Tech Update: SoundPads / Custom SoundPads

Edit 7/2/25 - Oops, messed up multi-part sounds on the Custom SoundPad (x4, x2 etc). This is now fixed. - Tim

Greetings Patrons,

This post is set to public as it's for all users of the site:

I've spent a lot of time recently working on the underlying code for the Individual, as well as Custom SoundPads. As I was working on Sanctum (the most recent), I ran into a few maddening bugs, and a few small quality of life issues that I finally decided to address. Here are the main fixes/ new features:

Better Looping

By far the most frustrating to me was that occasionally a looped file would hitch at the loop point. It was sometimes a tiny little hiccup, other times it was a G A P. These were files that looped seamlessly everywhere. It never seemed to happen on Chrome, but on Firefox and mobile Safari it could be mood-wrecking. Even worse, it didn't happen to every file. I examined the ones that worked and compared the ones that didn't for sample length, sample divisibility by 128 (don't ask), by 256 (ugh, I hated that day), frequency content, anything I could think of. Nothing. I eventually discovered that if I stopped the sound, and played it again - it worked fine. So I created a new playback method that basically silently starts a sound, and then plays it again. It's about a 50ms difference which - is nothing for web audio. Maybe you won't notice this improvement, or maybe you will, but the result is looped audio should now play back much more evenly and consistently.

Non Audio-Blocking Modal Dialogs

This one was nagging at me for a while. If you're playing SoundPad sounds, and save a scene, or the whole SoundPad (Custom Only), a browser alert window pops up where you can enter the name of the scene etc. The trouble is, and I don't know when this started, this would block the audio stream as long as the dialog was up. Jarring. Worse, sometimes mobile devices had trouble starting it again. So, I rewrote the save bits using modal windows which don't block the audio. As an added benefit, if you use SoundPad wrapped in a streaming service like Kenku, you'll be able to both save, and access your stored SoundPads and scenes.

Better Cleanup / Stability

This one is for Custom SoundPad: I discovered that adding and removing sounds over and over during a session can sometimes make the browser sluggish and slightly unstable. Most people wouldn't notice this, but I tend to hammer on things. This had all the markings of a memory leak, so that's been fixed with proper cleanup and sound removal.

There were a few other little things here and there but those are the big ones. Nothing to do on your end, just give the pages a good refresh and you should be good to go.

Thank you all, as always, for your continuing support.

Best,

Tim