There must be a better way to find sounds

Support
#1

The Syrinscape sounds are amazing, I love them. But there must be a better way to find sounds. Currently, I have to install the app, then one by one install all the sound sets to browse sounds. The worst part is that I can’t even do this because the inability to specify where the sound files go has eaten up all of my C: drive SSD.

These are such basic things - surely I’m missing something. Either:

  • the ability to listen to sounds in the web interface OR
  • the ability to download all the sound sets at once AND
  • the ability to change the location of the sound files

Like I said, I love this sound engine, but it is incredibly frustrating paying a subscription for something I can’t easily or even fully use.

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#2

I feel your pain - that’s why the DOM SoundLink Library was created. Of course, it is only for the Fantasy Grounds VTT (the Library is an FG Module), but if you happen to use that particular piece of software then it may be worth your while looking up the Library on the DM’s Guild.

If you do use Fantasy Grounds then come on over to the FG Forums and you’ll find lots of info in the DOE: Sound thread (the FG Extension that integrates Syrinscape and Fantasy Grounds).

Unfortunately, I am unaware of any other solution - sorry :cry:

Good luck :smile:

#3

Actually this is exactly why I am having this problem. I have all the FG stuff, including the library and even your latest publication of soundlinks off the DMs Guild (really amazing work, btw, thank you!!).

But the sounds don’t work unless I have the proper Syrinscape sound modules loaded. And since the sounds come from many various modules, my options are either look at each of thousands of sound links to see which module I need to load, or just load all of the modules, one by one, filling up my SSD.

/insertcrazyemojihere

#4

The need to install all won’t be necessary once the Minion/Master Player is released, neither will the need to change file locations. Bare with us until that is released, we’re already in closed testing and hope to take the Beta live very soon!

In the meantime head over to the Syrinscape STORE. Every soundset has a demo video, so just search for what sounds you need and then watch the video to see if it’s what you wanted. Once you’ve found the sets you want install them in your player and set up a campaign in the Campaign Manager :smile:

#5

Thanks Steve, but do you have any idea how many hours of video watching that is? There are a LOT of sound sets! :slight_smile:

Appreciate the heads up. Feel free to sign me up as a tester!

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#6

NOTE: 2018 is the year of Ben not inventing any more amazing lovely things (eg Creator + Master/Minion), but rather the year of making all the things we already have easier/better/faster/smoother.

So this kind of feedback is what we need LOTs of! Keep it coming.

Step 1 = finish the Master/Minion change over (ALMOST THERE)
Step 2 = Get to work on the stuff at the top!

THANK YOU as always for your patience and support! :+1:

#7

Where are we with this? finding sounds is critical to anyone using this application. I love the concept, and have found my way to sounds by just downloading Soundsets and pawing through them. Help us help you! :slight_smile: its so frustrating that something like this was not in since day 1…its core to its success!

#8

Try running the sounds you own in the Online Player… the search engine in there is epically better… and ABOUT to get even better!

ALSO: These search functions are coming to the Stand Alone players very soon.

ALSO ALSO: once you’ve played with them, give us some feedback here. :slight_smile:

@dpilsner

#9

Online searching options looking good Ben! Thank you for the redirect from the Desktop app. I was not clear in my original post, but specifically I was in need of a search in the SoundSet Creator.
As a subscriber I have access to everything, but have to DL the SS, to see whats in it.
I am very excitedly awaiting the new search stuff code drop :slight_smile:

#10

OMG, this, so this.

I really think that time needs to be spent making the offline player UI better.

At the very least:

Currently playing: And the name should be a button to go to it.
Search: Search needs to be much better. The search results are not in alphabetical order. Searching on “battle” I get: Bugbear Battle, Jungleplanet Dinolaser, Red Dragon City Raid, Barghest Battle, Battle of Wolven Pass)
No idea why the first couple are out of order.

Second, please, please, please remove the short cut codes from the front of the names, if they influence results. Although, again, I don’t know how this works. My results go from . . . Yeth Hound Battle, Zombie Battle, BO Attack on Sandpoint, BO Glassworks, BO Catacombs of Wrath, BO Thistletop, BSB Dark Winds Whisper. How do I remember that sometimes it has a code in front of it and sometimes it doesn’t?

