Backdrop is a web app which can be used to combine pieces of music and images into videos, where the music plays with the image in the background.

Its purpose is to decrease the fiction for musicians of manually rendering such videos to publish their music on (e.g.) YouTube.

It is still in extremely early development and doesn't do much except for what was just described.

Landing on the app's home page, you can upload both an MP3 file and a JPG file. Together, both files cannot be larger than 4 MB.

After selecting two files, hit the submit button to upload them and kick of the rendering process.

You'll be redirected to a download page where you can wait for the render to finish. Once the video is ready, the download button will light up to let you download the result.

Now you should have an MP4 of the given image with your music playing in the background!

Running the following command in you terminal will install and optionally run an instance of backdrop:

bash -c "$(curl -sLo- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/thass0/backdrop/main/scripts/install.sh)"

Alternatively, you can manually install and run your own instance following the steps below.

To build the app you need to have an up-to-date version of Docker installed.

Optionally, you can also install bunyan-rs to get pretty printed logs. This will however require you to install the Rust toolchain too.

To start off you'll need to have docker running in the background.

# Start Docker to run in the background
$ systemctl --user start docker-desktop

To run the app itself, you can use the bash script run_local.sh located in the scripts folder (You have to run the script from the root of this repository so Docker can find the Dockerfile).

# Make the script executable.
$ chmod +x scripts/run_local.sh

# Run it!
$ ./scripts/run_local.sh

Don't worry: running the script might take a while. Waiting for Docker to build the image the first time around might take a few minutes even.

After the build is finished and the app is running, you should be able to find it in your browser under http://localhost:8000/.

Otherwise, if you run into a problem building the image please file an issue.