Before you play your set, here’s a guide on how it all works.

Streaming on imissmymates.club is all done through your computer, using a streaming URL and a streaming key. You have complete freedom in terms of how you want to play your set, whether it’s decks routed through your computer, CDJs/DDJs, or even a good ol’ Youtube set. Although I encourage you to play your set live because it’s fun and you can interact with the people in the chat room, you’re also completely welcome to pre-record your set and I will stream and archive it for you. You don’t by any means have to be a professional DJ!!!

If you’re playing live, I recommend that you read through this guide a little while before you’re due to go *on air*, just so you can be sure you have all of the software you need downloaded and set up and you can play your set free of any technical worries or issues when the time comes.

Before your set, you’ll be sent a password and a link to the DJ page. Once you have entered the password on this page, you’ll be asked to enter the title and start and end times of your show. When entering the times of your show, remember to do this in London time, as the site isn’t smart enough to do timezones yet! These details will show on the front of the site while you are playing your set!

Once you’ve entered these details, you will be given a URL and a unique streaming key to enter into your streaming software. Your stream won't begin until you enter these things into your software and press ‘start streaming’ (or whatever the alternative is in the software of your choice). If you don’t have streaming software yet, don’t panic!

Streaming software

There are several different programs and apps you can use to stream through imissmymates.club, and several of them are completely free! One of the easiest to download and get up and running is OBS, and there’s plenty of support online for it as it’s pretty widely used. OBS is technically video streaming software, but if you stream through imissmymates.club it will automatically convert to an audio-only stream. Streamlabs is another free software which works, and some DJ software such as Traktor and Serato apparently also have livestreaming capabilities. If you have a preferred software, just make sure it’s able to stream to an RTMP server (I barely understand what that means either don’t worry) and you will be fine.

You can download OBS here and read the OBS Quickstart guide to help you get up and running.

To add your streaming URL and key to OBS once you’ve downloaded and installed it, visit the main menu and click on ‘Preferences...’ (on Mac). Once the preferences dialog has popped up, click on ‘Stream’ in the side menu and copy and paste the streaming URL into the field next to ‘Server’ and the Stream key into the field next to ‘Stream Key’, and press ‘OK’.

Before your setup is ready, you also need to set up your computer’s audio routing.

Routing your computer’s audio

To stream from your computer, you will need to configure your audio routing to make sure the audio you want to play in your set is going through your streaming software.

If you’re using any kind of software to play your set, whether that’s DJ software, production software or our old friend YouTube in your browser, you need to ensure your computer’s audio is being routed through the streaming software instead of just coming out of your speakers.

There are so many different possible configurations of audio routing depending on the exact setup you prefer, so this isn’t a step-by-step guide but hopefully some useful pointers to help you get started.

You might also want to add multiple inputs, and use a mic (computer or external) to do voiceovers between tracks.

You could also route audio from an external source, such as vinyl decks, using an interface to connect them to your computer.

You will probably also want to set up some form of monitoring, so you can listen though headphones to what’s coming out of the stream.

Mac users

To get your audio playing from these various sources through your livestream software, you will need two things:

• Audio routing software (I’ll get onto this in a minute)
• Audio Midi setup (this is pre-installed on your Mac so you don't need to download anything here)

For audio-routing, there are many decent free options. A good one is BlackHole—it’s free (for the price of your email address at least) and has instructions here to enable you to get up and running. There’s also this guide on the OBS forums which walks you through the process of getting BlackHole to work nicely with OBS.

Another free one which does a very similar job is Soundflower which has sadly stopped being updated (RIP) but is still decent and seems to do the trick on my Mac.

Windows users

You might have a *slightly* more difficult time routing audio than Mac users because Mac makes it super easy for babies such as myself to get things up and running, and a few fewer options when it comes to freeware BUT don’t worry—VB Audio’s Voicemeeter is free and fairly simple to setup. You could also try the JACK Audio Connection Kit.

Streaming from physical decks

If you want to stream from physical decks, you’ll need to find a way to get the audio routed from your mixer into your computer as an audio input. Here’s a video which explains it better than I can! Here’s another one which shows you how to get your audio routed through your mixer into your computer.

Streaming using DDJs/DJ software

If you use something like Traktor/Serato/Rekordbox, here is a video that’s helpful (it uses Traktor but a lot of the stuff here applies across different software). Don’t worry if you use BlackHole instead of Soundflower, they essentially do the same thing so when Soundflower gets mentioned, just use BlackHole instead. Also, don’t worry about setting up a camera, it all just gets converted to audio in the stream!

Ready to go!

Once you’ve got your streaming software downloaded and installed, and your audio routed through your streaming software, you’re ready to go! It’s a good idea to do a test recording to make sure everything’s working as expected, and so you can fix any issues before going live.

Before you start streaming, make sure you are also recording your set! On most streaming software there will be an option to do this—on OBS the button is just below the ‘Start Streaming’ button. Once you have finished your set, you’ll be asked to upload this recording so that it can be added to the archive! If you don’t record your set, your livestream will be saved to the server once you’ve finished, but just in case there are any technical errors like the stream cutting out momentarily because of a dodgy internet connection then it’s good to have a backup.

It will then be uploaded to the imissmymates.club Mixcloud (fully credited to you ofc), and added as a mixcloud embed to its own page in the imissmymates.club archive complete with a cute lil visualiser with your image and description of choice.

It’s also super important to upload your tracklist so I don’t get slapped wrists from the licence people.

When you are streaming, make sure you wait until the message comes up on the DJ page to tell you that your stream has started—if you start any earlier, people won't be able to hear you!

Most importantly, have fun hun!!!

If you’re completely stressed out by all of this audio routing and streaming software chat

You can always pre-record your show and send it to imissmymates@gmail.com (pop it on WeTransfer or Google Drive if it's too big to email). I can then stream it for you on the site and put it in the archive after the stream! Obviously it’s nice to be able to interact with people in the smoking area (chat room) while you’re playing your show, but it’s really not the end of the world if it’s pre-recorded!