Five weeks in. Podcast 75 is up — and this one had to be re-recorded from scratch, which is a story in itself. (More on that below.) Same compile as Podcast 74: live worship piano from the morning streams, stitched into a single listen. We’re still running about two weeks behind in the release cycle, which is fine. If you’re new here, the launch-week post walks through what Music To Pray By is and the tech behind it. The OBS Audio Doubling I Didn’t Know About I built an auto-switching scene this week that flips between an overhead camera (looking down at the keys) and the FaceTime camera on my MacBook Pro — a small visual upgrade that lets you actually see what’s happening on the keyboard during the streams. While building it, I discovered that the piano microphones were attached to the overhead-camera scene and getting added to the mix twice — once from the scene, once from the global audio. That’s been the case for an unknown number of past streams and podcasts. I had to re-record this entire podcast from the beginning to get a clean mix without the doubling. Going forward, the audio should be a touch softer overall but with noticeably more dynamics — soft passages can actually be soft now instead of pushed up to the same level as the louder moments. That’s a real improvement, even if it took an unplanned re-record to find. Logic’s Smart Tempo Ate My Sustain Pedal This one cost me most of today. Logic’s Smart Tempo — which I’ve come to depend on for the MIDI editing pipeline — has a quirk that mangles sustain pedal events. The Disklavier records pedal motion at extraordinarily high resolution: a single pedal press can produce 30 or more CC64 events, sometimes well over a hundred, capturing every subtle shift in pressure as I play. Part of my regular MIDI cleanup simplifies those down to about 7 events per press — held-down (127), then a graceful release ramp through 95, 64, 32, to fully-released (0) — so the file is actually editable. What I discovered today: Smart Tempo collapses those 7 cleaned-up events into a tiny window, sometimes under 15 milliseconds. On playback that turns a natural release into an abrupt pedal-up — which kills the tail of every chord. The fix required some custom tooling to detect compressed releases and widen them back out to a natural ~60ms ramp, anchoring the trough at zero and re-spacing the intermediates evenly before it. Tedious to track down but a good catch — this has almost certainly been affecting the Prayer Shorts MIDI quality for weeks. New Piano Sounds Coming for Church Our worship pastor at The Connection Church, Rene Rodriguez, has been telling me for the better part of a month that I need to update my MainStage patches. He’s right — I’ve been running the same piano and pad sound for years and they’ve started to feel dated. Spent a chunk of this past week digging back into Keyscape (Spectrasonics’ LA Custom C7), Noire (the felt-piano engine in NI’s Komplete), and Omnisphere for pads, building a fresh patch list with proper crossfade-on-mod-wheel behavior so I can blend piano + pad smoothly mid-song. Combined with the Dante cutover I wrote about last week, the church worship clips should start sounding like a different room over the next few weeks — cleaner signal chain, fresher voicings. Dante — Still a Project Speaking of Dante: the cutover from analog to all-digital is mostly working, but consistency week-to-week has been a fight. Some Sundays everything routes cleanly the first time; other times we’re chasing dropouts or weird routing states between the Allen & Heath board and Mainstage on my M3. The sound quality when it works is unambiguously better, which is the only thing keeping me from rolling back. Hoping to land on a known-good config in the next couple weeks. Night of Worship at TCC One more thing on the church side — The Connection Church (theconnectionchurch.org) holds a Night of Worship service on the first Wednesday of every month, and this past one was the first I’ve actually recorded. Came home with about 45 minutes of video and audio that will turn into shorts over the next two to three weeks — once they’re edited and the new piano patches are dialed in. If you’re local to San Marcos / Buda, come visit the next one. If not, the shorts will land on your feed soon. A Side Project — Flux Report And one tangent for the curious: I launched fluxreport.ai this week. It’s a Drudge-style aggregator for AI news — refreshes every ten minutes, pulls from Hacker News, Reddit, GitHub trending, arXiv, and the major AI labs, with niche routes for /security and /enterprise. Different audience from MTPB — same person behind it. If you work in tech and want a fast scan of what’s happening, give it a look. Closing — A Prayer of Trust in God’s Plan The Prayer Shorts continue rolling out two a day, 8 AM and 8 PM CT — we’re past 50 prayers published at this point. If you haven’t found them yet, search musictoprayby (one word, no spaces) on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, or X. Here’s a sample of the kinds of pray-the-Bible prayers landing in those feeds. This one aired this past Thursday — built on Romans 8:28-30, one of the most-quoted promises in all of scripture: Father, You see what I cannot. I trust You with every loose end. And we know that God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose for them. For God knew his people in advance, and he chose them to become like his Son, so that his Son would be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters. And having chosen them, he called them to come to him. And having called them, he gave them right standing with himself. And having given them right standing, he gave them his glory. Work it for good, Lord. All of it. Even this. Amen. — Romans 8:28-30 (NLT) This was a heavy tech week — OBS, Smart Tempo, Dante, Mainstage, all in one stretch. None of it is the point. The point is the morning hour at the piano. Everything else is in service of that. Thank you for listening, and thank you for praying. The post Music To Pray By Podcast 75 appeared first on Music To Pray By.
