted it for some reason, or are too busy to attend my request just yet. Kinda sad, as I think this is a way better episode than the last one. Either way, I decided to post this here, just in case anyone may happen to come here and is wondering why I haven’t posted anything lately. xD

So why it’s “sort of” a new episode? It’s only cause I’m still editing this mix nearly every single day to find a better arrangement of the tracklist. When I sent the mix to DI for consideration, I was pretty much happy with it to the point I locked the tracklist and simply decided to improve the transitions while not adding anything new. But, as it tends to be the case when I listen to a mix repeatedly, I started to find things I wanted to change, so I got myself to try new arrangements and add a couple of new tracks to see how they’d sound, and so far I still haven’t managed to improve it, anything I’ve tried so far hasn’t got any better.

However, I’m still happy enough with this mix to put it up here for download. Just beware, that I may replace this mix at a later time, should I find any error that may be bothering me, or in the case I may have struck some good luck and managed to get it into DI.fm’s rotation. I’m not likely to make drastic changes, so if I publish a new “version” of it, it’s only for fine tuning. You may call it bugfixing, which it really is per say.

Here’s the tracklist:

liam K – Sparks of Life (Episode 003)

01. Manendra feat. Eva Kade – Always (Original Mix)
02. Mango – Friday Coffee (Original Mix)
03. Pushout – For You (Ilya Soloviev Progressive Mix)
04. Matt Skyer pres. Skyover – Elixir (Original Mix)
05. Sean Tyas – Banshee (Original Mix)
06. Daniel Kandi – Promised (Original Emotional Mix)
07. Running Man pres. Fifth Dimension – Open your eyes (Original Mix)
08. John O’Callaghan & Timmy and Tommy – Talk to me (Original Mix)
09. Eva Kade – Pushing Hands to the Heaven (Poshout Dub Mix)
10. Juventa – Bente (Original Mix)
11. Julian vincent feat. Cathy Burton – No end (M6 vs Relocate Instrumental Mix)

To download, CLICK MOI!

This is nothing but a minor fix to my a A State of Trance mix, which later came on to be Episode 1 of the Sparks of Life line of mixes.

I’m posting this as a new mix, simply cause the original is still being broadcasted on DI.fm on a constant basis, and I’d rather keep it that way for those that are still coming to my website looking for exactly what they listened to at the radio station.

The difference with this version, is I removed the many micro-speed-adjustments I put on the initial mix (RPM varies across the entire mix), which was due to the time limit of 60 minutes I was given in the ASOT 450 contest. Also, this version has a new track at the end. Other than that, everything else is exactly the same.

I personally prefer this one, but more often than not my opinion doesn’t match the one of my listeners, so I’m leaving it up to you.

Click ALLOVERME

This one took me quite a bit to detail, specially the opening, but I think it turned out perfectly, definitely one of my favourite openings.

The songs, although definitely not the newest, made an excellent blend along the set. I haven’t had this much fun making a mixed set in a long time.

Anyway, here’s the tracklist:

liam K – Sparks of Life (Episode 2)

01. Temple One feat. Hannah Ray – Autumun Leaves (Intro Mix vs Estiva Remix)
02. Lange feat. Emma Hewitt – Live Forever (Steve Brian Remix)
03. Fabio XB – Make This Your Day (Gareth Emery Dub Mix)
04. Right Face – Morning Dew (Original Mix)
05. Evbointh – One Wish (Daniel Kandi and Mark Andrez Remix)
06. AMR – Sand Dunes (Daniel Kandi Club Mix)
07. Leon Bolier – Shimamoto (Aly & Fila Remix)
08. John Askew – To the Floor (Original Mix)
09. Sneijder – Warsaw (Original Mix)
10. Nacho Chapado & Smaz feat. Sue McLaren – Between Heaven and Earth (Aly & Fila Remix)
11. Reorder Pres. Group Number One – A World of Trance

And the link:

Click moi!

If you’re in an urgency, scroll down to “OMG a Fix!”.

Background

Apparently, WMP12 (and possibly 11, too) is an incredibly stubborn piece of software that *insists* on keeping a Library of all your media, be it pictures, movies, music, anything that it can possibly read. This usually wouldn’t be a problem, as it can keep things organized and centralized in a very annoying and awful nice place, but all that sweet concept ends when it finds media that it cannot recognize, such as corrupted music files, or avi movies encoded by some experimental and very advanced program that only its creator can understand; when this happens, WMP simply goes into brainless mode and stubbornly locks itself trying to read the media, consuming all your CPU for as long as the process is active. Normally, you’d think reading a massive library would take quite some time to do it, except WMP will never succeed, ever (trust me, I’ve left the computer alone for hours to see if it eventually manages to do it).

The best solution for this, would be to check your media files and be sure they’re not corrupted, to be standard compliant, not broken, virus free and other stuff like that, but this is not so simple when you have tons of stuff lying around, specially if you’re someone that works constantly and simultaneously with lots of media.

OMG a FIX!

So, the solution? There seems to be quite a few suggestions. Take this URL for instance, it’s from the Microsoft forums. The tech guys in there suggest disabling a lot of things, or even tell you that your installation is simply badly done so you should reinstall everything. Hell, some even tell you to not have your media on places like Music, Videos and Pictures, but why would we want to do that as a workaround in the first place? Those suggestions are terrible.

My solution, though a workaround still, is a bit less “user friendly”, but it’s a permanent one for as long as your installation stays the same. It involves tweaking a file that seems to be holding the Library data. When this file is locked to not receive data (read-only), WMP stops trying to fill it, and therefor stops to try to index your media. The file in question is called “CurrentDatabase_372.wmdb“, which might be named differently on your system, and is allocated at “C:\Users\[Your Username]\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Media Player” for users on Windows 7 and Windows Vista.

All you gotta do is find it via Windows Explorer, then right click on the file, then choose Properties, and then change the attribute “Read-Only” by marking the checkbox, followed by Apply or OK. I recommend that you either backup the file or delete it and then replace it with a dummy with 0 bytes on it (such as an empty text file by creating a new one in the same directory). Obviously, you should do this when both wmplayer.exe and wmpnetwk.exe are closed. To do this, just goto the Windows Task Manager, then Processes and kill both of them.

The inconvenience? Well, by doing this you’re completely disabling the Media Library for Windows Media Player, and while this may seem like a bad trade-off, for those of us that really do not have a use for it, it’s a completely harmless sacrifice. The Library won’t be able to receive any changes unless you go to that directory and revert the changes so the file is no longer Read-Only.

Also, if this seems like a bad solution for you cause you want to keep your Media Library, you should check the state of your files. The lockout suffered by either of these processes reflects an issue with your media, which doesn’t necessarily mean you’re doing anything explicitly wrong, it’s just that WMP is very tricky when it finds something it doesn’t like. This often happens when you hold mp3s in your Music directory, that were encoded by some of the newest (or perhaps strangest) encoders of late, which again it doesn’t mean they’re bad, it’s just that they may be using instructions that WMP doesn’t recognize.

Anyway, hope you find this solution useful. If you got any questions, feel free to drop a comment.