Third, even within search results, the results make no sense and it goes back to what I said in another post that I have to have things memorized, which I find unacceptable. In my above search result, many of those sets don’t have my search term, battle, in them. So, I have to click on each one individually to find what it is I’m looking for. There needs to be a way to see the sub sets from the search that are matching the criteria.

Fourth, making my own sound set under custom? Well, I had better name it exaclty every element that it contains because it only plays it, it doesn’t tell me anything about it. That leaves me having to re-search (and research) all my sound sets to find how I created something, if I want to make a variation of it, but without some of picked items and add in others.

In my mind, if you base everything on the Elements (I don’t know what to call them? In the UI, it’s soundset, first column (sound?), Elements?, then specific sounds, then global one shots? For example, under BO Glassworks, it’s sound? Outside the Glassworks, Element? Burnt Offerings Music, sound Don’t break that!, and then global one shots. So, again, if you base everything on the elements, Burnt Offerings music in this case, it would be nice to be able to search on them, see them in results, and play with them, plus sub search, and organize.

I don’t find that the online player is going to be better and if that is going to be the way going forward, then I would hope everything is done through there, with limited access if you don’t have them (but great promotion to see what is there!) as a way to make new sounds.

I apologize if I’m being too blunt but as much as I LOVE this program, I am frustrated weekly in trying to find the sounds I found a few days ago that I wanted to use for the next session because I had to memorize stuff. And then forgot. I’m running a game set in the swamp and while searching on ‘swamp’ gives me a good selection, there are still things I find that could work but it’s a different search. And there is no easy way to see both results. Then to do a drag and drop of sounds into my own area, call it a named bucket, that I can select later and drag from there to create my sound.

I LOVE Syrinscape but at the moment? I don’t need more sounds. This probably has enough sounds to last me a decade. I need the means to use them better and more efficiently, which means search, drag and drop, and more helpful ways to generate my own custom in a much easier way.

Thanks!

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#11

So yes, the next thing to do is to go back to the Offline player. We plan to do a wide user survey offering a whole lot of enticing options (including ones taken from feedback like this = so thank you) and let the user prioritise our list for us… and then get stuck into it!

Yes. This is on our list to do. :slight_smile:

Have you tried the search functions in the Online Player… that’s the sort of direction we are heading.

Blunt is ALWAYS welcome!

Your thoughts are noted! And absorbed! And ready to be acted on!

Stay tuned for that user survey! :smiley: :tiger: :hamburger: :pizza:

#12

Okay, I’m back. Sorry.

Did I miss the survey?

Let me approach this from another angle.

I’m going to run a game. I know it’s going to be in Waterdeep. I need generic city sounds, preferably for day/night but also Dock Ward (sea/harbor sounds), Trades Ward (craftsman working, selling), and the Market. How do I find those? I’m not making things up before hand as I find it too clunky for me to make custom sounds. I’m constrained to what already exists.

I don’t know which way they are going to go or which lead they are going to take. They might go to a haunted house where they will fight ghouls or skeletons. They might go into the sewers where they will fight cultists. They might have to fight something in their mind, so I will need creepy haunting music to set the moods.

They will definitely be at their Inn, so I need tavern sounds.

How would someone else go about finding these sound sets, on the fly, to play at the game? Please give me as explicit directions as you can. I not only want to find multiple sound sets that might work, I expect it. I can do a bit of picking between the presets and would prefer a choice. Maybe I even switch back and forth between a few. (How do I tell what’s playing?)

Thanks!

#13

Right at the moment there isn’t a way to tell which soundsets are playing if you have multiple elements going at once, though that is on the list of improvements.

For finding the right sounds, there is a search bar at the top of the soundset lists on the player. Searching for key words like “city” “market” etc should get you what you want.

However, I have a thread here:Some good generic campaigns to help you get organised!
I have organized all of the soundsets into generic campaigns - all monsters, all locations, all adventure paths etc. I also organized them into “Town/City”, “Dungeon”, “Sewer”, “Fear and Horror”, “Undead”, which brings your searching down from searching the whole player to scrolling through a short list of similarly-themed sets.

Once you know the general trend of where your players are going, you can quickly select the campaign and set you want, or know the key words you need to search for it quickly. I too am an extemporaneous DM, and I search, play, and mix on the fly all the time. Familiarity has given me speed, and the generic campaigns have helped with that tremendously.

