sofakid / libxylem

lib xylem

xylem album tuber 3000

Requirements

Software

• Blender 2.79b - note the path of the executable
• ImageMagick - note path to magick
• FFmpeg - note path to ffmpeg
• Python 3

Data

• Albums in the file-naming format you'd get from Bandcamp:
  • artist - album/artist - album - 01 song.mp3
  • cover.png or cover.jpg

If you are renaming things manually, and can't use weird charcters in the folder name, use another character (like _), but make sure it's the same length as the album in the mp3 file names.

Install

• clone git repo somewhere simple.
• Create a folder to put albums in, to be processed.
• Edit scripts/xylem/config.py
  • set albums_folder to the processing folder you just made
  • set paths to the executables for blender, magick, ffmpeg
  • profile is how you choose the output resolution and shape
    • 720p is Profile_1280x720()
    • wider is Profile_1920x854()
    • there's a few others to play with but they're unfinished

Formats

Inputs:

• Only tested with 320kbps mp3s, but others probably work, maybe.
• album artwork in png or jpg

Outputs:

• mkv files
• h.264 video
• mp3 audio
• 320kbps audio bitrate

To change output formats look in xylem/blender/sceney.py

Workflow

Copy albums to albums_folder. All the outputs go into each album folder, like, alongside the mp3s and the cover.

Open a terminal, cd to the scripts folder in the git repo.

Step 1: python processCovers.py

This will use imagemagick to create:

• cover_fg.png -- Just a .png version of cover.png/.jpg
• cover_bg.png -- A blurred and darkened version of the cover
• these files will be in the album folder alongside the mp3s, all output will.

Step 2: python generateThumbnails.py

• makes thumbnail_yt.png -- a 1280x720 youtube thumbnail

Step 3: python renderImages.py

This will use blender to render scene images for each track. At this point go look at them and see if anything needs tweaking.

Tweaks you can do:

• edit cover_bg.png in an image editor.
• change font in xylem/config.py
• put special cases in xylem/customy.py
  • change the text
  • move the text up or down
  • change default behaviour of showing track numbers or putting newlines on brackets
• hack at the code

Now the images look good, render the albums with:

Step 4: python renderTracks.py

Video rendering is slow and with blender it's single-threaded, so we start a bunch of blenders to render the track videos. This number is calculated as 75% of the number of cores (real or hyper).

When this step is done, the track videos will be concatenated with ffmpeg into a full album video. (this step is very fast)

Look in the album folder for these files:

• album_...
• trk_...

Additional YouTube asset created:

• nfo.txt -- a list of songs preceded by timestamps, paste into description so people can click to skip to the song in a full album video