Awww yeah! Our subreddit was out of commission but it is back! All public videos are shared there automatically, and its a great place to ask questions to other music video makers or share your music videos made with MVGEN.
You can find it here at http://www.reddit.com/r/mvgen
Subscribe today!
We also have some more surprises coming shortly in terms of new features and of course as we mentioned the youtube channel is zooming along with a lot of great videos! We are impressed! Keep them coming!
MVGEN did a demo at MUSICTECH meetup in NYC and it rocked the house.The audience loved it! Casey lead the discussion and broke it down what MVGEN mission is all about and the new features that are coming. Thank you to Seth for having us. Follow him @musictechster and check out nymusictech.com for more info.
John Skyped in from a remote location and discussed the Mobile app that is in development and some of the new face swap features we are rolling out this week.
So the future lookss bright! As you know we also relaunched the youtube channel — which has been on fire lately. Subscribe and check it out!
Aww yeah! MVGEN is going to be demo’ing in NYC on 4/17 with NY MUSIC TECH meetup! Join the group and come meet us there!
Let’s make videos!
In fact, go ahead and make some great videos and we’ll pick one to show the audience!
Aww yeah! MVGEN is on product hunt! Go vote us up or leave a comment!
It also looks like we will be demoing in NYC on 4/17 at Music Tech
Check them out on MEETUP and join!
So the number one requested feature was private videos – and now it’s here! When you create a video when you have an user account. It is automatically private until you decide to make it public. No one can see if except for you!
We launched a newsletter than will go out like once a month to let you know the newest features and new and update you on how your videos are performing. In the newsletter we annouced for instance our newest crazy font additions for titles. Sign up for a user account today!
We also have a top secret hardware project to help stream gifs to your television set, or on a projector to have fun at parties or just kick back and zone out. It’s called the GIFBOX and you can pre-order one now for $85!
As some of you may have noticed, for awhile now, the MVGEN SoundCloud functionality wasn’t working. There were other things going on at the time that took up our time. One of our team has moved cross country. I recently got a new dayjob that’s been taken some time to straighten out schedule-wise. And also to get the day to day routine down.
But suddenly one day in the last 4 or 5 months SoundCloud stopped working. There was much hand-wringing and gnashing of teeth at the prospect. It was mystifying, we didn’t know what might have changed and I at the time didn’t have the mental bandwidth to think about it, as I mentioned, other things were going on.
We did get some good error message feedback, which is always the starting point in an issue like this. At first blush, it appeared to be a upload tool version issue. But that wasn’t it. Then, I thought maybe the URLs we were using weren’t escaped or typed in correctly, that wasn’t the issue either. Finally, I capitulated and went with the prevailing wisdom (began to agree with John that the issue was with the version of Python running on the server). We went around the bush a couple times trying to get Python updated, installing mod_wsgi into Apache so that it would accept Python apps and serve them to the web.
This created a whole different suite of issues. Mainly, I inadvertently knocked out PHP when attempting to get mod_wsgi installed and configured. Then, we had more issues with a daemon that everyone forgot about until the last minute that was breaking the video creation step. Finally, we got that fixed – all of which took the better part of Sunday – and then I looked at the SoundCloud issue again with fresh eyes. I started to put the youtube-dl tool through the paces. Every time it errored it gave a recommendation: “see the youtube-dl –help for more details.”
I checked through this and found a way to enter username and password info, and some other interesting tidbits that allow you to ***. None of this really helped though. So I took to Stack Overflow. And yes, maybe I should have looked there first but when troubleshooting one must move systematically. I quickly found an article that explains how to use the SoundCloud API to download a song by the track ID. And there it was, the crack of sunlight shot through the end of the tunnel. I could taste the beginning of the fix coming, and it would be sooner not later.
So after some clicks and copy-pasting I got a API URL with the track ID in it. I plugged that into youtube-dl et voila! No more SSLv3 error message, in fact there was no error message at all, the mp3 downloaded and the verbosity of the output told me it was the song I wanted and the correct artist name and track name. Halleluyer! This was it, this was the workaround, and no Python upgrade necessary! And let me talk about that a bit too.
Updating Python outside of what comes with the OS is a HEAD ACHE. I don’t recommend it, in fact virtualenvs exist seemingly, solely for the purpose of being able to run another version of Python alongside the system version without clobbering installations. Even if you get a 2nd Python version running you have to reinstall ALL of your modules and dependencies. Along with this being a waste of space, it’s just bad because what if something gets crossed up in the process? Bad scene for business.