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#14

@evildmguy, glad to see I am not the only one who wishes for a better improvisation user experience. I find that new users, who wish to jump in and start playing stuff on the fly, without spending time making soundsets, is one of the most difficult things about Syrinscape.

I feel your pain, and recently created a thread about it myself.

The good news is that the Syrinscape team has made notes and discussed it internally, and will be working towards improving this in the future. There is no official timeline, but hold tight!

In the meantime, @HECook has some great material In the link above, but user to user, you will want to get into the online creator, and start building campaign soundsets and elements that specifically match your scenes. There is a steep learning curve, but once you get it, there is that aha moment, and everything just flows effortlessly. Check out the video tutorials @benjamin has made for a guideline.

3 Likes
#15

@evildmguy; @dorpond I’ve made the same plaintive cries as a primarily freeforming/homebrew GM for as long as I’ve been with Syrinscape. The sad truth is it seems their business model is built mainly around specific licensed soundsets for the big brand adventure path campaigns. I get around it by mainly using Syrinscape as a player for soundscapes by Other Providers ™ and simple music playlists, which I know is squandering Ss’s potential, but at least it’s manageable.

I still think the ultimate solution to this will involve us eating @HECook’s brains in order to steal their encyclopedic knowledge of soundsets, but that particular Feature Request appears to have been lost in the shuffle. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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#16

Hrm… That’s a shame…

#17

Hey guys!

For me, Dungeon Mastering is at its core improvisory. I built it for ME, specifically to help me run sound at a table which is freeform, and always rapidly changes unexpectedly.

I frequently use Syrinscape to DJ live shows in front of an audience where I have little to NO prior knowledge of what is going to happen.

With a fairly good knowledge of where content is and good use of the search functions, I am able to please Dungeon Masters and audiences alike.

Yes, Syrinscape is specifically designed for improvised, spontaneous cueing up of sound.

AND YES, we are currently working on improving the search functions and organisational setup of sound EVEN more, specifically based on the ideas of users and specifically this thread.

So THANK YOU for the feedback here, keep it coming. We are hearing you, and will continue to make Syrinscape better!

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#18

I suppose the big gap here for many people compared to ME is my VAST and detailed knowledge of what there is in Syrinscape and where might be a good place to look.

One of the things we have done (for our SuperSyrins) is things like the:
Elements Rain (a collection of all the rain elements in Syrinscape all in one place)
Elements Wind (the same for wind)
And the Music SoundSets that contain just different moods of music.
And Element Horror (a whole pallette of sounds for craft horror soundscapes)
Are people using these? Should we do more of these.

ALSO:

  1. We are working on making searching better and better. Do people think the search functions in the Online Player as better than those in the Fantasy Player (because we will be porting those through soon) (and continuing to make those search functions better everywhere too) (based on the feedback here)
  2. Maybe I should do some good demo videos of the steps I take to find and craft sounds together (perhaps a capture of me actually improvising at a live event?)

What do you all think?

#19

I am not aware of any of those things you mentioned. I’d love to see more videos on how to better use this tool.

#20

Regarding those elements, I was not aware of them, and now thinking about it, as an improv user, I think all sound can be broken down into the following categories, for tagging, organizing, grouping, and whatever else the devs or you can do moving forward, to make thing easier to find and manage:

  • weather (rain, snow, wind, thunder, etc)
  • ambience (anvil, bell, crickets, walking, )
  • creatures (goblins, orcs, trolls, dragons, etc)
  • vocal (“you shall die this day!”, “taste my fist!”)
  • Narrative (all the module character talking stuff)
  • music (combat, calm, suspenseful, sad, romantic, etc)

Those are just an example, but I could see myself searching and maybe even looking for soundsets moods, and even sample tags, organized in a similar fashion?

I will experiment and see if perhaps I make my own soundsets this way, if it will make things easier during session. In addition, I will search for for “elements” that you mention above.

One things for certain, is that we need to make this process as easy and as obvious as possible for new users, so maybe even having those tags in our face somehow, to make it obvious that everything is lumped into these categories for easy finding, might be another option?

Let me chew on this a while, experiment, and report back.

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