3rd party integration for MAC working?

Today I made the decision to leave the Syrinscape subscription. As a MacOS user I’ ve been waiting for a 3rd party integration fix during a lot of time. I’ll be back if you get it.

Best of lucks, guys!!!

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We’re sorry to see you go :frowning:

The last year much of our dev time has gone into developing Syrinscape Online. Now that this is out we are able to concentrate much more on improving both the existing players and continuing to improve the Online Player. 3rd Party integration on the Mac has proved to be a tough one due to the way MacOS handles URI’s but it is something we will continue to work towards.

Hopefully we will see you back again soon!

Yeah. Thanks from me too.

Look back near the end of this year and you should find 3rd party integration activated across all platforms via the Online Player.

Thooooough… what specifically are you looking for it for? What you are trying to do may already be possible in the Online Player?!?

I would like to trigger some sounds from Fantasy Grounds…

Then yes, you’ll need the 3rd party integration we are building in the Online Player.

We did TRY to activate integration for MAC but:

  1. It was proving really difficult (the Apple writes things to stop hacks like this)
  2. Such a small percentage of users actually use MAC to run Syrinscape and/or Fantasy Grounds (but I guess you hear that sort of thing a fair bit.) :-/

Sooo, yes, check back in near the end of the year.

AND THANK YOU for the support you’ve been able to give! Sad to see you go. :frowning:

It is now 2020-Sep, and I bet there’s more Mac users now. (I’m one.) Has there been any progress on this? Is there any hope for us Mac users?

I use Microsoft OneNote for my campaign notes, and it would be GREAT to be able to include a link directly into the notes that activates the mood or sound effect I need directly from my notes. That would allow me to focus on my notes and not flip back and forth between applications so much.

Am checking where we got to with this.

In the meantime… there is MUCH strong 3rd party integration in the Online Player that works on ALL platforms… so I would definitely recommend working with that instead!

So no, we were NOT able to get 3rd party integration working for the Offline Players on MAC. We have just kept running in roadblock after roadblock… there is, in the end, a price to pay for the nice tight way Apple have locked up thier OS.

So solution is to setup up something small to call the Online Player Remote control URL links AND also catch the returned page itself (so a browser window is not opened by the system.

Makes sense?

Hey folks, giving this thread a gentle bump. I’m a Mac user (yes, another one) and I’d love to be able to use my Stream Deck or a custom keyboard to build out funky, compact sound boards and triggers.

The integrations in the offline players don’t seem to do anything - the Mac doesn’t know how to respond to them. Meanwhile I know the fix is to use the online player… but for whatever reason I’ve only been able to get that (through Firefox) to output stereo sound, and I’m running a 5.1 surround system through a receiver.

Syrinscape sounds freaking amazing in 5.1 by the way - compliments to the chefs. But alas, I haven’t found a way to handle integrations without sacrificing it… so I’ll have to keep leaning over to my keyboard to trigger elements.

For any others in a similar situation, I might try using an iPad as a free-roving screen using sidecar… will update here if I make any progress.

Edit: Sidecar displays the Syrincape app beautifully, bringing it to my side at the table, but Sidecar doesn’t permit touch-screen controls so as a result I can’t actually trigger anything in the way I’d hoped. It does let work with a wireless mouse connected to the Mac though. It’s not ideal but it works.

Yeah, as I said above, we just CAN’T do 3rd party integration for the Fantasy Player in MacOS… which is annoying.

Can you do something for us? Have a test of the Web Player? Does it obey the system default speaker settings? I’ve been meaning to test for a while, but just haven’t got to that yet… and since you’ve got the speakers set up and all… <grins>

@benjamin alas, it does not … but I don’t think that’s because of a failure on the part of Syrinscape.

My Mac is configured for 5.1 and when I run the test in the Midi app, it correctly outputs to 5.1. So I’m confident in the audio hardware.

It also correctly outputs 5.1 from the three Syrinscape Mac apps (and sounds amazing).

