Happy Friday Slipmatians!
This week we’ve been bringing some very old features and ideas back to life on the new v3 platform. Some UI/template work has also been done but the Big Homepage was again pushed back due to finishing up some marketable features. Next week might finally be The Week…
About Slipmat Philosophly
Most of us artists are used to working in unoptimal conditions using unoptimal tools. We perform in tiny bars, nightclubs with shitty soundsystems, do mobile gigs in all kinds of weird places. We use software meant for literally everyone or in the other spectrum highly complex software designed for professional audio engineers. We very seldomly have the luxury of performing on purpose built stages or with setups made just for us. This is as true on the Web as it is in the physical world.
Everything on Slipmat is designed to challenge that. Everything is designed to be purpose-built for the small everyday artist using inexpensive gear. We might not have access to live audio engineer off stage or roadies doing the heavy lifting for us in the physical world, but on Slipmat every artist should have the experience of tuning everything exactly the way that works best just for them. Private chat channels can work as virtual walkie talkies, loyal fans can be virtual roadies on crowd control duty, and modern APIs can be used to build complex multi-user automated marketing workflows. And, of course, a purpose-built 100% audio-focused streaming pipeline can deliver true high-fidelity musical experiences that everyday nightclub DJs can only dream of. I also believe that the listeners too enjoy the music more when the experience is less shitty.
We build Slipmat not to challenge the hypermalls of the streaming Web but for the love and passion for the art. Thank You for being here! 
New Features
- Artist memberships are now partially exposed in the UI. Artist can have multiple members (think Daft Punk or any of your favorite bands) and event/artist channel ops are now called Roadies. Artist memberships have a very easy to use simple permission system. This allows Roadies to help with event chats and other members to help managing events or fully share all features – whatever you need. Members can have titles (“The Queen of Event Memes” is up for grabs) and they can be either public or private (for both shyness and Daft Punk -related reasons)
- Artists now have a Crew channel. Crew channel is an artist-specific private chat channel for artist members and roadies for event crowd control discussions (“please keep this Finn in control in the chat, he’s clearly drunk!”) and other artist-related planning and backstage banter that is always 100% needed and almost always needed to do on some third-party platform. Now this is built in, ready availalbe everywhere you need it.Crew channel is is automatically open on every live page and soon also on your artist pages wherever you need it.
- Event chat has now full support for multiple simultaneous chat channel tabs and private chats. You can open DMs easily with clicking from user profile or from chat via
/msgslash command. Note: you can only message yous friends – so unsolicited messaging is not possible. - Artists can now create Draft Events. We’re building a lot of planning-phase functionality intended for multi-user workflows (for example the Show Scripter from the Labs experiment) and more complex scenarios and drafts are an important part of normal workflows. For the moment this is a very simple “not yet published and not needing all data” implementation but in the future we can add more features here easily to allow much richer workflows and truly collaborative features.
- Artists have now proper dedicated Soundcheck events. For the longest time whenever you have needed to test your stream from a new setup or location, you’ve had to manually create things and if you forgot to make the event private you had uninvited people lurking and “test event 123” in your event history – super annoying and looks very unprofessional. Soundcheck event is literally one click of a button that creates a hidden event and starts it for you, all you need to do is start the stream. You don’t need to start it or stop it, the event is not visible anywhere, it will not be shown in any archives, but if you want, you can always share the URL and_ the crew chat channel is there so it’s very easy to chat with all your members and collaborators to make sure whatever you need to get checked, gets checked. If you have done soundchecks in the physical world, you know how good feeling you get just by knowing that “at least everything works” when you are in a hurry in a new place and last thing you need is a technical issue. Now you have one-button Soundcheck on Slipmat as well!
Note: private messages like all Slipmat chat messages are not encrypted. Consider the chat like speaking on Telegram or via olskool mail – if someone wants to read the conversation, they most likely can.
Enhancements
- Events now collect LOTS of stats, inclusing error rates (buffering events) from the listeners. This data is being collected now but not yet shown in the UI, that part soon.
- Live page now properly updates when event ends.
- Live page profile cards look a bit less crappy. This is NOT the final form but a step towards showing more data and actions for a profile.
- Artist public pages are now using the new common templates albeit still only partial data and not all features. This also is not the final stage but as the SEO is now fixed, enough tot ick off the item from the v2 ticket list. (v2 feature parity)
Bugfixes
- Events can no longer be left open by accident. If the stream disconnects on a live event, events get autoclosed and archived in 30 minutes (unless technical hold is set – more about this next week)
- There’s now a proper guard for allowing only one live event at a time per artist.
- Backstage dj_news tag now properly shows up on artist dashboard.
Finally
All of these new features were brewing up are not “wouldn’t it be nice if”-things made in the heat of the moment but solutions to actual real life pain points. Most of these new have been literally years in the making and some have just lived elsewhere because v2 wasn’t flexible enough to integrate everything. We still have a few more large-ish things to push through (request system, show scripter, show model, checklists). The goal is not to build every feature under the sun, the goal is to surface tools that are truly useful. I also want Slipmat to be useful to more broader group of artists than just lone DJs. Different artists have different needs.
Every new feature is a compromise between simplicity (often corresponding to ease of use) and usefulness. We have ways to hide unused things and make the UI cleaner, but the aim for v3 platform is also to keep it moving and be ruthless in cleaning up as well; if a feature isn’t been used it will get axed after a sunset period. (Axing might mean either deleting it or moving it away from the core product, whatever makes most sense.)
Just wanted to say this aloud as well because the new features heading might give a totally wrong idea of the long term roadmap – it is not going to continue like this forever 