TG Studios

TG Drop Deck for Mac, the manual

Everything the Mac copy does, in order, with every key and every setting.

This is the reference for the Mac version. If you want the short version, press 1 in the app and you will hear applause; that is the whole learning curve, and the rest of this is for when you want more.

Nothing here needs a mouse or a trackpad. Every feature is reachable from the keyboard and announced out loud, and the app was built and tested with VoiceOver running.

Conventions. Keys are written like Command+B. Menu paths are written like On air, Go live. Where a thing has both a key and a menu item, both are given, because a key you have not learned yet is no use to you today.

Coming from Windows? The Mac copy is the same program with the same board file, and nearly every key is the Windows key with Command where Windows has Ctrl. Chapter 4 explains the one place that had to move and why. The Windows manual is at /drop-deck-guide/.

Back to TG Drop Deck for the download.

Contents

Getting started

The soundboard

Running a show

Your voice, and other audio

Getting it out

Reference

1. Installing and first run

Drop Deck is free, needs no sign-up and no licence key, and installs nothing but itself.

Installing. Unzip the download and move TG Drop Deck into your Applications folder. That is the whole installation: no runtime, no helper, no driver. The demo sounds travel inside the app.

The first time you open it macOS checks the app with Apple, which takes a second, and opens it. It is signed and notarised, so there is nothing to allow and nothing to approve.

Requirements. macOS 14 Sonoma or later on a Mac with Apple silicon, which is any Mac made since late 2020. Capturing one program's audio needs macOS 14.2 or later; everything else works on 14.0.

One setting worth making before you start. The volume keys are F3 to F8, and a Mac keyboard sends brightness and volume on that row unless you turn on Use F1, F2, etc. keys as standard function keys in System Settings, Keyboard, Keyboard Shortcuts, Function Keys. The app checks at startup and says so once if it is off. Until then, hold fn with the key, or use the Sounds menu, which has every volume command on it.

What you already have. Press 1 and you hear applause. Forty sounds and beds are loaded, all of them generated rather than sampled, so you may use them in anything you make. Your board and settings live in Library/Application Support/TG Studios/TG Drop Deck in your home folder, never inside the app, so they survive an update. It is the same board.json the Windows copy writes, so a show built on one machine opens on the other.

1a. What macOS has to allow

Drop Deck asks for these when it first needs them, and you can ask for them whenever you like from Help, What Drop Deck is allowed to do. That window lists all three, says whether each is allowed, asks for the one you are on when you press Return, and opens System Settings at the right place.

What What it is for
Microphone Your voice, on the air and in recordings
Camera A camera as the picture, and what the camera can see
Screen recording Your screen as the picture, and the camera in its corner

An app does not appear in System Settings until it has asked. If you go looking for Drop Deck under Camera before it has ever wanted one, it will not be in the list, and that is normal rather than a fault. Use Help, What Drop Deck is allowed to do, and it puts itself there.

macOS only asks once for each. If you say no, it will not ask again, and the way back is System Settings, Privacy and Security.

Screen recording needs Drop Deck quit and opened again after you turn it on, even though the switch is already set. That is macOS, not this app.

2. How the app is laid out

There are two views, one button and one status line.

The soundboard is eighty buttons in four banks of twenty, on four tabs. Control+Tab moves to the next bank and Control+Shift+Tab to the previous one, and Command+Shift+] and Command+Shift+[ do the same for a keyboard where Control+Tab is awkward. The tab says which bank it is and how many sounds are on it.

The running order is a table of songs and drops with columns for whether it will play, title, artist, whether it is a song or a drop, length, when it starts, and its own crossfade if you have given it one.

Command+Shift+P goes to the running order, Option+Command+Shift+S back to the soundboard, and Option+Command+Tab swaps between the two. Each swap says where you have landed and puts focus there.

The Stop everything button sits under the banks and does in one press what Escape does in two.

The status line carries the three volumes, whether ducking is on, whether the microphone is open, whether you are on air and whether you are recording, and beside it the last thing the app said. It is always true; nothing there needs a key press to refresh, and VoiceOver can read it at any time.

3. How the app talks to you

VoiceOver reads the controls. The app adds speech of its own on top, through VoiceOver rather than through a voice of its own, and Preferences, Speech has three settings for how much of it you get:

There is a separate switch for announcing what is playing as each sound or track starts.

A switch you press always says what it did, at every setting. Ducking, the microphone, going live, the recorder, global hotkeys, muting and soloing a source and the three faders are on a channel that "Nothing" does not silence. "Nothing" means stop narrating, not stop answering: a switch you pressed that then says nothing is not quiet, it is a switch you have to go and look up.

Turning the app quieter never silences the essential channel, and everything it says is also written to the status line at every level. Being told whether you are live is not a pleasantry.

Each bank's hint is spoken once per session when you first land on that tab, not every time.

4. The four banks

The keyboard map came from the soundboard this app replaces and has not changed shape. What changed on the Mac is which key sits under your thumb.

Bank What it is for Keys
1 Sound effects 1 to 0, and Shift+ those for 11 to 20
2 Dialog drops Command+ digit, and Command+Shift+ digit
3 Music beds Option+Command+ digit, and Option+Command+Shift+ digit
4 Miscellaneous No fixed keys: give each slot its own

Why not the Windows keys. On Windows the drops are Ctrl and the beds are Alt+Ctrl. On a Mac, Control+Option is VoiceOver's own modifier, the VO keys, and VO plus a digit already jumps to a VoiceOver hot spot. VoiceOver takes those combinations before any program sees them. Control plus a digit is also how macOS switches desktops. So the map moves one key: what was Ctrl on Windows is Command here. Every finger moves the same way and the thumb moves one key to the left.

The Windows combinations still work wherever the system leaves them free, so a key you already know is not refused. If you have moved VoiceOver's modifier to Caps Lock and turned the desktop shortcuts off, Preferences, Keyboard can give you the literal Windows map instead, and says there what it costs.

Help, Check the keyboard is how you find out what really arrives. It asks you to press each combination and reports exactly what the app received, because nothing in any manual can know what your VoiceOver settings will let through.

Twenty slots a bank, eighty in all. Command+F2 renames the bank you are on, and Banks, Reset this bank's name puts the original back. Renaming bank 3 does not stop it being the looping bank, and renaming bank 4 does not stop it taking your own hotkeys. Those are what the keys do, not what the tab says.

Bank four is the one you design yourself. Its slots have no keys until you give them one, through Sounds, Assign a hotkey or the pad's own menu.

