Mixes & Playlists

A single track rarely carries a scene on its own — you want rain under a tavern theme, with a door-slam ready on top. Mixes let you run several layers of sound at once and balance them live. Mixes are a Booster feature.

Layers

Rain under a tavern song, with a door-slam on top. That’s the whole idea: three layers, each with its own fader, so you can bring the music down without losing the rain.

Open the audio panel with the Audio button, then open the Layers tab:

Ambience — the sound of the place: rain, wind, crowd murmur. Loops underneath.
Music — the melodic layer.
Effects — one-offs and stingers: a door slam, a thunderclap.

Each layer has its own fader, a Loop toggle, a Delay before it starts, and Play, Pause/Resume, and Restart controls. The layers draw from your soundboard’s banks, so the pads you’ve built double as the sounds in your mix.

Linking faders

Between each pair of neighbouring layers is a small link control, so two faders move as one:

⇄ Match — the two faders move together.
⇆ Inverse — one rises as the other falls, for a smooth handover from, say, ambience into music.
— — unlink them again.

To start or stop all three at once, use All in the Layers header.

It’s the easy way to cross-blend two layers with a single drag.

Crossfades

Open Audio settings (the gear in the panel’s toolbar) to turn on crossfade and set its length. With it on, switching tracks eases the old one out as the new one comes in instead of cutting hard — ideal for shifting the mood mid-scene without breaking the spell.

Where the tape comes out

The cassette is a layer too. Above the deck, Out picks which fader it rides — Amb, Music (the default) or FX — so a tape you’re using as ambience sits on the same fader as your other ambience, and moves with it.

The transport under the cassette is always the tape’s: play, pause, skip, scrub. The big fader beside it is always the master — it brings the whole soundscape up or down, tape and layers alike.

To start or stop all three layers at once without touching the tape, use All in the Layers header.

Saving a mix

Balanced your layers just right? Save the whole set of fader levels to recall later. In the Layers header, open Saved mixes, type a name in Name this mix…, and click Save. Click a saved mix’s name any time to snap every fader back to it, or the trash icon to remove it.

Soundscapes

A saved mix remembers how loud each layer was. A soundscape remembers what was on each layer — rain on Ambience, a hymn on Music — along with its level and whether it loops. Load one and the whole mood comes back at once.

Put a track on each layer you want, and set the faders.
In the Layers header, open Soundscapes.
Type a name in Name this soundscape… and click Save.

To load a soundscape, open Soundscapes and click its name. All three layers change together and start playing, and a layer the soundscape doesn’t use goes quiet.

Once a soundscape is loaded, Save changes writes what’s on the layers back to it — and every scene or page it’s attached to plays the new version. To keep the original, type a new name and click Save instead.

When you’re working in a world, a soundscape you save belongs to that world, and that world’s soundscapes are listed first.

In a live session, the GM can send a soundscape straight to the table: hover it in the list and click the send button beside it. It replaces whatever the table was hearing.

Loading a soundscape doesn’t add anything to your playlist. Its tracks sit on the layers, and each layer’s track list shows them under From a soundscape.

You can also give a scene, page or place its own soundscape — see Audio in a session.

Sounds now and then

A loop of rain is a recording. The same rain with a timber creaking now and then, a drip, a wolf far off — each a little louder or quieter, from a different side — sounds like a place. Any layer can do that.

In the Layers tab, open Now and then under a layer.
Click Add a sound and pick one or two from your library.
Set Every (the seconds between sounds), Level, and Spread, from Centre to All around.
Click Try one to hear what it will do.

While the layer plays, one of its sounds plays every so often — never the same one twice in a row. A layer can be nothing but these: a cave that only drips.

They’re saved with a soundscape, so a scene or page with that soundscape brings its sounds along, and at the table everyone hears the same one at the same moment. Stop silences them with everything else.

Playlists

Open the Lists tab. Whatever is on the deck right now is a playlist — there’s no save button, because there’s nothing to forget: add a track and it’s kept. The first time you add something, a Quick queue is made for you.

From the Lists tab you can:

Rename the loaded list, or Save as to fork it into a new one.
Click any list to load it onto the deck.
Choose what happens when a track ends: Play through, Shuffle, Repeat one, or Stop at the end.
Set a Blend — how long one track takes to fade into the next.

Those last two travel with the list, so a tavern playlist can shuffle with a long blend while a chase playlist plays straight through and hard-cuts.

Playlists as a place’s soundtrack

Anywhere you can attach audio to a wiki page, entity or scene, you can attach a playlist instead of a single track — pick one from the Playlists section at the top of the picker.

Streaming sources

Use the panel’s add a track by link button to paste a YouTube link (a single video or a YouTube playlist), and it plays like any other track, including inside crossfades.

Pasted links are saved to your library, so they’re there next time: nameable, taggable, favouritable, and usable anywhere a track is — in a playlist, on a pad, as a place’s soundtrack, or sent to the table.

Spotify is a first-class deck source too. Open the Spotify tab and click Connect Spotify once to link your account; it then shows your top tracks and a search box. Pick a track and it plays through the cassette deck itself — the transport, scrubber, master fader, and prev/next all drive Spotify, and a waveform previews the track. Hearing full tracks needs a Spotify Premium account (searching and browsing work on any account).