When are we getting a simple linking to Discord?!

Just to add a small +1 for the answer. I also use Kenku and it is basically solving all the issues for me. Not sure what solution you’ve been using with Voicemeeter (I use it as well) with Discord. Quite curious tho!

I have set up Kenku too, but whenever Discord updates (weekly) it breaks the link, and I have to do the setup all over again. It would be nicer to have something like this with a designated Discord link, for those of us with limited time for screwing around and limited tech knowledge to customize this stuff.

I just want to point out that I have been with Syrinscape since the beginning, and LOVE the desktop player immensely. I totally gets me in the mood for writing my fantasy scenes for my games. However, the online player is way less friendly to use.

Ever since covid hit and the world of RPG went online I have been trying to get this to work on-and-off to little or no success. Honestly, I just want something simple and easy.

I totally second this! The desktop player is excellent, the online player not so much.

Ability to link the desktop player to discord would make this product a 11/10!

I’m going to investigate how hard it would be to fix Kenku to talk WAY more easily to Syrinscape. Or whether Kenku might be forked to make a version permalinked to Syrinscape = things like that.

Another question occurs to me:

What would need to change about the online (Web) player to make it as good as the Fantasy Player to use? (because fixing the Web Player is another solution, right?)

BE HARSH!

2 Likes

Thanks for the reply Benjamin!

The worst part about the web player is that you dont have the ability to archive any of the soundsets. They are all available so there is alot of clutter.

I have bought alot of them, but for a single game i mostly use around 3-5.

In the desktop player you can download only the ones you will use for the single game session so just with a little preparation you can cut down the search time immensely. And of course when they are preloaded even the download time is 0. So its just alot more efficient way to use Syrinscape. But now that our group is split around scandinavia the only way to play is via VTT:s

Even with these minor problems let me be clear! I love it, the players love it and it has given us alot concerning the atmosphere of the game.

1 Like

Hi @erkki.nordberg, you can use the “Campaigns” feature to build a list that only contains the SoundSets that you use during your sessions. Then in the Web Player you simply select the campaign and now the only SoundSets shown in the left hand column are the ones you selected. you can even import ready built Campaign lists for all of our published adventures.

2 Likes

Well that was an easy fix for the biggest problem. Thanks Steve, dont know how I missed that!

Now if we just could preload the soundsets so the lag wouldnt be a problem. :slight_smile:

But this helped alot, you learn something new every day

2 Likes

Kenku is great, but if you accidently click off it and don’t realize it, you can go a whole session without realizing all the sound you worked on wasn’t heared by the players. I would really love a Syrinscape discord bot. My players don’t have machines that can keep up. I am already asking them to install Fantasy Grounds, Discord, and more. If we had a discord bot, that would be 1 less thing players would need to worry about. Discord can allow them to adjust the volumes to their liking. It would be a massive win if we could get a discord bot.

Hell! I would pay for a discord bot. 1 time payment or even if you all added a couple bucks to my subscription.

With the web player they only need to click one link to open the browser, then they can hear the sounds directly from Syrinscape and control their own volume. Putting audio through Discord causes compression, meaning that they won’t hear the sounds as they are designed to be player, whereas with the Web Player they will hear every little detail.

I may be wrong here, as I haven’t used it for quite a while, but you should be able to hear Syrinscape’s sound natively through Fantasy Grounds. You shouldn’t need to pipe it through Discord or open an extra browser window to use the web player interface.

Fantasy grounds just triggers sounds. You still need to pipe it with discord or the web app.

I think I understand what you’re saying, but I am not suggesting Syrinscape build a Kenku or Audio Pipe bot. Instead a bot that does basically what the website does.

I could build a bot (most likely) that you type “/play {url from dashboard for sharing}”. It would:

  1. start a bot in discord
  2. simulates a browser using the URL
  3. Plays sound through the bot.

But this bot would be inefficient. What the bot should do is whatever is happening behind that web app, so it is most direct to Syrinscape

Then instead of a discord bot compressing sound from my machine to other people’s Discords, it would do what those radio bots do and plays direct sound from the source (in this case Syrinscape) through the bot.

The bot could also have the host login, and use an API so you wouldn’t even need to type in the URL.

So over the weekend I was bored and I decided to try and build this discord bot. I think I am roughly 80% of the way there, but I am having trouble when it opens the site, I can’t get it to click the button “click here to play” (or whatever it reads).

Is there a url attribute, tag, hack… I can use to get past that button?

End goal is the Discord users would not see anything except the bot enter the room and it starts playing from the Syrinscape web app.

This sounds cool. [pun intended]

So you are actually running the Web Player locally on remote friends machine?! Or is this running the Web Player on the GM’s computer and porting the sound through a voice channel?

