Soundboard

The soundboard is a grid of one-shot pads on the console’s Ambience tab, under the playlist library and headed Soundboard. It is part of that tab rather than a tab of its own. Opening an album replaces the tab body with the album view and hides the grid until you close the album again.

Pads are stored per world. The fire button on each pad is available to anyone with the console open; adding, editing, deleting, and selecting pads render for the GM only.

Pad fields

The Add pad tile and the pencil button on an existing pad both open the same prompt, titled Edit Pad.

Field	Description
Label	Text shown on the pad and in its tooltip.
Sound file	The audio file the pad plays, chosen with the file picker.
Icon	Font Awesome class string rendered on the pad face.
Color	Background color of the pad face.
Volume	Slider setting the level the pad plays at.
Start at	Seconds into the file where playback begins.
Stop at	Seconds into the file where playback ends.
Duck music while playing	Checkbox that dips the music channel while the pad plays.

The dialog offers no other fields. The trash button on a pad asks for confirmation before removing it.

Trimming a pad

Start at and Stop at cut a pad down to one part of its file, which lets several pads share a single recording. Leave Start at at zero to begin at the top of the file, and Stop at at zero to run to the end.

A Stop at value below Start at is ignored and the pad plays to the end of the file.

The stop point carries a short fade so a pad cut off partway through a sustained sound does not click. A trim shorter than that fade is faded across half its length instead.

Firing a pad

Clicking a pad plays its file once on the interface channel and broadcasts it, so every connected client hears it. Playback is one-shot: the pad plays to its stop point and ends. Firing the same pad again starts another copy rather than restarting a single one.

The mixer’s Interface bus is the level for that channel, so it scales every pad on top of the pad’s own volume slider.

Ducking

A pad with Duck music while playing checked dips the music channel when it fires. The dip is a ramp down to a fraction of the music bus level, a hold, then a ramp back up to that level. Both the depth of the dip and the ramp time come from module settings. See Settings.

The hold lasts as long as the pad’s sound, measured between its start and stop points. When the length cannot be worked out, a short fixed hold is used instead.

Ducking is broadcast alongside the pad, so every client’s music dips together. Only the music channel is ducked. Ambience and interface audio keep their levels.

Building pads from a playlist

Right-click an album tile in the library and choose Make soundboard pads to turn a whole playlist into pads at once. The entry appears for the GM when the playlist holds at least one sound.

Which sounds are used depends on the playlist. When any sound in it carries a pad preset, only the preset-carrying sounds become pads. When none do, every sound in the playlist becomes a pad. A sound whose file path already belongs to an existing pad is skipped, so running the command twice on the same playlist adds nothing the second time.

Each new pad takes its label from the preset, falling back to the sound’s name, and its volume from the preset, falling back to the sound’s own volume. Icon and color come from the preset when it carries them. A notification reports how many pads were added and which playlist they came from.

Folding pads into a mood

Every pad carries a Select for mood button for the GM. Selecting one or more pads opens the selection bar at the foot of the tab, showing the number selected, Clear, and New mood. An Add to mood… picker sits alongside them once at least one mood exists.

Add to mood… appends the selected pads to an existing mood; New mood opens the mood editor prefilled with them. Selections carry across the Music and Ambience tabs. Pads, playlists, and individual tracks can go into one mood together.

A pad joins the mood as a sound effect element carrying its file path and label. The pad’s volume and its ducking setting do not travel with it. From then on the mood’s element timing governs the sound: it fires on the element’s own offset and repeats at a random interval inside the element’s range. An element whose maximum interval is set to zero plays once and does not repeat. A file already present in the target mood is not added twice.

Adding a pad to a mood copies it. The pad stays on the soundboard and keeps working on its own.