The Console

The console is Minstrel’s main window. A tab rail runs down the left edge, the open tab fills the body, and the transport footer sits under it on every tab.

Opening the console

• The Minstrel button in the Ambient Sound Controls toolbar. Pressing it again closes the window.
• The console keybinding. See Settings.
• The Open Console button in the module’s settings.
• Right-click a scene in the Scenes sidebar or an actor in the Actors sidebar and choose Set Minstrel music.

The toolbar button, the settings button, and the sidebar entry are GM only. The keybinding is not restricted.

The sidebar entry opens the console on the Scenes or Actors tab and scrolls that document’s cue row into view with a highlight. See Assigning Music.

The window is resizable. Each client remembers the tab it was last on and the console reopens there. If the remembered tab is Other and no module has registered a section, the console opens on Music instead.

Minstrel registers the console with 3DS:ATLAS as a detachable application.

Tabs

The rail shows one icon per tab, each with the tab name as a tooltip. A divider separates the audio tabs from the cue tabs.

Tab	Holds
Music	Playlists on the music channel, drawn as albums. See Library.
Ambience	Playlists on the ambience and SFX channels, plus the soundboard pads. See Library.
Moods	Saved moods and the mood editor. See Moods.
Mixer	A fader for every playing playlist and one for each audio bus. See Mixer.
Scenes	The area cue for every scene, and the area suppression toggle. See Assigning Music.
Combat	The default combat cue and a combat cue per scene, and the combat suppression toggle. See Assigning Music.
Actors	Combat cues for the tokens on the current scene and for every actor. See Assigning Music.
Other	Cue rows for sections other modules have registered. See API.

The Other tab is hidden until a module registers a section.

The transport footer

The footer shows the track that is playing, or the track that is paused when nothing is playing. It is empty when neither applies.

The cover art of the playlist the track came from sits on the left, falling back to the playlist’s initial. A colored wash bleeds behind the whole footer, taken from the playlist’s color, or sampled from the cover art when the playlist has no color set.

Next to it are the track name and the playlist it came from. When the track carries an artist credit, the artist follows the playlist name. If the track also carries a source URL, the credit is a link that opens in a new tab.

The meter shows bass, mid, and treble for the channel the current track plays on.

The scrub bar seeks. A seek is sent to every connected client, and each client that has the track loaded jumps to that point. The elapsed time beside it counts up while the track plays. The bar itself is left alone while it has focus, so a drag is not fought by the ticker.

Four buttons finish the row:

• Pause pauses the current track and remembers its position. It becomes Resume while the track is paused.
• Stop all stops every playing playlist.
• Next track advances the current playlist.
• Mute all audio silences audio on your client alone. The console button and the mini player button stay in step with each other.

Hovering or focusing the mute button opens a fly-out with a volume slider for the Music, Ambience, and Interface channels.

Meters

Meters read Foundry’s audio analyser. The console switches the analyser on when it renders and off again when it closes, so meters only move while the console is open. Only the footer meter and the meters on the active tab are painted.