5. Playing and stopping sounds

Press the key and the sound plays. That is all there is to the good case.

Sound effects and drops overlap. Press the same key twice and you hear it twice, and a laugh can land on top of a sting: banks 1, 2 and 4 overlap and never cut each other off. That is what a soundboard is for, and it is the default.

Beds toggle. Bank three is the looping bank: the same key starts a bed and stops it, and only one bed plays at a time. Starting another takes the first down with its own fade, because two pieces of music at once is a mistake rather than a texture. A bed will not start over a running playlist either, for the same reason; stop the playlist first.

Three ways to stop.

Stopping can cut instead of fading. A short fade is the default so a stop does not click. Turn it off in the same place if you are riding a mixer and want the app out of the way instantly.

Command+L says what is playing right now, on the board and in the running order, and how long the current track has left.

6. Putting your own sounds in

Land on any empty button and press Space, or use Sounds, Assign a sound file, or Control-click the pad for its menu.

It takes WAV, MP3, M4A, AAC, FLAC, OGG, Opus, AIFF and more, everything the Mac itself can decode, so an Apple Music library goes straight in. WMA is the one common Windows format a Mac cannot read, and the app says so rather than failing when you press the key.

A folder works too. Sounds, Assign a folder puts a whole folder on one key, and each press plays a different one at random, never the same one twice running. Drop another jingle into that folder later and the app picks it up; nothing needs re-scanning by hand.

Listening while you choose. The file window is the standard Mac one, so press Space on a file in it to hear it with Quick Look, and Space again to stop. You pick by ear instead of by file name.

Sounds are never copied into the program. The board remembers where they live. That keeps boards small and means one file can be on several boards.

7. Changing a sound

Command+I on a slot opens its properties, which holds everything on one window. Option+Return opens the same window, because that is the key in every TG Studios app. The same things are on the Sounds menu and the pad's Control-click menu one at a time.

An edit lands the instant you make it. The button reads its new name without you tabbing away and back.

8. Removing and restoring slots

Delete empties a slot but keeps its key and its name. On a Mac keyboard that is the key above Return; the forward delete key does the same.

Shift+Delete takes the slot off the board entirely. Its key then does nothing, which is the point: an empty pad you keep hitting by accident is worse than no pad. Nothing is renumbered, ever, so taking slot 5 away leaves 6 on the 6 key.

Sounds, Put a removed slot back lists what you have taken off this bank and puts one back where it was, with everything it had. Put this bank's slots back restores the lot. Both are on the pad menu too whenever there is something to put back. Want ten slots instead of twenty? Remove 11 to 20.

9. Finding a sound

Command+F searches every slot on the board by name, across all four banks. Command+E does the same, because it was the key for two releases and taking a key back off somebody who learned it is not a fix.

Type part of a name, press Down into the matches, and the Play button plays one without closing the window so you can check you have the right one. Return jumps to it on the board.

10. Firing sounds from another program

This is the point of a soundboard on a live show: you are in your DAW, your browser or on a call, and you still need the sting.

Control-click a slot, or use Sounds, Assign a global hotkey, and give it one. Any slot in any bank can have one, and it fires while another program has focus. macOS needs no permission for this.

It needs at least one modifier, such as Command or Option. A bare key would be taken away from every other program on the Mac, including whatever you are typing into, so the app refuses it and says why. If another program already owns the combination, the app tells you which keys it could not take.

Command+G arms and disarms the whole set at once, and disarming hands the keys straight back to macOS. The Sounds menu shows whether they are on, because "does this key belong to me right now" has to be answerable without pressing it. Preferences, Keyboard has the same switch.

11. The running order

Command+Shift+P takes you to it.

Getting songs in. Copy them in the Finder and press Command+V, as many at once as you like, and a whole folder works. Playlist, Add songs to the end does the same through a file window, and you can drag files, folders or a saved running order onto the list.

What it shows. Whether it will play, title, artist, whether it is a song or a drop, length, the time it starts, and its own crossfade if it has one. Title and artist come out of the file's tags and fall back to the file name. Typing a letter jumps to the next title starting with it.

Playing. Return plays from the row you are on. Command+Shift+Return does the same from anywhere in the app. Once it is going it works down the list on its own.

Ticking. Space ticks and unticks, and says what it did: "Ticked, it will play" or "Unticked, it will be skipped". Arrowing onto a row, VoiceOver says the Play box is ticked or not ticked. An unticked track stays in the list and keeps its place, and is skipped. Shift+A ticks every track and Shift+U unticks them all; both are on the Playlist menu too.

Moving. Option+Up and Option+Down move the track you are on by one place. Option+Home sends it to the top and Option+End to the bottom, which on a laptop keyboard is Option+fn+Left and Option+fn+Right. Delete takes it out.

Getting about. Command+Shift+L puts the cursor on whatever is on air, which matters once the show has run past the row you were looking at. The Playlist menu also has Next track, Previous track and Stop the playlist.

Control-click a row, or use VoiceOver's own menu command, for everything you can do to the row you are on, which is how you find these without learning them first.

What is on air is spoken, never written into a row. Each song is announced as it starts and the window's title carries it, but the row you are standing on is never rewritten under you while a song changes.

11a. What is coming up

Command+Shift+C opens the cue sheet: everything ticked in the running order, top to bottom, draining as the show runs. A track leaves it ten seconds after it starts.

N says the next three in one sentence, which is what you want when you are planning a link and do not want to arrow through three rows to find out. Return crosses into the track you are on.

Your pads and every other key still work while it is open. It is an ordinary window, not a dialog: the show is running.

The row you are standing on never moves, so a song changing underneath you cannot interrupt what is being read out. The last row always says the running order ends, so that is something you know before it happens rather than after. A ticked track whose file has gone is listed and marked rather than quietly left out.

12. Crossfades and segues

Each song hands over to the next before it ends. How long they overlap is the crossfade. The box for it sits under the running order, with a stepper beside it, and the same number is in Preferences, Playlist: two views of one setting. Playlist, Crossfade between tracks takes you straight to the box.

Three seconds to start with. Set it to zero and each song plays right out before the next begins. The overlap is the outgoing song riding down under the new one as it comes in, so every start time in the list moves when you change it, and the list shows the new times.

The crossfade is measured from where the music stops, not where the file does. An MP3 usually carries a second or two of silence on the end, and the app measures it once in the background so the handover lands on the music.

A single track can have its own, from its Control-click menu: Crossfade for this track. Useful for an ident you want played dry in the middle of a music show. A drop never fades under the next song unless you say so.

