Release Notes - Week 18/2017

Some of the features in this release have been over three months in the making, and I’m very excited to share these with you today!

New: one-click “Stream Now”-events without a YouTube account

YouTube is still by far the best live streaming platform, allowing 4K 60FPS streaming and superb video platform. Problem is YouTube has been changing streaming policies frequently and many DJs don’t want to deal with copyright issues and maintaining own channel. We offer now fully native YouTube streaming for every DJ by setting up live streams automatically on Slipmats own channel. This means that you can now stream with YouTube without using your own channel! All you need to stream is a streaming software like OBS.

One-click events

We now offer “Stream Now” events that enables starting an event literally with one-click. These event have no configuration whatsoever, all you need is to set up your streaming software and you’re ready to go. These events are intended for casual streamers and for situations where you just want to play and not care about marketing or other details.

Stream Now events are available for your own YouTube or Chew videos, and if you don’t want to set up your own video, we’ll generate RTMP address and key for you.

For YouTube/Chew videos, all you need to do is paste the video URL and click start. That’s it. Done. Off you go!

For automatically generated RTMP streams we’ll first generate the streaming keys for you, then wait for you to set them in your streaming software to get the preview video going, and when it works, you can start the stream. Again, no configuration at all besides the RTMP keys you need for streaming.

Stream now events don’t have warmup mode, they go straight live when the event is created.

Building this feature was a long process, and this is again just the first version, but the current status is already very usable. In the near future we’ll allow more options for default values (event pictures, tags, etc) which then can be used with stream now events. We are also in process for pre-clearing copyrights on our YouTube account which hopefully will make live streaming without your own channel even more stable.

Okay, time to move on to other upgrades.

Improved: event listener list now shows profile photos

The list of active listeners has not looked very nice, especially when there are 100+ listeners online. The listener tab now shows a list of avatars instead. The size of the avatars change dynamically depending on how many listeners are online; when there are only few listeners you’ll see nice big avatars, and when the event is crowded with lots of listeners, the avatar images shrink to fit everyone in the room. If the user has no profile photo, we’ll show a placeholder with a first letter of the username.

Next update will bring better user profiles to make this even better. If you have any comments or ideas regarding this, we’d be happy to hear them!

Various other improvements

  • All embedded content (like Images, YouTube videos and SoundCloud links) are now minimized by default. This makes following chat much easier.
  • Dropbox links that point to an image are now extracted and embedded straight to the chat.
  • The URL Crawler that fetches the pasted links on the chat now explicitly asks for English as a language to avoid weird issues with various sites (I’m looking at you, Facebook!)
  • Fixed a bug in channel mode commands ( /mute, /unmute, /op, /deop ) that work now again normally
  • Updated Getting Started document and automated invite emails to be more current and easier to read. (More help with these would be greatly appreciated!)
  • Made tag pages over 700% faster by optimizing the database structure. The individual tag pages now also show upcoming shows and links to relevant DJs. We’ll next focus on making the tag pages way better by building dedicated templates for most used tags and showing more related data. The idea is to for example on house page to show a house-themed visuals with house-related news, upcoming events and of course the related DJs. When someone searches house music related info on Google, they’ll easier end up to this tag page and see promotions for house DJs on Slipmat. We could also display “book this DJ”-links etc here to drive even more traffic for relevant DJs.

Join Us At Community Livestream on Thursday 4th

It’s been almost a year since our last community live stream. Join us this Thursday for a live event where we’ll look at all the new and current features, talk about the future plans, and of course answer any questions you might have.

Check out the event page for your local time and subscribe there for notifications if you don’t want to miss it! If you can’t make it, no worries, the video will be online after the event, we’ll post it here on the Backstage.

Your help is appreciated!

Slipmat.io is a community effort, we are not driven by any for-profit company. Your help is much appreciated. Please give feedback on the new features, report bugs and invite your friends to use the site - this is how we keep on getting better!

If you want to help in the development itself, check out the help wanted-topic for things you can do and step up :slight_smile:

Happy spinning!