Glossary

The terms that Slipmat uses, in alphabetical order.

Activity Log

The plain-language record of what happened on your account and on your artist: who did what, and what Slipmat did automatically. See Activity Log.

Ad Hoc Event

An event that goes live automatically when you start to stream, and ends when you stop. Unline the normal Schedules Events, zero extra setup pr scheduling needed. See Events.

Backstage

Slipmat Backstage is our community forum. It runs on Discourse, which is third-party software.

The first time you log in to Backstage with your Slipmat account, Backstage makes your Backstage account. After that, the two systems are separate. A change in one does not change the other.

An error message that you should not see, but sometimes can. It means that the server that runs Slipmat.io is down or in the middle of restarting after a site update, so the proxy server in front of it cannot get data from it. This can sometimes occur during larger upgrades or planned maintenance, and it resolves by itself soon. If you see this, just refresh the page.

Chrome Fromage

Our imaginary example artist duo from France. We came up with this crazy and novel idea of a band that would perform in cool robot helmets that obviously would never happen in real life.

Cooldown

The 30 minutes after a Slipmat event ends. The event is over, but the chat stays open so people can stay and talk. See How Events Start And End for detailed information.

Crew

Slipmat artists like normal bands can have multiple members and support staff. We call them crew. See Crew.

Discord

Our community chat on Discord, a third-party messaging app. We prefer Backstage and our own chat but keep the Discord channel open for legacy reasons.

Elvis

Elvis Bot is our AI-powered chatbot that knows everything about music. It’s named after Elvis Costello.

Fan

We call artists followers their fans. See Stats & Fans.

Flash

Slipmat.io’s email bot. It sends automatic messages from noreply@slipmat.io. The bot is named after Grandmaster Flash.

Frankie

Slipmat.io’s purpose-built streaming server, engineered and optimized for high-quality music. Its main job is clean audio. Frankie uses the HLS protocol tuned for stable and clean audio. It is named after Frankie Knuckles.

FrankieBot

Slipmat AI-chatbot. Like our streaming server, named after Frankie Knuckles.

HLS

HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) is a video streaming protocol that Slipmat Frankie server uses. It puts a stable stream before latency.

The protocol cuts the video into short 2-4s segments and keeps a buffer of 3 to 6 segments, this is what causes the minimum latency of ~6-24 seconds depending on the server configuration. The resulting latency is always a compromise between stable video/audio and short latency.

Other protocols like WebRTC offer near-realtime possibilities but in turn trade it for more brittle audio/video quality and more taxing resource usage for both streamer and listener.

Hype

The real-time reactions that listeners can send during a live event. See the Live Page.

Jitter

Jitter is variation in how long data packets take to arrive over a network. In streaming, high jitter can cause audio or video to stutter, even when the connection is otherwise fast. Wired connections generally have much less jitter than wifi.

HLS protocol does not suffer much from jitter so it can be easily streamed over wifi. WebRRTC protocol is sensitive to jitter which means that for a stable stream you generally need a wired connection.

Latency

In Slipmat live streaming context latency means the time it takes to the stream get from artists streamer to the end listener. For normal Slipmat streams the latency is around 13 seconds. For realtime-focused WebRTC streams it might be only around 100ms which allows things like musical performances over Web.

Note that when talking about global streams the speed of light and physical distance becomes a major part of the equation. It’s physically impossible to make roundtrip to the other side of the globe faster than ~200ms, but the closer you are physically to your listeners, the less that matters.

Live Page

We call the page where the audience tunes in the Live Page. It works in any Web browser, on phones and on TVs. See The Live Page.

Roadie

On IRC there are channel ops that can moderate the chat. Slipmat artist chat ops are called Roadies, and they’re also part of the artists Crew. See Crew.

Scheduled Event

An event planned for a set time, always on the hour. Its doors open for warmup 30 minutes before the start time. See Events.

Sentry

Sentry is monitoring software that we use to find and debug problems in the production code. When an error in our API or on the website is not handled, Sentry catches it and makes an automatic bug report, with as much anonymized information as possible. This helps us fix bugs faster. Our settings send as little personal information as possible: Sentry never gets things like IP addresses. It does get the user ID and username of signed-in users.

Slug

An old term from newspaper industry which means the part of a URL that names one page. In slipmat.io/chromefromage/friday-grooves-12/, chromefromage is the slug of the artist and friday-grooves-12 is the slug of the event.

In the above example /chromefromage/friday-grooves-12/ is the path of the URL and slipmat.io is the domain.

Many systems don’t care about details like this but your artist profile slug and your event slugs are important for marketing. For example when putting things in print it’s much easier to read clean, short, human-readable URLs than badly constructed ones. Slipmat tries to always optimize your slugs for you and in most cases allows you to decide and edit them yourself.

Soundcheck

Most artists are familiar with soundchecks for offline gigs, we built that functionality right in Slipmat so that you can run easy and fast soundchecks for your streams as well. See Soundcheck.

Stream Dashboard

The place where you run your live streams from. Visible always when your stream is connected or event is live. See Stream Dashboard.

Tag

A label. We use tags to label all kinds of content, for example live events and Music API artists and releases.

Technical Hold

A feature that allows artists to easily communicate about an issue during the stream. See Technical Hold.

Track Collection

An artist’s own music collection on Slipmat, imported from DJ software. It can be used to provide data for the Request System, and Script Studio, for example.

URL

The unique address of a Web page, for example https://slipmat.io/chromefromage/, short for Uniform Resource Locator.

The https:// at the start is the protocol, it tells the browser how to open the page, and the s means that the connection is secure. Without it, apps and Web sites cannot always tell that the text is a link, so some forms on Slipmat ask for the full URL.

On printed materials, such as posters and flyers, you should leave the protocol out, because a short URL is easier to read and to type: sli.pm/chromefromage. Browsers add the https:// automatically.

Warmup

The 30 minutes before a scheduled event starts. See How Events Start And End.

WebRTC

WebRTC is an open-source technology for real-time audio and video in Web browsers. It optimizes for latency instead of stability, so it is good for live interaction with very little delay. Frankie and the live page use HLS instead which optimizes for stability and quality.

WebRTC can get the delay between people well under 1 second. But it needs more bandwidth, and it can be less stable on slow connections. WebRTC also needs a stable connection with low jitter, which usually means a wired connection.