Shift+Return crosses into the track you are on, fading out whatever is on air at the crossfade length. That is how you get out of a song early, and it is the same thing the row menu calls Segue.

13. Drops and your drops library

A drop is an ident, a stinger or a bumper: something short that goes between songs rather than being one.

The drops library is Playlist, Drops library. Put your regular idents in it once and they are one key away for ever. It travels with the board.

A drop in the running order is marked as a drop, so you can hear the shape of the show at a glance.

14. The warning before a track ends

Preferences, Playlist. Turn it on and set how many seconds, ten by default. It is the countdown clock a sighted presenter watches.

You hear it wherever you hear yourself, which is the output set under Hear yourself through on the Microphone tab, so with headphones set up there it never reaches the show or the recording.

Six sounds to choose from: a pip, a double pip, a chime, a bell, three ticks and a rising sweep, with a volume of its own. They are different shapes rather than different notes, which is what lets you tell them apart over a song, and all six sit at the same loudness, so changing your mind never changes how loud your warning is.

A track shorter than the warning does not get one, so a nine second ident with a ten second warning does not beep the moment it starts.

15. Saving a running order

Playlist, Save the running order writes an M3U file, dated, wherever you like. Open a running order loads one back in place of what is there, and asks first if the list is not empty.

M3U because every player opens one, so a saved show can be checked in VLC, in Music, or handed to somebody else, and a running order saved on Windows opens here. Drops, ticks and per-track crossfades are kept in comments this app reads back and other players ignore.

Dragging an M3U onto the running order adds it instead of replacing, so you can build a show out of several saved parts.

16. Volume, and getting out of the way

Three faders, because a bed and a sound effect should never fight over one.

Keys What they move
F3 and F4 Sound effects and drops
F5 and F6 Music beds
F7 and F8 The running order

Each says its new level as you move it, and all six are on the Sounds menu for a keyboard whose function row belongs to brightness and volume.

Ducking. Fire an effect or a drop and the music underneath drops about nine decibels, then slides back when it finishes. Opening the microphone does the same. It is the thing radio does that makes a show sound produced rather than assembled, and here it happens without you touching anything.

Command+D turns it off and on. Preferences, Sounds and beds sets how far it ducks and how long beds take to fade in and out.

The duck follows the microphone being OPEN, not you talking. A gate that opens on your voice clips the first word of every sentence, so there is not one.

While you are on air, F7 and F8 become a monitor fader. Pull the music right down to hear VoiceOver and get about the list, and your listeners still get it at full level. F3 to F6 move both what you hear and what goes out. This is the single most useful thing in the app for working a show by ear, and it is why the playlist has its own fader at all. Preferences, Playlist turns it off if you want F7 and F8 to change the level on air as well.

17. The microphone

Command+M opens and closes it, and so does Option+Shift+M, for when another program has taken Command+M for itself. Command+Shift+M is where you set it up.

The first time you press Command+M macOS asks whether TG Drop Deck may use the microphone, before anything is opened, and the microphone opens the moment you say yes. Say yes once; the app is signed, so the answer survives updates. If the answer was no, pressing Command+M says so and says where to change it, rather than opening a microphone macOS would only hand silence.

If Command+M does nothing at all, another program has probably taken the key before Drop Deck can hear it. Option+Shift+M still works, and so does Microphone on in the On air menu. Help, Check the keyboard shows which keys really reach Drop Deck.

If the microphone will not open, it says why, in plain words: unplugged, held by another program, refused by the privacy settings, or the audio system not running. If it opens and nothing arrives, not even background noise, it says that too a couple of seconds later, because that is what a privacy refusal or a muted input looks like from here.

A chosen microphone that is not plugged in is said out loud, the system default is used for now, and your choice is kept, so plugging it back in is all it takes.

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.

The monitor can have an output of its own, so what you hear sits in your headphones and the show goes somewhere else entirely.

Nothing opens your microphone except you pressing Command+M or Option+Shift+M. Not startup, not opening a board. Whether it was open is never saved.

Going out is a different question from hearing yourself. On the Streaming tab, Put the microphone on the air decides whether your voice reaches the programme, and it works whether or not you are monitoring. On speakers you monitor nothing and are still live.

It is on by default, so pressing Command+M is normally all you need. It is worth knowing what it covers if you ever turn it off: it governs the programme, which is the stream AND the recording, so with it off your listeners do not get you and neither does the file. You go on hearing yourself either way, which is exactly why that is easy to miss, so the app now says so out loud when you open the microphone while live or recording, Command+Shift+B reports it, and the status line says Mic on, NOT on air.

18. Voice processing

The Voice tab in Preferences is a gate, a high pass filter, a three band equaliser, a compressor and a ceiling, on your microphone, in that order. It is what makes a voice sit in a mix rather than sounding like a laptop.

It is one list. Up and down choose a setting, left and right change it, and it says the new value as you go, in real units. Hold Shift for ten steps at a time. Page Up, Page Down, Home and End move around the list as they do in any list.

Process my voice at the top switches the whole chain off and on while you talk, which is the quickest way to hear what it is doing.

Stage What it is for
Gate Silence between sentences. Below the threshold it turns you down rather than off, so a breath does not slam shut.
High pass Everything below 80 Hz is desk rumble, a fan, or a lorry going past. None of it is your voice.
Equaliser Low, middle and high, plus or minus twelve decibels. Small moves.
Compressor Evens out loud and quiet, so leaning back from the microphone does not disappear. Threshold, ratio, attack, release, make up.
Ceiling The limiter, and it means it.

The ceiling is a real ceiling, not a loudness maximiser. Set it to minus one and nothing leaves louder than minus one, ever. It adds no delay at all, because a few milliseconds between your mouth and your headphones sounds like a barrel.

Everything here is live. The microphone you are listening to changes as you arrow about, which is the only way to set a compressor. Cancel puts all of it back; OK keeps it, and it is saved with your board.

The defaults are set up for a voice already, so a good first move is to turn it on and leave it. The Windows copy can also load a VST3 plugin into this chain; the Mac copy does not host plugins yet.

19. Audio sources

Option+Shift+S, or On air, Audio sources. Other things to put on the air besides your own voice: a co-host's microphone, a hardware mixer, or one program's audio.

It is one list of sources and one set of controls that follows whichever row you are on. Add a source makes one, Take audio from says what kind it is, and every source has a name, a gain, which channel to take, whether it goes on the air and whether you hear it yourself.

A sound card or a cable

Anything macOS offers as an input: an interface, a second microphone, or a virtual device such as BlackHole or Loopback.

