The rumors say that SoundCloud is on its way out. The company is laying off staff, while burning through streaming bandwidth with no real way to make any money. If you’re a musician, this is a big deal, because SoundCloud is where you share music, and where you go to hear other musicians’ music. It’s a mixtape and an audition reel combined.
The smart move is to take your music to YouTube, because a) it’s not going away, b) it’s free, and c) it’s where everyone goes for free music anyway. The problem? You need to make a video. You could always just put a still image up there, but then the kids will get bored and move onto something else. But as a musician, you’d probably rather spend your time making music instead of making movie.
Luckily — surprise surprise — there’s an app for that. It’s called Wizibel, ands it comes from master iOS music-app-maker Klevgränd.
Wizibel is designed to make automatic music videos. No, they won’t reach the heights of budget and absurdity of the promos from history’s greatest era of music videos, the 1980s, but they will make great automatic visuals for ADD kids to ignore while they listen to your music.
Using Wizibel to make YouTube videos
To use Wizibel, you import a song from iTunes or Audioshare (it also takes MP3, AIFF, WAV, and AAC files via the Open In… dialog), pick a theme, tweak a few parameters, and you’re done. I picked one of my projects from GarageBand and exported it straight to Wizibel. Then I chose a theme, picked a background photo, and added the title and my name to an overlay.
Once you’re ready, you hit export and your movie is generated and saved to your Photos library, ready to be uploaded to YouTube or other destination.
It’s easy, fast, and the result is a lot better than looking a a still photo. The price for this magic? $8, which is easily worth it if you don’t care to craft music videos.
In the meantime, you might consider downloading all your music from Soundcloud, just in case it shuts down and takes all your published content with it.
