Make guess-the-song, MIDI animation and faceless sound-ranking Shorts
ComingA song excerpt becomes a mask-and-reveal MIDI (pitch tracking, tempo grid, stem separation), the owner approves an MP3 preview, then a bouncing-ball animation with themed objects and level titles renders as a Short; plus the band-kid guessing web game.
Kit
video-offline-tools
You need
| Account | Why | Free or paid | Plan |
|---|---|---|---|
| yt-dlp | Downloads YouTube, TikTok and Instagram video, auto-captions and comments for vaults, B-roll, MIDI extraction and quote verification. | Free | Free. |
| ffmpeg + ffprobe | Every cut, mux, loudness pass, proxy, contact sheet and platform encode. The delivery encoder uses h264_videotoolbox on Apple Silicon. | Free | Free (Homebrew build includes VideoToolbox). |
| Python 3.12 + uv | Runs every pipeline script (video gates, library export, research cache, Brain export, PDF generator, MIDI tools) inside per-project virtual environments. | Free | Free. |
| Playwright + headless Chrome (and Safari for the final check) | Renders pages to PNG for visual QA, drives the dashboard verification protocol, captures library stills, renders HTML titles and animations offline. | Free | Free. Google Chrome installed for headless screenshots; Playwright installs its own Chromium and WebKit. |
| Blender 5.x (headless renderer) | Renders the guess-the-song bouncing-ball animation frames headless (`Blender -b -P midi2anim.py`) for the music-animation Shorts. The script targets the 5.x API (compositor as a node group, glare type as a menu socket). | Free | None. Open source. Apple Silicon build tested; other platforms untested by the corpus. |
What you bring
- A song link, when you build a music short
- Your choice of theme
- A link to the video you are working from
- Your ranking criteria, and the clips and label words that go with them
The steps
- Find the published MIDI, then the sound from the record
- The rhythm protocol: restate the count in beats before building
- Build, render, verify, and stop at the MP3 preview
- Animate: layout numbers from the reference spec, stills gate, then the render
- Probe the MP4, deliver, delete the previous version
- Faceless sound ranking (the other format)
Get the full playbook
Part of: Install your video editing suite