TG Drop Deck, every release

Back to TG Drop Deck for the download and what the app does. Most of these changes came from people who use it and wrote in.

2.8.0, 4 September 2026

Put the show on the internet. Ctrl+B sends everything you can hear to your own streaming server: Icecast, a Liquidsoap harbor or SHOUTcast, in MP3 or Ogg Opus, at whatever bitrate you pick. Set it up under On air, Set up streaming, and Test the connection proves it works before the show rather than during it.

Ctrl+Shift+B says what the stream is doing: on air, for how long, and whether anything has been lost.

It sends the program, not your headphones. Sounds, beds, the playlist and the microphone go out. Previewing a sound and the beep before a track ends do not, because those are yours.

The microphone goes out whenever it is open, whether or not you are hearing yourself. Being heard and hearing yourself were the same switch before, and they are not the same question: on speakers you monitor nothing and you are still on air.

F7 and F8 become a monitor fader. Pull the playlist right down to hear your screen reader and navigate, and your listeners still get it at full level. The other faders change both, because a drop fired at half level was meant to be at half level.

The show comes first. Encoding and the network run on their own thread. If the connection cannot keep up, the stream loses audio and what you hear does not. It reconnects on its own and tells you; a wrong password stops instead, because retrying that forever only looks like it might work.

Listeners see the artist and title from your playlist.

Nothing goes out until you press Ctrl+B, and it is never on when the app opens.

2.7.1, 4 September 2026

Preview works in the ordinary Windows file window too. Browse with Windows, press Alt+P, and each sound plays as you arrow onto it, the same as in the app's own browser.

It only listens while Drop Deck is the program in front. The first build of this took Alt+P system wide, so pressing it in another program fired a preview here. That was caught before it shipped.

2.7.0, 4 September 2026

Find a sound by listening to it. The window that opens when you assign a sound is this app's own now, with a Play each sound as I reach it box on it, Alt+P. Turn it on and every sound plays once as you arrow onto it, and stops the moment you move on, so you can find the right one by ear instead of by reading forty file names. It waits a beat first so your screen reader gets the name out before the sound starts.

Enter opens a folder or takes the sound you are on, Backspace goes up one, and Browse with Windows opens the ordinary file window for typing a path or reaching a network drive.

A bank does not have to have twenty slots. Shift+Delete takes the one you are on off the board. It is in the Sounds menu, the right-click menu and Properties too. Want ten instead of twenty? Remove 11 to 20.

Removing one never moves the others: take slot 5 away and 6 is still on the 6 key. The slot keeps its sound, its name and its hotkeys while it is off, so nothing asks whether you are sure, and Put a removed slot back brings it again.

2.6.0, 3 September 2026

The playlist is rebuilt. Brian Hartgen recorded a show with it and sent back eight things. This is all eight.

Your screen reader now says whether a track is ticked. The running order is a list view with real check boxes, in columns: title, artist, song or drop, length, when it starts, and its own crossfade if you gave it one. The artist and title come out of the file's tags. There are no numbers in front of the rows any more, so first letter navigation works. Enter plays from the row you are on.

The crossfade is a crossfade. It used to cue off the file's last sample, and an MP3 carries a second or two of silence there, so most of the overlap happened in the gap. It measures where the music really stops now, and the new track comes in at level while the old one rides down under it.

m4a files play, along with aac, wma, opus and the rest. An iTunes or Apple Music library goes straight in.

Save a running order as an M3U and open it again, or open it in VLC, or hand it to somebody else.

A beep before a track ends, at however many seconds you like. It is off until you turn it on, and it plays where you hear yourself, so it stays out of the show.

Audio settings is now Preferences, still Ctrl+P, on five tabs. The microphone is one of them, and Ctrl+Shift+M opens the same window on it.

2.5.2, 2 September 2026

Text only. Nothing you press has changed.

Every em dash is gone from the app, the help, the dialogs and this website. A screen reader either skips one or says the words "em dash", and neither is what the sentence meant.

2.5.1, 2 September 2026

There is a user guide now. Read it here, or open it in the app under Help, User guide. Plain English, every key explained.

Save board as is Ctrl+F12, not a bare F12, which sat one key from the volume row and was too easy to hit by accident.

The crossfade box says what it does, and it is in Audio settings as well as under the running order. Set it in either and the other shows it.

2.5.0, 2 September 2026

The biggest release since 2.0.0. Treat it as experimental: plenty of tests, not many shows yet.

A playlist. Ctrl+Shift+P goes to it, Ctrl+Shift+S comes back. Paste songs in with Ctrl+V straight from File Explorer, as many at once as you like, or drag them in.

Each song hands over to the next before it ends. That overlap is the crossfade, and the box for it sits right under the running order.

Every track has a tick. Unticked stays in the list, keeps its place, and is skipped. Enter plays from the one you are on, and the Applications key opens a menu with everything else, including Segue to this now for getting out of a track early.

The playlist has its own fader on F7 and F8.

Drops, and a drops library. Put a drop between two songs, or after every so many songs. Better still, put the idents you use over and over into the drops library, and Alt+D puts one in at random wherever you are standing. Never the same one twice running.

A microphone. Ctrl+M opens and closes it. Ctrl+Shift+M sets it up: which microphone, how much gain, which output you hear yourself on, and whether you hear yourself at all.

