Lord Chaos' Myst / Uru Story

Thank you for starting this. Swift. I hope lots of folks respond.  

Broadcasting in the Cavern was well established by the time I came to Until Uru in late May, 2005. The Tapestry Activities Group started the first regular musical event that I know of, Tapestry Happy Hour, in late February or early  March, 2005. Unfortunately the Tapestry Shard Forum is shut down so I can't refresh my memory here.  

My broadcast story has roots reaching far back into time. I'd have friends over and show slides while playing music. I was always fiddling with audio equipment, and did quite a bit of on-location recording too. Remember when recorders had big reels of tape instead of hard disks? When I moved away from that place I stayed in contact with a few friends using cassette-letters. I always added songs to mine.

A friend of mine responded one time, saying "Here ya go, buddy! Here's the song that may be the start of a new carreer for you!" After that: Charilie Dore's "Pilot of the Airwaves." I knew I'd never be a DJ but it was a fun song. I waited over the years for it to come out on CD but eventually had to buy a turntable.

Well, June 2005 rolls around. I'm just starting to copy CDs to the PC. I went to my first Happy Hour and Donahoo taught me how to broadcast using the Voice Chat. Soon after that I learned about Teamspeak, which gave better and more predictable results.

I did my first broadcast, UCF Music Night, in mid-June. I had no idea what a playlist was, and also thought I could only play whole CDs. I played just about every CD I had on the computer that night while talking with friends in the 'hood.  I continued copying CDs, and Music Night became a weekly event. First on Tapestry, then Guild of Greeters Shard, then on Great Tree Shard. After all, we were using Great Tree's Teamspeak server.

Had to go out and check on the Until Uru first anniversary. I think that was my first big public event. Due to crashes and so on, the regular DJs were off the air so I filled on and we had a lot of fun. That was early August, 2005, and taught me a strong aversion to big events. More organizing than fun, from my point of view.  

In October, Ashtar asked me to provide music for the Great Tree Shard Halloween and anniversary party. This turned out to be quite a bash. We met in Eder Gira and danced on the lava for something like four hours. In November I started alternating Tapestry Happy Hour with Donahoo. This was the start of the Dark Winter: every event had fewer people attending. Still, I finally found someone to host my next party idea.

Ashtar welcomed me to the Great Tree Shard for the first Up On the Roof! party in late December.  I'd now learned my way around playlists. Roof! was designed as a kind of sophisticated party: Rather than just give the audience what they thought they wanted, I offered good music that no one had heard before. It worked. Eventually some Europeans asked if we could start earlier, so I enlisted some help and became the Rooftop Volunteer Group. Every two weeks we did a ten-hour party. Whew. Until Beta siphoned off all of our partygoers, whereupon I shut it down until New Live became established.

That's how things ran for a long time. Donahoo had the D'ni Cocktail party and I did Up On the Roof! There were other parties too, open houses, events, but those were the two regular parties. Roof eventually came back as Under the Roots because we couldn't get to the Tokota Rooftop any more, at least publicly.  

Shoutcast came along in September 2006. Ashtar set up a server for Donahoo and me to use, and it was quite a revolution. I could play more subtle music because it would come through on Shoutcast. Donahoo and I just taught people how to use it in the course of the party, just as we'd done with Teamspeak.  

After a while it just sort of hit some kind of critical mass: Lots of other people started using Shoutcast. Pick-up parties became frequent. Go to Tokotah and get music. It's great. And then SwiftHawk came up with Urutunes so that people had one place to go to find music. We've come a long way from the days when some thought music in the Cavern was a travesty.
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