One program

Take audio from, One program, then pick it from the list. macOS hands over exactly what that program is playing and nothing else. There is nothing to set up in the program itself, no driver to install and no cable in the middle.

Everything that is running is in the list, whether or not it has made a sound yet, and each one says which it is: playing now, has played, or running. The ones playing now come first, because that is usually the one you are looking for. Something like Spotify sitting paused is still there to pick, and the capture takes hold when it starts.

The first time, macOS asks whether TG Drop Deck may record system audio. Say yes once. This needs macOS 14.2 or later; on 14.0 and 14.1 the option says it cannot be done, and a cable still works.

Drop Deck remembers a program by its identity, so it finds it again next week even though its process number will be different, and on macOS 26 the capture survives the program being quit and reopened during a show.

VoiceOver itself

VoiceOver is in the list. Capturing it puts its speech on the air, which is how you demonstrate something, or teach with it, without holding a microphone up to your headphones.

Two things worth knowing before you put it on air. Everything it says goes out, including it reading Drop Deck's own buttons while you work, so Option+Command+C and mute it between the bits you want. And turn "Hear it yourself" off, because you are already hearing VoiceOver through your own speakers.

If the program is not running when Drop Deck opens, the source says so. If you quit it mid show, Drop Deck says it has closed and that the source is silent until it opens again, instead of going quiet and looking fine. When you open it again, it says the program is back and puts the source back on, on its own.

Hearing it yourself

Leave it off when the sound already comes out of your speakers from the program itself, or you will hear it twice, slightly apart. Turn it on when the program is sending its audio only to a cable.

Sources are never ducked and never go through the voice processing. Both belong to your microphone: program audio is not somebody talking, and a compressor set up for a voice has no business on a games call.

Hold this one back. A capture card, a games console or a call over a cable arrives whenever its own hardware gets round to it. The slider at the bottom of the sources window delays a source by up to two seconds so you can line it up by ear.

It can only ever make a source later. Nothing can make live audio arrive sooner than it does, so a source that is running behind the others is fixed by holding the others back instead. OBS works the same way and it surprises everybody once.

20. Source control

Option+Command+C. This is the one for during a show, and it is worked entirely from the keyboard.

There used to be left and right arrows that cycled between mute, solo, rename and remove, with Space doing whichever one you had landed on. That was a mode: something to remember, and something the window had to keep telling you because nothing said which of the four you were on. It went in 3.5.2.

Your microphone is in the list, because soloing a games call has to take your voice down with everything else or it is not a solo. It can be muted from there, and not renamed or removed: Command+M is its switch.

Every source keeps a number, and the number is its position rather than anything to do with its name, so renaming one does not renumber it.

Mute wins over solo. A source that is both stays silent.

Two keys do this without opening anything. Option+Command+M mutes every source at once and unmutes them, which is the one to reach for when a guest's laptop starts making a noise. Option+Command+S solos your microphone, so every other source goes silent and the music and the running order carry on, and pressing it again drops whatever is soloed. Both say what they did out loud at every speech level, and the status line carries SOLO and SOURCES MUTED while they are on.

Neither is saved with the board. A mute is something you do during a show, and coming back tomorrow to a source that is quiet for reasons you cannot remember is worse than having to press it again.

Turning your microphone off with Command+M does not take your sources off air. They are separate on purpose: somebody putting a call out has not necessarily got their microphone open.

21. Streaming

Option+Shift+B goes live on your radio station and comes off air again. Command+B does the same for your video platform, which is chapter 21a. One key each, so the summary you are shown before going live is always for the place you actually meant. Command+Shift+B says what the stream is doing: on air or not, for how long, at what bitrate, to where, and whether anything has been lost.

Pressing one key while the other destination is on air does nothing except say where you are and which key comes off air. It never drops one broadcast and starts another on a key that looks like a toggle.

Set it up first in On air, Set up streaming, which is the Streaming tab of Preferences. Everything on it is something the person who runs your server tells you.

Setting What it means
What kind of server Icecast, which also covers a Liquidsoap harbor, or SHOUTcast
Address The name of the server, with no http in front
Port The port the server gave you for a source. For a Liquidsoap harbor that is the harbor's own port
Mount point The part after the address, such as /live. SHOUTcast does not use one
User name Almost always source. SHOUTcast ignores it
Password The source password, not your listener password
Bit rate 128 is plenty for speech and music together
Station name What listeners see

Test the connection proves it works before the show rather than during it. It connects, says what the server answered in a box you can read back at your own pace, and disconnects. It sends no audio.

Send as picks the format, because the format is your server's choice and not the app's.

Format What it is for
MP3 The default, and the safe answer if you are not sure. Every server and every player takes it, and every SHOUTcast v1 server needs it
AAC in ADTS Smaller than MP3 at the same quality. Most Icecast, Liquidsoap and SHOUTcast 2 mounts take it
Opus in Ogg Better again at half the bit rate, and what Icecast recommends now. An Ogg mount wants this one
WAV Uncompressed. For a relay or for feeding another encoder, not for an audience

WAV is not a broadcast format and is not offered as one. A listener who joins part way through a WAV stream misses the header and hears nothing. It is there for the case where the thing on the other end is your own machine.

Where MP3 comes from. macOS has no MP3 encoder of its own at any layer: it decodes MP3 everywhere and writes it nowhere. So TG Drop Deck includes LAME, the standard MP3 encoder, as a separate library inside the app. There is nothing to install and it costs you nothing; it is mentioned here only because it is somebody else's work and their licence asks that it be credited. Help, About says so too, and links to the source.

A station saved on Windows as MP3 stays MP3 here. One saved as Ogg comes in as Opus, because macOS has no Vorbis encoder either and Opus is the Ogg stream it can make.

What goes out. Sounds, beds, the running order, your microphone if it is set to, and any audio source that is on air. Everything, whatever sound card it was routed to. Not a preview, and not the warning before a track ends, because those are yours.

Track titles go to the server as they change, so listeners see what is playing, and the same title goes on the card and the words on the picture. Turn Send what is playing off on the same tab if your server does its own; then no title leaves your Mac at all, on the station or on the picture.

How a song is named is on the same tab. Title by Artist gives "The Dance by Garth Brooks", which is what the Windows copy sends, and Artist - Title gives "Garth Brooks - The Dance", the order most stations and players use. It is also how the window's title and the line said as a song starts name it. A song with no artist is named by its title either way. The track list written beside a recording is not affected: it keeps the performer and the title apart.

If the connection drops the stream loses audio and what you hear does not, which is the right way round, and it reconnects on its own. If listeners have actually missed something it says so, and Command+Shift+B reports it.

