Show what Music is playing on Stream – with Snip!

Ever wanted to show what the song is at any given time and give proper credit to artists whose music you’re using in your content? Then, Snip is the right tool for you!

I only recently stumbled across it while browsing for some way of crediting artists properly and it’s honestly really easy to set up and use, which is why I wanted to showcase it today.

Downloading and Installing Snip

The download and installation process is really simple. To download it, you visit this link right here: https://github.com/dlrudie/Snip/releases

There you can download the file ending with “.zip” under “Assets”. People that code can probably make use of the source code as well if they wanna change or update it but honestly, it works really well right now.

The installation process is also really easy. You simply unzip the zip-file and run the exe-file in the folder.

Signing Up (through Spotify)

Upon running the exe-file found within the folder, Snip will open up a webpage that essentially prompts you to sign up with Spotify. This is mainly to read what song is being played at the moment.

Once you’ve done this, you’re good to go.

Adding the Text to OBS

When it comes to adding the text into OBS, you’ll essentially have to select a scene and create a “Text (GDI+)” source.

By double-clicking the Text source, you can then click on an option called “Local File” which will then prompt you to browse for the file you want. You’ll need to select the Text Document titled “Snip” in the Snip folder you unzipped earlier.

Important Note: If you change the folder’s or the file’s location, it will not work until you reassign the file location again. Keep that in mind when you’re cleaning up!

Editing the Font in OBS and Text

By double-clicking the Text Source in OBS, you can edit the font. Here you can change the font, text colour and even add a background colour that is in line with your stream’s branding.

In my case, I decided to keep it as white text on a purple background that is slightly opaque. I changed the font to “Courier New Bold” since I like that one a lot more than most other fonts.

If you want to change the way the artist, song and album are put out, you can head into your system tray and right-click on Snip, before you click on “Set Output Format”. Here you can then head into the different formats and change them as you please.

At “Set Artist Format”, you can simply add a few spaces after $$a and then add some sort of line or slash to it. I’ve seen people use “|” for this or underlines but I just personally like “//” more. This will make the text not look “weird” when it loops around. Speaking of which…

Note: Any changes made to this will only take effect once you save them and switch to the next song.

Scrolling Text

To make the text scroll, you simply head back into OBS and right-click on the Text source.

Then, you click on “Filters”, followed by the “+” icon on the bottom. Here you can add “Scroll” to it, which makes the text scroll from beginning to end, making it look a lot neater in the process.

You simply have to adjust the “Horizontal Speed” here to a value that looks good to you. Negative values will make it scroll in the other direction.

Apart from that, I’d recommend clicking on “Limit Width” to change how much text is shown at any given time. In my case, I’m using “3000” for this.

Displaying Album Artwork

At last, displaying Album Artwork can help make it all look a lot neater.

To do so, head back into the “Snip” folder and add the JPG-File “Snip_Artwork” as an Image source to OBS.

In the system tray, you can check “Save Album Artwork” and change the size of the art work in “Keep Spotify Album Artwork”.

Once you’ve done this, simply resize and reposition it until it looks neat.

Note: The image source can look huge at first and needs to be resized accordingly. I’d recommend right-clicking on the image in OBS, clicking on “Transform”, and then clicking on the “Fit to Screen” option. This will keep the image source’s proportions while shrinking it down to a size that fits onto the screen. Then you can simply drag it at the corners to make it smaller.

At last, I would recommend grouping up the Image and Text sources. That way, you can simply move around the group instead of moving both files individually. This will save you a lot of headaches later.

This post was first published on Indiecator by Dan Indiecator aka MagiWasTaken. If you like what you see here and want to see more, you can check me out on Twitch and YouTube as well. If you find this post on a website other than Indiecator.org, please write an e-mail to me. Thank you!