Built for the week after the song is finished

Why it exists

An independent artist finishes a track and then needs a vertical video for three apps, a square one for the feed, a wide one for YouTube, a countdown for stories, an image for the announcement, a link that works everywhere and something to write under all of it. That is a week of fiddly work in tools built for other jobs, and it lands exactly when the energy from finishing the song has run out.

ReleaseKit does that week in one sitting. You add the song and the cover once. It gives you the moving picture, the clips, the stills, the page and the captions, all in the same colors, all pointing at the same link.

How it is built

Almost everything happens in your browser. The song is decoded with Web Audio and analyzed with a real frequency transform as it plays; the visualizers are drawn with WebGL; clips are recorded from that canvas with the browser’s own video recorder; graphics are drawn on a canvas and saved as PNG files. That is why the song never needs to be uploaded, and why recording a clip takes as long as the clip.

The server side is a WordPress plugin. It keeps accounts, saved releases and credits, and it hosts published release pages with their cover image, a 30 second preview and their counts. Payments go through Stripe.

The example release that opens with the tool, “Afterglow” by “Violet Static”, is not a real artist. The track is composed and rendered in code and the cover is generative artwork, so nothing on this site borrows anyone’s music.

What it will not do

• Distribute your music to streaming services. You need a distributor for that.
• Post to your social accounts. You download the files and post them yourself.
• Mix, master or edit the audio.
• Invent things about you. The caption about the story behind the song leaves brackets for your own words.
• Promise streams, followers or playlist placements. Nobody honest can.

What we have and have not tested

ReleaseKit was built and tested in Chromium, on desktop and at phone size. In that browser, clips record as WebM. The tool asks for MP4 first in browsers that can record it, and that path, along with Safari and Firefox generally, has had less testing than we would like. If something misbehaves on your device, tell us exactly what you saw and we will look at it.

Who is behind it

Agent Creative designs and builds websites and web tools from Connecticut. There is no growth team and no investor deck: if you write through the Contact page, the reply comes from someone who works on the product.