During my mid-career retirement in 2015, I had a chance to revisit and spend time on hobbies such as DJing. I dug up old recordings from CD burns, MiniDiscs and even cassettes 🙂 I also added a few newer mixes using mp3s, time-coded vinyl and Traktor software. Everything was converted to mp3. After finding a site to upload my mixes, I compiled a collection of my recordings and made them available on MixCrate.com.
http://www.mixcrate.com/djrecreator/dj_mixes
The whole process was fun. I got some initial engagement in terms of likes and downloads then things tapered. Interesting how fleeting things are these days with all the “noise” and options out there for our on-demand generation. Anyway, I got pulled into starting my next career chapter and stopped spending as much time on the DJ stuff.
Recently, I had the idea of expanding my reach by using YouTube…but how? I’ve seen many YouTube ‘videos’ that were primarily music with a static image as the video. I didn’t want to go that route. So I thought about ways I could add motion to my mixes so they could be uploaded as videos. The challenge was to do it without making it such a big production. iTunes has the Visualizer built into the player and I enjoy watching the hypnotic movements as the tracks play. Doing a little research and testing, I tested a few screen recorders and then made YouTube videos using screen recordings of iTunes Visualizer while my mixes played. The first batch of videos is now uploaded to my YouTube channel. They’re not getting much attention. Maybe they never will. It doesn’t bother me too much because I enjoyed the process of testing an idea and figuring out out to pull it off.
View The Resulting Videos:
How I did it…
- Downloaded Bandicam Screen Recorder as a trial to test. It worked better than the other free software I tested and it had good reviews. A few trial runs is all I needed. I went ahead and purchased the registered version of the software for $39 because I didn’t want the large www.bandicam.com watermark to be included with the video output.
- Loaded my mixes into iTunes as single song playlists so that I could record the visualizations without having to worry about captures bleeding into the next track in queue.
- Read Google’s recommendations for optimizing video uploads: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/1722171?hl=en
- Aligned the iTunes window and Bandicam’s screen capture frame so it was a 16:9 aspect ratio (1280×720 recommended). I didn’t want the screen recorder to capture my mouse movements so I chose not to do full screen.
- I read an article on cool tricks for controlling the visualizer display in real time: http://www.instructables.com/id/Cool-Itunes-trick-VISUALIZER/
- As cool as visualizer can be, all the videos looked too similar so I began manually changing the visualizer theme in sync with the music as it recorded.
- I uploaded each video via the interface in my YouTube account. While each video uploaded and processed, I added descriptions with track names and a link to the corresponding mix available on MixCrate.
If the opportunity presents itself, I may actually take the time to produce videos for my DJ mixes and not just screen recordings. Baby steps.