New SoundPad Feature: Broadcast

I get lots of feature requests for Tabletop Audio.  Small things, big things, even the occasional weird thing. As you probably know I add every idea I get to an ever growing list. One thing I never get, however, is a  feature request followed by a fully working solution. Well, that was true until three weeks ago when I got an email from Merten Popp.

Merten's online gaming group in Germany wanted a way to use SoundPads online. He wanted to be able to 'push' sounds from SoundPad to his players who would hear them simultaneously.  To do this he put together a working prototype that he and I have been playing around with for the last few weeks. I'm pretty happy with how it's turned out so I'm releasing SoundPad Broadcast today as a beta.

Now, when you launch any of the SoundPads you will  see a third button, to the right of Save Scene. Clicking this Start Broadcast button will allow your browser to broadcast whatever you play on your SoundPad to anyone who connects to it via a temporary link.

As you can see in the screenshot above, the GM, or whoever is controlling the sounds, copies and pastes this temporary link and sends it to their players. The players will then paste this URL into their browsers. They will then get a

 'connecting...' message, after which the SoundPad GUI will be replaced by a GUI-less version of SoundPad.

It should be quite straight forward and it puts no extra strain on the broadcaster's machine or connection. Broadcasting doesn't send audio data, just instructions for which button to trigger on the client machines.

I would like to extend a public thank you to Merten and his gaming group for getting the ball rolling on this and hope that many of you will enjoy this new feature.

Thank you for your continued support,

Tim