Mixtape Generator

This is a quick-n-dirty makefile for generating "mixtape" videos from a single still image and music from YouTube.

It's useful for creating party playlists or playlists to work out to. No real YouTube video examples are given to avoid copyright issues so contact me privately if you want my Synthwave/Retrowave exercise mix :-)

Dependencies

This makes use of youtube-dl, wget and ffmpeg which you can install via your normal package manager usually.

How to use

Clone the repo

git clone https://github.com/avengerpenguin/mixtapes.git
cd mixtapes

Create as many input files as you want with .txt extension that look like:

https://some.domain/path/to/image/file.jpg
youtubeid1
youtubeid2
youtubeid3

i.e. the first line is a URL of an image you'd like to use and the remaining lines are YouTube IDs of videos whose music you would like to use, in order.

Then you may run:

make

and the following will happen (if your input is e.g. foo.txt):

Make will generate a series of .webm files with the audio only for each YouTube video ID you gave. This is hard-coded to download a particular format to keep it efficient and only get the audio, so it's not 100% guaranteed to work on every video (adjust it maybe if that's a problem).
Then each .webm file will be converted to mp3.
The makefile will then generate a foo.list file (if your input file was foo.txt that contains ) with each mp3 in the order you have. This is in the format ffmpeg expects as input for -f concat
Then ffmpeg -f concat is run on that foo.list file such that you get a single foo.mp3 file. This file is usable as a single mixtape file if you wish.
Your chosen image URL at the top of foo.txt will be downloaded as foo.jpg.
Finally, ffmpeg is run again to generate a foo.mp4 video that has your playlist with your given still image.

The makefile is generic enough that you can populate the repo with as many $foo.txt files as you like and it will generate as many output mp4 files as you like. Run with make -j to run lots of things in parallel if you have a lot of cores (make -j 4 to restrict to e.g. 4 cores).

Possible Extensions

This is something that's good enough for me that is open to copy/use but feel free to contribute any extensions you do to make it more advanced, e.g.:

Change the image when the song changes.
Have an animated gif like a nyancat throughout the video.
Generating playlists from YouTube playlists or indeed from elsewhere like Spotify.