TG Drop Deck, the user guide

Everything in this guide works with the keyboard, because that is how the app was built. If you use a screen reader, nothing here needs a mouse.

If you only read one line: press 1 and you hear applause. That is the whole learning curve. The rest of this is for when you want more.

Back to TG Drop Deck

Getting started in five minutes

1. Open the app. It comes with forty sounds already loaded, so it makes a noise the first time you run it.
2. Press 1. You get a sound. Press 2. And so on up to 0, which is the tenth one.
3. Hold Shift and press 1. That is sound eleven. Shift plus the number row gives you sounds eleven to twenty.
4. Press Ctrl+Tab. You are now in bank two, Dialog Drops. Press Ctrl+1.
5. Press Escape. Everything stops.

That is the app. Everything below is detail.

The four banks

Twenty slots each, eighty in total, and each bank has its own set of keys.

Ctrl+Tab moves to the next bank.

Sounds in banks 1, 2 and 4 overlap. A laugh can land on top of a sting; nothing cuts anything else off. Beds toggle: the same key starts one and stops it.

You can rename any bank. Ctrl+F2, or the Banks menu. Call bank one "Movie Clips" if that is what is in it. The name saves with your board. Renaming changes the name and nothing else: bank three is still the looping bank and bank four still takes your own hotkeys.

Putting your own sounds in

Move to an empty slot and press Enter. Pick a file. That is it.

• F2 renames the sound you are on.
• Alt+Enter opens Properties: name, level, looping, both hotkeys, in one place.
• Delete clears the slot.
• The Applications key opens a menu on the slot with all of it.

A slot can hold a whole folder instead of one file. Sounds menu, Assign a folder. Every press plays a different sound from that folder, never the same one twice running, and the app tells you which one it picked. Good for the six jingles that all mean the same thing. Drop another file into the folder and it joins in on its own.

Your board saves itself. On exit, and whenever you change something.

Volume, three separate faders

They are separate on purpose. A bed and a drop should never fight over one fader.

Ducking is the thing radio does that makes a show sound produced. Fire a sound effect over a music bed and the bed steps back about nine decibels, then comes up again on its own. Ctrl+D turns it off; Ctrl+P sets how far it ducks.

The playlist

Ctrl+Shift+P takes you to it. Ctrl+Shift+S comes back to the soundboard.

Put songs in it by copying them in File Explorer and pressing Ctrl+V, as many at once as you like, and a whole folder works too. You can also drag them in, or use Add files.

Each song hands over to the next before it ends. How long they overlap is the crossfade, and the box for it sits right under the running order. Three seconds to start with. Set it to zero and each song plays right out before the next begins. A single track can have its own crossfade from its right-click menu.

Inside the list:

Unticking is not removing. An unticked track stays in the list and keeps its place; it is just skipped. That is how you say "play this, this and this, not that" without losing anything.

Segue to this now crosses to a track at the crossfade length instead of waiting for the cue. That is how you get out of a song early.

Drops, and your drops library

A drop is something that goes between two songs: a station ident, a stinger.

• Ctrl+Shift+D puts a particular file in, in front of the track you are on.
• Insert a drop every so many songs does a whole countdown at once.
• Alt+D puts in a random one from your drops library.

The drops library is the idents you reach for over and over. Playlist menu, Drops library, add them once. After that Alt+D grabs one wherever you are standing, and never the same one twice running. If you use "every so many songs" with a library, every gap gets a different one.

The microphone

Ctrl+M turns it on and off. Ctrl+Shift+M is where you set it up: which microphone, how much gain, which output you hear yourself on, and whether you hear yourself at all.

While the microphone is on, the music gets out of the way. The beds and the playlist duck, and they come straight back the moment you turn it off. That happens because the microphone is open, not because you are talking. A gate that opens on your voice clips the first word of every sentence, so this does not use one.

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, which is why it starts off. It can go to an output of its own, so monitoring sits in your headphones and the show does not.

Nothing turns your microphone on except you pressing Ctrl+M. Not startup, not opening a board. Whether it was on is never saved.

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.

Right-click a sound, or Alt+Enter, and assign a global hotkey. Any slot in any bank can have one. It needs at least one modifier such as Ctrl or Alt. Alt on its own counts, so Alt+A is fine. A key with no modifier at all would be taken away from every other program on your machine, so the app refuses it.

Ctrl+G arms and disarms the whole set, and disarming hands the keys back.

Sending sound to different places

Ctrl+P is Audio settings. Pick a virtual cable there to feed a stream or a recorder while you keep listening on your own speakers.

Each bank can go to its own sound card. Put beds on one and drops on another and you can ride each on its own channel of a physical mixer. Ducking still works across outputs.

Finding things

Ctrl+F searches every bank by name. Ctrl+E does the same. It was the search key for two releases and it still works.

In the results, Alt+P plays the one you are on and leaves the window open, so you can try each match. Enter jumps to it and closes.

Ctrl+L tells you what is playing right now, playlist included.

How much the app says

Ctrl+P, Spoken feedback from the app, has three settings:

• Everything. Confirmations and bank hints included.
• Only what I cannot hear or read for myself. No confirmations, but anything that is a failure or a number you asked for still speaks.
• Nothing. The app never speaks. The status bar still shows everything and your screen reader still reads every control.

Whatever you pick, nothing this app has to say is ever only spoken.

If a sound goes missing

Move a folder of sounds and the app will tell you at startup how many are missing. File, Relink missing sounds, point it at where they went, and it finds them by name. It repairs your playlist and your drops library out of the same search.

Telling us something

Help, Submit feedback. Pick what kind of thing it is, write a sentence, send it. It goes straight to the person who wrote the app.

It shows you exactly what goes with your message before it sends, the version, and your audio and speech settings. Never a file name, a sound name, a bank name, or anything from your running order. If you are offline it is saved and goes out next time; nothing is lost.

Every key, in one place

F1 inside the app is the full list, and it is always right for the version you have.

Still stuck?

Get in touch, or use Help, Submit feedback inside the app, it brings your settings with it, which usually answers the question on its own.

Drop Deck is free and staying free. If it earns a place in your show, the donate page is there.