But when I try to run 5.1 from a browser, it seems to be outputting in stereo which is then upscaled by the receiver. I’ve tried this in a few YouTube 5.1 audio tests as well as in Syrinscape Web Player. I’ve tried in both Chrome and Firefox.

I have no reason to think the web player isn’t functioning as intended, I just can’t test it on my Mac Mini M1 2020.

Hey @benjamin just a quick thought because I refuse to let this drop :grin: .

All this talk of 3rd party integrations … we’re over-engineering this. Regular old keyboard shortcuts would work great, and I know you can support those, because you already do for one-shots!

You have 1, 2, 3… for one shots, and a, b, c… for global one shots. How about alt/option + a, b, c for moods? They could be assigned based on the order they’re listed on the screen.

Then whatever third party app or device the user has just has to send that keyboard shortcut and blammo/zap/roar - we’re done!

Did you guys ever get 3rd party integration working on the Mac? I’m on the brand-new 1.5 and I can’t get it working.

My understanding is 3rd party integration for macOS is mostly an issue of packaging or providing post-installation steps. :package:

I did fix a bug where the URI directory was not being watched for changes on macOS (and Linux), only Windows. This was probably not noticed because we were not packaging the URI Proxy app anyway. :hammer:

With this fix it should be possible for users to implement their own integrations (crafting the appropriate files and dropping them in the appropriate folder), or potentially for us to try building the URI Proxy app for macOS, and users can use some tool to associate the syrinscape-fantasy:// scheme to the Proxy app we can post here (after we’re back running again in the new year). It is untested, but I would expect something like this should work. :crossed_fingers:

If you are interested in either of these approaches, please let me know by replying to this thread! :rainbow:

Yes, I would be very interested. My use case is:

  • in-person play
  • unreliable network connectivity
  • prep-work in Obsidian.md
  • I’d like to be able to put a link in the Obsidian.md page for the room/scene notes which starts the appropriate mood for the room.

I’m a developer (well, before moving to management) and not afraid of getting my hands dirty if you need a tester or if you have unofficial “the proxy is included in the app bundle but not set up as a daemon process” guidance I could follow to associate the URL myself.

Okay, so you want to try to associate the scheme with the same proxy app Windows users get but built for macOS yourself - that plan will probably have to wait for the new year when we are all working again.

My understanding is that the association just tells macOS to launch a certain app passing in the URL value when a scheme is navigated to (not any daemon process), but indeed we should be able to pack the App into the App bundle, that sounds like a good idea. Maybe if this goes well we can work out how to do that in future releases.

I believe there was a user that posted a utility app they used to create the scheme association, but I can not find that now. I did find this post that suggests they were able to do it, but not how:

Probably your own Googling can produce something that works for you, and you can let us know what worked :slight_smile:

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Getting the URL handler registered was easy. Just add the following to Info.plist inside of Syrinscape.app/Contents

<key>CFBundleURLTypes</key>
<array>
  <dict>
      <key>CFBundleURLName</key>
      <string>Mood handler</string>
      <key>CFBundleURLSchemes</key>
      <array>
          <string>syrinscape-fantasy</string>
      </array>
  </dict>
</array>

And I’m able to invoke the open command from the command line and it starts/activates Syrinscape.

open syrinscape-fantasy:moods/*RedactedLongStringOfLettersInCaseTheyAreUniqueToMe*/play/

However, it doesn’t actually start playing anything. For that, we’ll need the application updated to listen, I guess.

Yes, as I tried to explain, we have a separate URI Proxy handler app to process the URI and send the message to the running app so that it can remain hidden and not steal focus.

In anywcase, I appreciate your feedback here, I’ll pass it on to see where we go with it :rainbow:

Oh sorry - I understood what you were saying. I was responding to you saying you couldn’t find how it was done and to respond with what I got working.

And then just re-iterating for others who read this later that without you updating the app, just editing that plist file isn’t going to do anything.

But I didn’t express myself well.

Well, let’s see if this goes anywhere. Here’s hoping it will.

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Have you thought about implementing midi commands? Most of today’s 3rd party devices support this. if you assign midi notes to each task it can be triggered this way, on ALL os systems