While the microphone is open, the beds and the playlist duck out of the way, and they come back the moment you close it. That happens because it is open, not because you are talking. A gate that opens on your voice clips the first word of every sentence.

Hearing yourself is off until you turn it on. On headphones it is how you know you are live. On speakers it is a feedback loop. It can go to an output of its own, so monitoring sits in your headphones and the show does not.

Nothing opens your microphone except you pressing Ctrl+M.

Telling us things. Help, Submit feedback goes straight to the person who wrote the app. It shows you exactly what goes with your message, and never a file name, a sound name, a bank name or anything from your running order. Offline, it is saved and goes out next time.

Help, Donate. Drop Deck is free and it is staying free.

2.4.0, 2 September 2026

Rename the banks. Ctrl+F2, or the Banks menu. A board of your own is not "Sound Effects" and "Dialog Drops", it is "Movie Clips" and "Sirens and Alarms". The name saves with the board.

The name is all that changes. Bank 3 is still the looping bank and bank 4 still takes your own hotkeys, and the app says so when you rename either. David Goldfield asked for this one.

One key, a whole folder. Sounds, Assign a folder. The slot plays a random sound from that folder every press, never the same one twice running, and says which one it picked. For the six jingles that all mean "down the chart". Drop another file in the folder and it joins in.

Play in the Find dialog no longer throws you out. Alt+P plays the match you are on and leaves the dialog open, so you can try each one. Enter still jumps and closes. Both of these came from Brian Hartgen.

And the announcement when the app opens works again. Since 2.1.2 it had been failing silently, which meant "3 files missing" and "audio could not start" were never spoken at startup.

2.3.0, 2 September 2026

Both from Brian Hartgen.

A music bed starts exactly where the file does. It used to ease in over a third of a second, and if you cue a bed on its first beat, that is the beat it ate. Stopping one still fades, because a bed cut dead mid phrase is a more obvious mistake. Both fades are in Audio settings, Ctrl+P.

A button tells you what you changed the moment you change it. Assign a file to an empty bed and the button used to go on saying "Empty" until you tabbed away and came back. Turn looping off and it still said "loops". It does not any more.

2.2.1, 30 August 2026

Checking for updates answers in a window now. The reply used to be spoken and nothing else, so with the app's speech turned down it looked like the menu item did nothing. It sits in a box you can arrow back through, it names the program, and you can read the release notes before deciding.

2.2.0, 30 August 2026

All of this came from David Goldfield and Brian Hartgen, who both wrote in the same morning after using 2.1.2.

The function key row makes sense now. F2 renames, because that is what F2 does everywhere else in Windows. The volume keys moved down one: F3 and F4 for sounds, F5 and F6 for beds. None of the number keys moved.

Ctrl+F searches. It is the key everyone reaches for. Ctrl+E still works and always will, because a key you have already learned should not be taken away to tidy up a menu.

Alt+Enter opens properties for the sound you are on: its name, its level, whether a bed loops, and both of its hotkeys. The right-click menu now offers the global hotkey too, and reads out what it is set to.

Alt on its own now works as a global hotkey. Alt+A was impossible before. Alt+F4 is the one combination it will not take, since that closes a window in every program.

The app can talk less, or not at all. Audio settings, Spoken feedback from the app, with three settings: everything, only what you cannot hear or read for yourself, or nothing at all. The bank hint is also spoken once per bank now rather than on every tab change.

2.1.2, 30 August 2026

Send a bank to its own output. Each of the four banks can go to a different sound card. Put music beds on one and dialog drops on another and you can bring each up on its own channel of a physical mixer.

Ducking is still there and still on by default, and it still works across outputs. A drop on one card ducks a bed on another. Banks left on the main output share one audio stream, so nothing changes if you do not use this.

Turn off the announcement when a sound starts. Audio settings, Say the name when a sound starts or stops. For when you built the board, you know where everything is, and you can hear the sound perfectly well. Anything you cannot hear, such as a missing file, always speaks.

Both of these were asked for by Brian Hartgen.

2.1.1, 29 August 2026

Opening the app when it is already running now brings the copy you have back to the front, instead of starting a second one that would fight it for the audio device. Every TG Studios program works this way now.

2.1.0, 29 August 2026

Global hotkeys. Assign a key to any sound and it fires while another program has focus. You can be in your DAW, your browser or on a call and still hit the sting, which is the whole point of a soundboard on a live show.

Sounds menu, Assign a global hotkey, on any slot in any bank. It needs at least one modifier such as Ctrl or Alt. A key on its own would be taken away from every other program on your machine, so the app refuses to do it. Ctrl+G arms and disarms the whole set, and disarming hands the keys back.

None of the keys you already know changed. The number row is exactly as it was.

It updates itself now. 2.0.0 shipped as a zip with no way to send you a new version, so that one had to be a manual download. From here it tells you when there is a new version and asks before it does anything. That goes for every TG Studios program.

2.0.0, 26 August 2026

The first release. A rebuild of The Tony Gebhard Show Soundboard, whose source code was lost.

Eighty sounds on the number row across four banks, two independent volumes, music beds that duck themselves, and forty sounds included so it makes a noise the first time you open it.

The keyboard map is the one from the old app, recovered out of the only surviving copy, because years of muscle memory should not be thrown away.

Free, and staying free.