At any rate, since I got the API track ID working with youtube-dl it was only a matter of adjusting our backend code a bit to work. This is where John valiantly jumped in and saved the day. In a matter of a few hours he’d coded the workaround into our main branch and suddenly SoundCloud upload was working again!
It’s been a long time coming, and we learned a lot in this process. Much of it had to do with patience and tenacity and good old fashioned troubleshooting the latter of which seems to be a skill I’ve done well to master over the years.
Enjoy SoundCloud upload everyone!
Happy Generating
Aww yeah!
We added some new features for user accounts. You can now download your video in a 1 min instgram format you can easily share on your instagram. We are ramping up the launch of our own instagram – where you can promote your video there!
We also fixed a bug related to titles that sometimes screwed with titles with the & sign. If you have a user account you can rebuild your video with the new title system!
This week we are premiering private videos. When you make a video with a user account your video will be private to the internet until YOU decide to make it public.
And of course m great news , we barreled past 1.5 million views and headed toward 2 Million Views on YouTube! More exposure for all MVGEN music makers!
More changes coming soon! Don’t forget to donate!
Hey guys! Thank for the donations! We put it toward server costs and it gave us time
to cook up a ton of new title effects for you! More font options to customize your videos the way you want!
Here’s just a few:
Stay tuned. More CRAZY filters coming soon and some hardware thats going to blow your mind!
Once again the donations are welcome! They mean a lot to the team as we work overtime to bring you new features!
Hey guys! We finally have user accounts! Sign up now!
Now you can control your MVGEN videos. You can delete them or remake them!
You can send them to our Youtube Channel for promotion – or take them down when YOU want to.
You can even add metadata to your songs – like your social media links, website or soundcloud page!
More information soon!
Oh! And there is a secret little trick you can do in the code now. You can repeat a keyword by using the notation x.
For example you could do DOG x10 in the keyword box and MVGEN will pull TEN dog gifs in a row saving you time from typing
Check it out!
“The extent to which you have a design style is the extent to which you have not solved the problem” — Charles Eames
Today I got an amazing amount of things done. I started early, so maybe I should rethink this “not being a morning person thing.” I got to this coworking space at almost 9 AM! I got some school “paperwork” stuff done immediately and then I started on the MVGEN end of things.
John and I discussed his desire to do more outreach starting this week and I suggested I could whip up some quick and friendly example/boilerplate emails for the verticals he’d like to reach out to. I offered to help with this because at the moment I’ve got time to help out where I can and I need to keep my writing muscles in shape because it’s a skill I don’t use enough these days. I got 3 of the 4 “press” templates cranked out faster than expected. These are: Soundcloud, Youtube Channel(indie) and Tumblr GIF creators. I haven’t started the 4th one, the generic “Press” template because I need to think more about it and maybe look at some good examples. Once I emailed and slacked those to him I pivoted and started on the MVGEN mobile redesign in Sketch. It’s weird because I’d been so intimidated by that software for as far back as I can remember. It’s amazing how much reading the instructions will point you in the correct direction :).
We’ve needed a mobile interface for aeons now, but I didn’t have the headspace for it. I realise that’s an excuse but at the time I’m being idle it feels reasonable not to even start without the appropriate motivation. At any rate, I’ve started (finally) on mobile (iOS) views for all the desktop pages on MVGEN.com.
I’m embarrassed to say this but the thing that really put the fire under my ass was finally looking at our Google Analytics (GA). Lo and behold, a cursory glance at a pie chart and some percentages and it became abundantly clear: the vast majority of our users create videos from their mobile devices. GA is granular enough that it shows which screen resolutions are most used. A quick search later and I learned a great many of our users are on the iPhone 6 plus.
I won’t be done quickly with this, but it does feel good to start the process finally. So now I know I need to make an iPhone 6 Plus friendly interface (phablet) and a smaller screen interface and larger format (tablet) interface. I sent John a quick screenshot of my progress so far and he seemed good with it.
Likewise, I finally get why designers extol Sketch’s praises from the mountaintops. The steep learning curve I’d convinced myself of is just not there. Especially if you’ve used Photoshop/Adobe apps to any depth. Everything is laid out cleanly and all the components you need to build a wireframe or mockup or prototype are laid bare, in easy reach. I got all the views for MVGEN mobile started in what seemed like minutes. So for anyone that’s been hesitant or unsure about trying Sketch or moving from Photoshop or something similar, I highly recommend it.