21a. Video: going out on YouTube, Facebook and Restream

New in 3.5.2. Your show can go to a video platform instead of, or as well as being set up alongside, your radio station.

Open Preferences, Video streaming. Pick your platform, paste your stream key, and press Check my stream key. Then Command+B, which always goes to your video platform. Option+Shift+B is your radio station.

Check my stream key asks the platform whether your key is right and reads out what it said. It sends no sound and no picture, so nothing is broadcast and nothing is posted. For YouTube, and for any server Drop Deck does not know, it asks you first. It checks what is in the boxes now, before you press OK, and the answer is also written in the What happened box under it so you can read it back. Press it again while it is still asking and it says so; the button never goes grey under you, because that would move your focus.

Channel name is optional. It is what your channel is called, if you want it said on the way to air: "Tony Gebhard, on YouTube Live". It has nothing to do with your radio station's name, which is on the Streaming page. Leave it empty and Drop Deck just says the platform. YouTube and Facebook each have one address, so it is never read out; a custom server's address is.

YouTube and Facebook each have one address and it is filled in for you. Restream hands out its own address along with the key, so paste theirs over the one that is there if it differs.

Your stream key is kept in your keychain, not in your board file. Anybody holding a YouTube key can broadcast to your channel, and a board file is plain JSON that people send each other.

Two things behave in opposite ways, and both surprises are expensive. YouTube usually puts you live the moment you connect: it makes the watch page, tells your subscribers and saves the video. That is true while auto start is on for that stream, which is a YouTube setting Drop Deck cannot see. With auto start off, YouTube waits for you to press Go live in your live control room, and your channel shows nothing until you do. Facebook shows you a preview and posts nothing until you press Go Live Now on their page. Restream goes wherever you have switched channels on, so with every channel off it goes nowhere at all, which makes it the safe place to practise. The app says which of these applies before you connect, not after.

Help, Setting up streaming has the steps for each one, in the app.

Where the show goes

The keys decide: Command+B is always your video platform and Option+Shift+B is always your radio station. On air, Streaming location lists both, with a dot beside the one you last went live to, and each key moves the dot as it goes. It is the destination Command+Shift+B describes while you are off air. Pick one yourself and it says where that is and which key goes live there. The Streaming location is this platform box on the Video streaming page is the same choice and the two move together.

21b. What is on the screen

Something has to be on the screen, because YouTube will not take sound on its own. Option+Shift+V, or On air, Video source, lists what it can be:

What What the audience sees
A card Your station name and whatever is playing. Costs almost nothing and never fails
A picture of my own Your artwork, fitted inside the frame without being stretched
A camera Your camera, filling the frame
What is on my screen Everything on your screen. Remember they can read it
My screen with the camera in the corner The screen fills the frame and the camera is small in a corner you choose

Up and down read the choices and Return puts one out. It changes while you are on air without dropping the stream.

The camera corner is a box in the same window: bottom right, bottom left, top right or top left. It moves while you are live, and it is worth having because your screen has its own furniture and some platforms put a chat panel over one corner.

The screen fills the frame and the camera goes in the corner rather than side by side, and that is measured rather than preferred. A 1280 wide picture split down the middle leaves your screen 640 across, and a 1920 by 1080 desktop at 640 across is not small text, it is no text.

The first time you choose your screen, macOS will ask. Turn Drop Deck on under Screen and System Audio Recording in System Settings, Privacy and Security. Until you do, the app says so and shows your card instead. It will never quietly broadcast a black rectangle.

21c. Things on top of the picture

Option+Shift+T, or On air, Screen text. Four named places, and each one can show nothing, your station name, what is playing, the time, your own words, or a text file:

Place Where it is
Top strip across the top
Corner top right
Lower third bottom left
Clock bottom right

Up and down read them, Return chooses what one shows, Delete empties it. It changes while you are on air.

A text file is re-read a second after it changes, which is exactly how OBS does it, so anything else on this Mac that writes a text file can drive your screen.

There is no canvas and there are no coordinates, and that is the point. Putting something at an exact position is the easy half. Knowing whether it looks right is the half that needs eyes. Four places that are already the right size and cannot land on top of each other can be checked without looking, because the answer to "what is on screen" is four lines long.

Command+Shift+V says what is on screen. The picture, and everything on top of it, in words. On air or off.

Going live checks the text fits. A title too long for the lower third is said before you connect rather than discovered by somebody watching.

21d. Your colours

Option+Shift+C, or On air, Colours. Three things: the background everything sits on, the words, and an accent for the rule under your station name and the line round the camera inset. Ten ready-made looks are offered first, and every one was checked against the numbers rather than picked by eye.

Every colour tells you how it will read against what it will sit on: "gold, easy to read, 8.6 to 1", or "light green, too close together to read, 2.2 to 1". Nobody is asked to imagine a swatch.

That number matters more for video than for anything else. Video stores colour at half the resolution of brightness, so a pair whose difference is all hue has nothing left after encoding. One number catches both the unreadable and the unencodable.

There is a second column, and it is a different question. Contrast says what can be read. It says nothing about what frays at the edges: a strongly coloured letter keeps its shape and loses its border however good its ratio, and no bitrate mends it. The two faults have two different repairs.

What does this look like to a sighted viewer? is a button in the same window. It renders your branding and asks a model for a real opinion: warm or cold, deliberate or accidental, what kind of station it would suit. That is the only question in this app that arithmetic genuinely cannot answer.

21e. Knowing what your shot looks like

Command+Shift+F says what the camera can see. In shot or not, centred, close enough, lit. It says changes rather than states, so it is not a running commentary: at the most talkative setting, six seconds in front of a camera produced one sentence. Off, problems only, or everything, on the Video streaming page, and the key answers at all three.

Option+Shift+D, or On air, Check my shot, is the other one. It sends one still of the picture going out to Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini, on your own account, and reads back what a sighted person would have noticed. Framing, whether the top of your head is cut off, whether the light behind you is brighter than your face, whether your shirt blends into the wall, what is behind you, and whether the words on screen are sitting across your chin.

It answers with a verdict first, then the details worst first, then one line saying the single most useful thing to change. There is a question box under the answer, and it remembers the conversation, so "what about the other side" means something.

On a screen share it looks for anything private: an inbox, a password manager, a notification, somebody's address. It says where it is so you can close it.

Three things it deliberately does not do. It is never needed to go live, and going live never waits for it. It never sends a picture of your screen without asking, and it asks every single time, because a yes about one screen is not a yes about the next. And it never fails loudly: if the service is down or the key is wrong it says so in a sentence and the show carries on.