I’d love to try it out once you are making it work.

Is compression/noise reduction an issue, or is there a way of stream the full quality sound?

As for clicking the button without having to click the button… @ryan.cassar, thinks?

What does Kenku FM do about this issue (actually bring up the UI?)

Ok, so it isn’t really like Kenku. What Kenku does is the sound that is playing on Host machine, goes through Kenku, and Kenku compresses the sound and pipes it through discord like a microphone, and everyone elses machines hear the sound.

So basically: Syrinscape > Kenku > Discord > Internet > (other users) Discord > Speakers.

That is why Kenku users never have to press a button the sound is not coming from their computer, it is coming from the host.

(sorry if I am over explaining, I just want to make sure we all are on the same page) A Bot in Discord can do practically anything. Let’s pretend Netflix removed all their restrictions, you could make a Bot open up Netflix (independently on everyone machine) and play a movie right to the bot. Everybodys machine will independently load netflix, load the movie and the visual and sounds would be coming from Netflix > discord > video & sound. Everyone would be looking at a window in Discord to watch a Netflix show/movie. You can’t do this because Netflix has security that prevents it, but it IS theoretically possible.

You can build games, soundboards, and a kind of unlimited number of things. It is just an interface that accepts python or javascript.

So what I am trying to do is for the bot to (unseen to the user) create a chromium browser behind the scenes, and port all the sounds from the browser to the bot in discord. This will happen independently on everyones machines.

It is kind of a simple idea, just load the “share audio” site on a discord comand and play the site through the bot.

So each persons machine in discord will be running the webapp (site) “https://app.syrinscape.com/{blahblahblah}/player/” and the sound will come right out the discord bot. They can adjust the discord bot’s volume to control their preference.

This would sound just a good as if they open up the link because the source and destination are the same.

The benifit here is we can pretty much stay in Discord and I don’t have to ask them to open up more windows.

My last game I didn’t realize the players were not hearing my sound. I spent time setting up all the sound and I forgot to ask “can you all hear this”, but I forgot to setup the VAC and put Kenku in the right modes.

If we had a Syrinscape Discord bot, the chance of failure would be lower because it would be something that is specifically designed to work with syrinscape and discord.

My only problem is I am having a hell of a time trying to figure out how to get puppeteer to find the button to click
image

If there was an attribute I could put in the URL or a Hack to just get past this. That would get me to maybe 90-95%.

Super super useful info. Something now Ryan can probably speak to. :slight_smile:

Sound NOT going through Discord is going to be def a good thing!

1 Like

Thanks! I had the idea when I was watching your Nova Q&A, you mentioned Discord, so I chatted here, then Steve was like “but it compresses the sound”, and I was like “but what if it doesn’t have to?”

Also, Ryan (nice to meet you) if you can tell me anything about:

  1. how the sound is coming through the webapp, like WebAudio API or it is simple HTML Media Elements.

  2. Is the final audio mix produced client-side or is it a ready made mix audio file(s)

If I get this to work, maybe we can talk about a step further of having an endpoint the app could tap into and then it will be efficient and not need to fake up an entire invisible browser, capture the audio, and pipe it to the bot, the bot could just simply play the audio from the endpoint. But that is future thinking.

Sorry @james, I didn’t realise there was someone waiting for a response from me on here :grimacing:

Firstly, what you’re trying to do sounds fun, and I would love to see something like that working. I’m no expert with Discord bots, but from what I know of our Web Player, the “Click to Start” button isn’t just a feature for the user to only start sounds when they want, but a sneaky way for us to capture a genuine user interaction. As best as I understand, the Web Audio API by design, refuses to actually make any sound without a genuine user interaction, to prevent websites auto playing sounds, which would be very annoying. This is why the button exists, and I don’t know of any way to avoid having at least one real click from the user somewhere on the page.

There might be some way to configure your bot’s Chromium browser to bypass this restriction, in which case I think you can actually click anywhere on the page to trigger the sounds, the button is just there to prompt the user to click on something.

So I think that answers question 1) - we use Web Audio API to make the sounds.
And the reason we use Web Audio API is the answer to 2) - the Web Player locally fetches the original Sample files, and then uses a network of Web Audio nodes to mix the sound client side.

If you can convince some user agent to support running Web Audio API without any user interaction, then I think we can get somewhere, it should just be a matter of executing some JavaScript :slight_smile:

2 Likes

Thank you @ryan.cassar,

So, yes… maybe it is a matter of rather than running the Web Page (player’s) Basic Player in a browser (because that ALSO needs a response to the Cookie Question, right?)… instead run the embedded player (info in docs), and fake an interaction with some JavaScript?