TG Drop Deck

Free. Version 2.0.0. Windows. Forty sounds included, so it makes a noise the first time you open it.

• Download for Windows (47 MB)
• Source on GitHub

Unzip it and run TG Drop Deck.exe. Nothing to install, no sign-up, no key. Keep the demo folder next to the program.

The whole app is the number row

Press 1 and you hear applause. That is the entire learning curve.

• 1 to 0 — sound effects 1 to 10. Add Shift for 11 to 20.
• Ctrl and a digit — your own dialog drops. Add Shift for the second ten.
• Alt+Ctrl and a digit — music beds. Press it again to stop that bed.
• Ctrl+Tab — move between the four banks.
• Escape — stop everything.

Effects and drops overlap and never cut each other off, so a laugh can land on top of a sting. Beds toggle: the same key starts one and stops it.

Two volumes, because one is not enough

A music bed and a sound effect should never fight over the same fader. F2 and F3 move the sounds; F5 and F6 move the beds. Both speak the new level as you go.

The beds get out of the way

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

Ctrl+D turns it off. Ctrl+P sets how far it ducks.

What comes with it

Twenty sound effects and twenty looping music beds — applause, buzzers, an air horn, a rimshot, risers and impacts, and half-minute beds from lo-fi and funk to news urgency, ambient and late-night jazz.

Every one of them was generated with AI, using ElevenLabs. Nothing in the pack is recorded or sampled from a commercial sound library, which is what makes it safe to hand out with a free program. Use them for whatever you make.

The beds are trimmed to an exact loop and crossfaded, so they run under you for an hour without a click, and every effect is levelled so nothing jumps out or disappears.

Then make it yours

Ctrl+N empties all eighty slots. Land on any button, press Space, and pick a file — WAV, MP3, FLAC, OGG or AIFF. F4 names it so you recognise it live. That is the whole workflow, and the board saves itself.

Sounds are never copied into the program; it remembers where they live. Move your sound folder later and File → Relink missing sounds repairs the whole board against the new location in one pass.

Ctrl+S saves a board to its own file, so you can keep one per show and open whichever you need. File → Load the demo pack brings the included sounds back at any time.

Send it wherever you need

Ctrl+P chooses the output device, including a virtual audio cable — feed a stream or a recorder while you keep listening on your own speakers. The device is remembered by name, so plugging in a headset later will not silently move your sound somewhere unexpected.

Where it came from

This is a rebuild of the soundboard I have used on my own show for years. The original had no surviving source code, so the keyboard map was recovered out of the program itself before a line of the new one was written — which is why anyone who used the old one already knows this one.

Underneath it is new: a real mixer, proper sample rate conversion, long files streamed from disk instead of loaded whole, and ducking that was not there before.

Requirements

Windows 10 or later. No Python needed. Built and tested with NVDA in mind; if you use JAWS and try it, tell me how it goes.

Free and MIT licensed. Windows may warn the first time because it is not code signed — choose More info, then Run anyway.