Set it up in Preferences, AI Provider: choose who to ask and paste your key. The key is kept in your keychain, not in your board file, so a board you send to somebody else does not carry it. The model is a list you can arrow through, with a Get the list button that asks your service what it can really see, because model names change faster than this app ships.

21f. Command B tells you what it is about to do

Command+B and Option+Shift+B say what they are about to do, and wait. Where the show is going, what it is sending, what will be on the screen, and whether your microphone is on the air. Then Return puts you live, so it is one extra keypress and you hear all of it on the way past.

It also checks, and that is the half worth having. Nearly every way of getting a broadcast wrong survives the connection and ruins the show quietly:

When something is stopping it, that is the first thing read. The box the window opens on starts "Not going out:" and the reason, then where it would have gone. Put it right opens the page that fixes that reason, and closing the window says the reason again.

A box in the window turns the asking off for good if you would rather not have it, and Preferences, Streaming turns it back on.

It tells you when the picture dies. Camera unplugged, screen gone black, capture stuck on one frame. It says so once, after a few seconds so a blink does not set it off, and says when it comes back.

22. Stations

Save as many servers as you run. The Streaming tab has Saved stations, a pop-up to load one into the boxes, with Save this station and Forget this station beside it. A station saved there is kept even if you cancel out of Preferences. On air, Station lists them, so switching is one menu rather than four boxes of retyping.

Switching station is refused while you are on air. Come off first.

23. Who is listening

Command+Shift+A. Every stream on your server, how many people are on each, the most there have been at once, and what the server thinks is playing, in a box you can read at your own pace.

It works whether or not you are on air, which matters if your station carries on without you.

If you stream into automation, the server you send to is not the server people listen to. That is the normal setup: you connect to a harbor on one port, the automation decides what goes out, and the audience is on the streaming server behind it. Put the address of the listening server's status-json.xsl page in Where to ask who is listening on the Streaming tab, and leave it empty to ask the server you send to.

Nothing here needs a password. Icecast publishes its listener counts already. If your server says nothing, it is usually missing the status-json.xsl file Icecast normally serves, and whoever runs it can drop one in.

24. Recording

Command+R starts and stops it. The status line says RECORDING while it runs.

It records the same mix that goes on air: every sound card, the running order, your microphone if that is set to go out, and any source that is on air. The warning before a track ends and previews are never in it.

It does not need you to be on air. A show taped for later is the ordinary case. Recording and streaming run together and neither takes audio from the other.

Files go to your Documents folder, in TG Drop Deck, named Drop Deck Stream 001 and counting up, so nothing you have already recorded is written over. On air, Open the recordings folder takes you there.

Preferences, Recording sets the format, the bit rate and the folder. WAV if the recording is going into an editor; MP3 if it is going anywhere else at all, because an MP3 opens on everything; AAC for a smaller file at the same quality; FLAC when you want it lossless and half the size of WAV.

Quitting the app finishes the file first, so a recording always opens.

Command+Shift+R records the picture and the sound together, into one MP4. It does not need you to be on air either: it takes the same picture that would go out, so it is also how you check a shot works before a show. If you are already live it uses the identical frames the stream is sending.

The sound is the master clock and the picture is fitted to it, so a camera that stutters cannot drag the sound out of step with it. If the machine cannot keep up, the picture loses a frame and the sound does not.

Both keys say what is really in the file when they start. A recording takes the on air mix, and monitoring is what YOU hear, so anything you can hear that is not on the air is not in the recording. That is the right way round, and nothing used to say so.

Both also write a .cue track list beside the recording, with the same file name, listing every running order track that went out and the moment it started. Upload the pair to Mixcloud and the track list is already done. Your pads are deliberately not in it.

25. Outputs and routing

Preferences, Output.

The main output is where everything goes by default, including a virtual audio device.

Each bank can go to a card of its own: beds to one output, effects to another, the running order to a third. That is how you feed a stream or a recorder while you keep listening on your own speakers. Ducking still works across outputs, and so does the stream: the encoder takes the sum of everything whatever card it went to.

Devices are remembered by the device itself, so plugging in a headset later will not silently move your sound somewhere unexpected.

Where you hear yourself, on the Microphone tab, is where your monitoring and the end of track warning play. Set it to your headphones and neither reaches the show. It carries every card's show, so putting a bank on a sound card of its own does not make you deaf to it.

Command+Shift+W reads out where everything is going, in one go: which card your sounds play from, which card you listen on, where the show is being sent and what it is leaving out, and anything that is wrong with the arrangement. It is three questions with one answer and it works on air or off.

This output is where your SOUNDS play, and it is not the whole show. Your microphone and every source you are catching live on the on air mix rather than on this output. To hand another program the whole show, use section 26 rather than pointing this at a cable.

Changing the output reopens the sound cards and stops what was playing.

26. Giving another program your show

On air, Send this show to another program, or Option+Shift+O.

Point it at a virtual audio cable, then set TeamTalk, Zoom, Skype, Discord or OBS to take that same cable as its microphone. They get the whole show: your pads, your beds, your running order at full level, your microphone with its processing, and every source you are catching.

It does not need you to be on air or recording.

Do NOT point Preferences, Output at a cable instead. That output carries your sounds and NOT your microphone, so the other program would get a soundboard with no voice on it, and you would lose your own speakers at the same time. That was the only way to do this before and it was never right.

It can leave one source out. Broadcasting calls this mix minus and it is the setting that matters most. If you capture TeamTalk as a source and you are sending to TeamTalk, a send that carried everything would hand TeamTalk its own audio back and everybody in the call would hear themselves a moment late. Choose the source to leave out and everything else still goes. If you later rename or remove that source, Command+Shift+O says so in as many words rather than letting a call full of echo be a mystery.

Command+Shift+H puts the send in your own headphones, exactly as it is being handed over. A radio desk calls this a confidence feed. It goes to your monitor output only and can never find its way back into the send. It arrives about a quarter of a second late, so it is for checking rather than for talking over.

Command+Shift+O says whether it is arriving: where it is going, what it is leaving out, whether it has had to rebuffer, and whether your output is keeping up.

A card doing two jobs is refused, out loud. Sharing one card between the send and a bank means that card carries the show twice, which the far end hears as a strange hollowness rather than as an obvious fault. One sound card doing everything else is still perfectly fine, because that is what almost every setup is.

Test the cable on the same window proves the cable works before the show. It plays a tone down the output you chose for two seconds, listens to the other end of the same cable, and says what came back: nothing, the tone with pieces missing, or the tone clean with its level. It refuses while you are on air or recording, because everybody listening would hear the tone.

The other program takes the same cable as its input. A Mac cable is one device with one name, so Command+Shift+O says the name to choose in the other program.

A send that could not start is not switched off. If the cable is missing when Drop Deck opens, it says so and keeps the send turned on, so it starts again the next time the cable is there.

For OBS, add an Audio Input Capture source and pick the same cable. OBS then gets the soundboard, the running order and your processed microphone together, and Twitch or YouTube get it from there.

26a. Drop Deck Audio, the cable that comes with the app

You do not have to go and find a cable. On air, Drop Deck Audio installs one that belongs to this app.

After that it is called Drop Deck Audio in every program's list, in both directions, and the send is already pointed at it. In TeamTalk, Zoom or Skype, choose Drop Deck Audio as the microphone. That is the whole setup.

Installing it does two things, and the app says so before it asks. It copies the cable into a folder that belongs to the system, so macOS asks for your password. That is macOS asking, not Drop Deck: the app never sees what you type. Then it restarts Core Audio, which stops every sound on this Mac for a second or two, VoiceOver included. If you are on air or in a call, do it afterwards instead. You can also choose to install it and skip the restart, and the cable will be there the next time you log in.

The same menu item removes it again, completely.

Any other virtual cable still works. BlackHole is free and Loopback is the paid one, and both appear in the list beside this one. The only thing Drop Deck Audio does that they do not is save you working out which end is which: other cables are named from the cable's point of view rather than yours, so the thing called Input is a playback device and the thing called Output is a recording one, and everybody reads that backwards the first time.

27. Boards and files

A board is your eighty slots, your running order, your drops library, your settings and your stations, in one file.

Key What it does
Command+N A new board, eighty empty slots
Command+S Save
Command+Shift+S Save as, so you can keep one board per show
Command+O Open one. It becomes the board you are on and saves to its own file

The board saves itself a couple of seconds after anything changes, and again when you quit.

File, Relink missing sounds repairs a whole board against a new location in one pass, and does the running order and your drops library at the same time. Move your sound folder and this is the fix.

File, Load the demo pack brings the included forty sounds back at any time. File, Import an old soundboard bank reads a bank from the soundboard this app replaces, or a board exported from the Windows copy.

The same file on both platforms. A board written on Windows opens here with everything in it, and the Mac writes back everything it does not itself use, so nothing the Windows copy owns is lost on the round trip. The only things kept apart are the keys: a bank four hotkey pressed on Windows and one pressed on a Mac are saved side by side rather than over each other.

28. Every setting

Command+comma opens Preferences, and Command+P still does too.

It is laid out like VoiceOver Utility: a list of categories down the left, and that category's settings beside them. Arrow up and down the list to choose a category, then Tab into the settings. Escape closes the window and keeps nothing, and everything is applied on OK whichever category you were looking at.

Output. The main output, and an output of its own for each of the four banks.

Sounds and beds. How far the beds duck. How long music beds take to fade in and out. How many presses of Escape stop everything, one to four. Whether stopping fades or cuts.

Playlist. The crossfade between tracks. Whether to beep before a track ends, how many seconds before, which of the six sounds and how loud. Whether the playlist fader changes only what you hear while you are on air.

Microphone. Which microphone, which channel the voice is on including keeping it in stereo, gain, whether you hear yourself and through which output.

Voice. Process my voice on or off, and the gate, high pass, equaliser, compressor and ceiling as a list. See chapter 18.

Streaming. Server type, address, port, mount point, user name, password, what to send as, bit rate, station name, genre, where to ask who is listening, whether the station is listed publicly, whether the microphone goes on the air, whether what is playing is sent, a button to test the connection, and your saved stations.

Recording. Format, bit rate for MP3 and AAC, and the folder.

Keyboard. Which keys fire banks 2 and 3: Command, or the literal Windows Control and Option keys. Whether global hotkeys are on.

Speech. How much the app says of its own accord, and whether it announces what is playing.

Cancel means cancel on every tab, including Voice, where everything you do changes the microphone you are listening to as you do it. The one exception is a station you saved or forgot on the Streaming tab, which is a deliberate act and stays done.

29. Every key

F1 inside the app is this list, and it is always right for the version you are running.

Sounds

Key What it does
1 to 0, Shift+ Sound effects 1 to 10, 11 to 20
Command+ digit, Command+Shift+ Dialog drops
Option+Command+ digit, +Shift Music beds
Control+Tab, Control+Shift+Tab Next bank, previous bank
Command+Shift+], Command+Shift+[ The same
F2 Rename the sound you are on
Command+F2 Rename the bank
Command+I, Option+Return Properties
Delete Clear the slot
Shift+Delete Take the slot off the board
Option+Space Stop the last sound
Escape twice Stop everything
Command+L What is playing
Command+F, Command+E Search
Command+G Global hotkeys on or off

The running order

Key What it does
Command+Shift+P Go to the running order
Option+Command+Shift+S Go back to the soundboard
Option+Command+Tab Swap between the two
Return Play from here
Shift+Return Cross into the track you are on
Space Tick or untick
Shift+A, Shift+U Tick all, untick all
Option+Up, Option+Down Move by one
Option+Home, Option+End Move to the top or the end
Delete Take it out
Command+V Paste. Songs into the running order, or text into a box
Command+C Copy
Command+X Cut
Command+A Select all
Command+Z Undo
Option+D A random drop from the library
Command+Shift+D A drop from a file
Command+Shift+L Go to what is on air
Command+Shift+Return Play from here, from anywhere

Levels

Key What it does
F3, F4 Sound effects
F5, F6 Music beds
F7, F8 Running order, and the monitor fader while on air
Command+D Ducking on or off

Your voice and other audio

Key What it does
Command+M Microphone on or off
Option+Shift+M The same, for when another program has taken Command+M
Command+Shift+M Microphone settings
Option+Shift+S Set up audio sources
Option+Command+C Source control: mute, solo, rename, remove
Option+Command+M Mute every source, and unmute them
Option+Command+S Solo the microphone, and drop the solo

On air

Key What it does
Command+B Go live on your video platform, and come off air
Option+Shift+B Go live on your radio station, and come off air
Command+Shift+B What the stream is doing
Command+Shift+A Who is listening
Option+Shift+V What the stream is showing
Option+Shift+T Things on top of the picture
Option+Shift+C Your colours
Option+Shift+D Check my shot
Command+Shift+F What the camera can see
Command+Shift+V What is on screen
Command+R Start and stop recording, sound only
Command+Shift+R Record the picture and the sound, to one MP4
Command+Shift+C What is coming up
Option+Shift+O Send this show to another program
Command+Shift+H Hear what is being sent
Command+Shift+O Is the send keeping up
Command+Shift+W Where is everything going

Files and the app

Key What it does
Command+N, Command+O, Command+S, Command+Shift+S New, open, save, save as
Command+comma, Command+P Preferences
Command+Q Quit. The board is saved and a recording is finished first
F1 This list, inside the app

The Windows keys still work. Control+F, Control+E, Control+L, Control+D, Control+B, Control+M, Control+R and Control+G do what their Command versions do whenever no text box has focus, Option+Control+Shift+S still opens Source control, and Control plus a digit still fires a drop where macOS has not taken the combination for switching desktops.

Escape belongs to whatever is in front. In a dialog it closes it and keeps nothing. On the main board it is the stop key, and it takes more than one press. The one place it is neither is Help, Check the keyboard, which is reporting Escape rather than acting on it: press it twice there to leave.

30. Questions people ask

Does it cost anything? No, and it will not. There is a donate page if it earns a place in your show, and nothing is held back from anyone who does not.

Will it run on an Intel Mac? Not this build, which is for Apple silicon on macOS 14 or later. The Windows copy runs on anything from Windows 10 up.

Is it the same program as the Windows one? Yes. Same banks, same running order, same microphone chain, same streaming, and the same board file. A show built on either machine opens on the other. The differences are the ones the platforms force: the Mac cannot read WMA, does not host VST3 plugins yet, and moves Ctrl to Command for the reason in chapter 4.

Why do my bed keys do nothing? Almost always VoiceOver. If you have chosen the literal Windows keys in Preferences, Keyboard, Option+Control plus a digit is VO plus a digit, which VoiceOver takes for its hot spots. Go back to the Command map, or move VoiceOver's modifier to Caps Lock. Help, Check the keyboard shows you exactly what is arriving.

Why do the volume keys change my screen brightness? Because the function row is set to brightness and volume. Turn on Use F1, F2, etc. keys as standard function keys in System Settings, Keyboard, or hold fn.

Can I use the included sounds in my show? Yes, for anything you make. They were generated with AI rather than taken from a commercial library, which is what makes them safe to hand out.

Why does pressing a key twice play the sound twice? Because that is what a soundboard is for. If you want one particular sound to stop instead, tick Pressing its key again stops it in its properties. Music beds already work that way.

Why does Escape need two presses? Because one key that silences a live show is one key away from silencing it by accident. Set it to one in Preferences, Sounds and beds if you would rather.

Does turning my microphone off stop my audio sources going out? No. They are separate on purpose. Mute a source in Source control, Option+Command+C, or take every source off at once with Option+Command+M.

Can I record without being on air? Yes. Command+R works whether or not you are streaming, and both run at once without affecting each other.

Can I put a Zoom or FaceTime call on the air? Yes, two ways. Add it as a program source, which needs nothing set up in the other program, or point it at a virtual audio device and add that as a sound card source.

Will my listeners hear VoiceOver? Only if VoiceOver is going to the same output as the show, or you have added it as a source on purpose. Give the show its own output, or your monitoring its own, and they will not. While you are on air, F7 and F8 pull the music down for you alone so you can hear yourself think.

Where are my recordings? Documents, in a folder called TG Drop Deck. On air, Open the recordings folder takes you there.

Where do my settings live? Library/Application Support/TG Studios/TG Drop Deck in your home folder. Not inside the app, so an update never touches them.

31. When something is wrong

macOS says the app is damaged or cannot be opened. The download did not finish, or was changed on the way. Delete it and download it again from tgstudios.app. The copy there is signed and notarised, and opens like any other app.

A sound will not play, or says it is missing. The file has moved. File, Relink missing sounds repairs the whole board, the running order and the drops library in one pass.

No sound at all. Check Preferences, Output, and check the three faders in the status line.

The microphone will not open. Drop Deck says why when you press Command+M. The commonest reason is System Settings, Privacy and Security, Microphone: TG Drop Deck has to be turned on there, and if you said no the first time, that is where to say yes.

Command+M does nothing at all. Press Option+Shift+M instead. If that works, another program has taken Command+M; Help, Check the keyboard confirms it.

The camera will not work, and Drop Deck is not in the Camera list. Update to 3.8.4 or later. Earlier Mac copies could not be given the camera at all, however often they asked.

A program source is silent. Check the program is running, and that it is actually playing something. On first use macOS asks for permission to record system audio; it lives under Privacy and Security, Screen and System Audio Recording. Capturing a program needs macOS 14.2 or later.

I can hear a program twice. Turn off Hear it yourself for that source. The sound is already reaching your speakers from the program itself.

The stream will not connect. Use Test the connection on the Streaming tab. It says exactly what the server said. The usual causes are the source password rather than the listener password, a mount point with no leading slash, and for a Liquidsoap harbor, the Icecast port instead of the harbor's.

Who is listening says nothing. Your server may not publish status-json.xsl, or the listening server is a different one from the one you send to: put its address in Where to ask who is listening.

A key does nothing. Help, Check the keyboard tells you whether the app received it. If it did not, VoiceOver or macOS took it first; the Keyboard tab and chapter 4 say which and why.

The app will not open, or opens and does nothing. Only one copy runs at a time; a second launch brings the first to the front. Check the Dock.

Something else. Help, Submit feedback sends a report with your settings attached, which usually answers the question on its own. It never includes file names, sound names or paths.

32. Updates, feedback and licence

Help, Check for updates looks for a new version and tells you what changed before it downloads anything, in a box you can read back. The app also looks once a day on its own and only speaks up when there is something. Updates are signed, and one that does not match its signature is thrown away rather than installed.

Installing one downloads the new copy, checks it, puts it where the old one was in your Applications folder, and reopens it. Your board and settings are untouched, and macOS remembers the permissions you gave, because the new copy is signed by the same developer. It will not do any of this while you are on air or recording.

Help, Submit feedback sends a message with your version, your macOS version and your settings. Never a file name, a sound name, a bank name or a path, and the window shows exactly what will be sent before it sends it. If you are offline it is kept and sent next time.

Help, User manual opens this page. F1 is the key list inside the app, always right for the version you have.

Free and MIT licensed. Source on GitHub, in the same repository as the Windows copy.

Get in touch if this manual does not answer your question, and I will fix the manual as well as the problem.