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In a previous post a while back, Getting into the Mood, I touched briefly upon using music and sound-effects to liven up your D&D games. However, I never went over possible tools that can be used for this task. Now, of course, you could use Windows Media Player, Winamp, or even iTunes for music. But if you want to play some sound-effects on top of that music, you’ll generally need to use some other program to play those sounds.

In the past, when I’ve done this myself, I used Winamp to play my background music, and UnrealEd for Unreal Tournament 2004 for the sound effects. And yes, despite the fact that Unreal Tournament is a sci-fi shooter, it does contain some sound effects that are still useful in a fantasy campaign.

However, I’ve discovered a couple of tools, created specifically for use in table-top RPGs, that can make your task of bringing sound into your campaign a bit easier. Generally, they both allow you to play both music and sound-effects at the same time.

RPG Audio Mixer
This is a nice little free tool that makes it easy to organize your music and sound effects into various groups. Music is displayed at the top, while your sound effects are displayed at the bottom. You also get a few options of whether you want playback to be done manually, automatically (stepping through each song in order), and even randomly. There are also looping options for the music, from looping one song or even the whole playlist. And of course, you can disable looping completely. And there are also buttons to play, stop, and skip to the next song.

The sound effects area below the music area is a bit more basic. Basically, when you want to play a particular effect, just double-click on it.

One thing that I particularly like about RPG Audio Mixer is that it’s usable on any platform, since programmed in Java. However, I think that’s about the only really good thing that stood out to me. Unfortunately, I think that’s about the only positive thing that really stood out for me.

My first problem was that it isn’t immediately obvious that you must double-click on either a song or a sound effect to play it. What makes this fact worse is that hitting the play button in the music area doesn’t do a thing unless you’ve already double-clicked on a song.

Second, no drag-and-drop support. It would far easier to drag a bunch of audio files and dump them into either into the music or sound effect section. Thankfully, you can add multiple files at a time through the import dialog.

Third, you can only play one sound effect at a time. If you go to play another sound effect while another is playing, it stops the currently playing sound effect and plays the new one. One sound effect suddenly getting cut off in favor of another can be a bit jarring, particularly if your players are in a heated adventure.

Fourth, there is limited audio format support. Officially, it only supports MP3 and WAV audio formats, which can be seen when loading a file for use as either music or sound-effects. However, looking at the Java Media Framework settings, it seems like it could support other formats.

Fifth, this program requires the Java Media Framework. Generally, most computer users will have the Java Runtime Environment on their machines, as it’s a fairly common requirement. However, requiring another framework on top of that may turn away those who are less computer savvy. Additionally, adding support for other audio formats isn’t very straight forward. I’ve tried to add Ogg Vorbis support to the Java Media Framework, and simply ran into error messages. And even though the site, where I found the support file, states where the information could be found (the documentation), was I wasn’t able to easily find where the right information was.

RPG Sound Mixer
A very similar name to the previous, but a very different program. And even though it’s not free, it’s not too expensive either, coming in to about $20 (USD). Overall, I think it’s a bit better than RPG Audio Mixer. First of all, it allows multiple sound effects to be played simultaneously, which helps tremendously in creating a believable ambiance without needing any kind of music. Of course, though, you can have music playing as well.

Another thing I particularly like about this is that you can set up how often each sound plays in a particular profile, add reverb and other effects to your imported audio, and even modify which speaker the audio comes out of. Basically, you can add motion to the sound which adds an extra layer of believability to an otherwise unbelievable setting.

Also a very nice feature is the ability to assign individual music, sounds, or even whole programmed profiles to a hotkey. This saves you from having to search through a list or through several windows to find a particular item you wish to play. And there’s an option to print out all your hotkeys, so that you have something to reference in case you forget which hotkeys you’ve assigned to what.

Unfortunately, there are drawbacks with this program as well. First, it’s Windows-only. So if you’re a Mac or Linux user, you’re out of luck. True, most people will probably be Windows users, but there are plenty of people around who use other operating systems.

Second, is lack of support for various audio formats, a problem it shares with RPG Audio Mixer. It supports MP3 and WAV, as well as a couple other formats, but that’s about it. Absolutely no support for formats such as Ogg Vorbis (OGG) or FLAC. However, even though it supports WAV audio files, the support it offers seems limited. I tried to import some WAV audio files I had into a profile, but I got an error stating that there was no PCM data in the WAV file. And yet, I could play the audio just fine by clicking the Play Audio button to preview it!

Third, it seems to requires a lot of clicking through various windows (or screens, or dialog boxes… however you want to put it) to get something done. While it may be more of a personal preference of mine, I tend to prefer something where the majority of the tools I’ll need are right there in front of me. I don’t like having to click a menu, pick an option from there, and then click through several more areas just to get a profile setup.

Fourth, no drag-and-drop, which is another problem it shares with RPG Audio Mixer. Again, it would be easier to just drag and drop a bunch of files right into the audio import window itself, but it instead forces you to use its rather funky way of pulling in audio instead.

Fifth, the way you need to import audio. First, you need to go to the settings menu, and tell it what folders to look at for your music and sound effect files. While this may make sense for some users, it doesn’t make sense to others. I’m sure I’m not the only one who uses music and sounds from various games in a D&D session, and being forced to use only one folder is rather annoying. However, you can work around this problem by picking a common root folder, or even just selecting the entire hard drive (unless you have more than one, in which case you may have some problems). However, when you go to actually add audio to a given profile, you’ll still probably need to select the appropriate folder to get to where you want to get to. And it doesn’t save where you were last browsing, which just makes setting things up even more of a pain.

Conclusion
Both of these programs can be valuable to DMs, at least those who aren’t too picky about features. As far as music and sound files go, most people usually have just MP3s and WAVs. However, there are those who use a wider variety of audio formats, whether it’s because of preference (such as ripping CDs to OGG or FLAC) or just ending up with it (such as the wide variety of formats found between games).

Though RPG Audio Mixer does not seem to be all that great, at least feature-wise, please keep in mind that it’s only at version 0.22. This basically that it’s more in a alpha or beta state, so not all the features are going to be implemented. I can imagine that, over time, RPG Audio Mixer can grow into something wonderful.

RPG Sound Mixer is a pretty good program, at least from what I’ve seen from the demo and some tinkering around, but it looks like it would take a bit of work just to set up something just the way you want to. RPG Audio Mixer is more stream-lined and easier to understand in this respect. However, RPG Sound Mixer currently does offer much more flexibility.

Unfortunately, in both cases, I have to questions whether or not they are still being supported. The latest post on RPG Audio Mixer’s blog is from the end of February. However, that pales in comparison to RPG Sound Mixer’s latest news posting, which is from October 2006. And looking at RPG Sound Mixer’s forums, there might not even be any further development on it, since announcement posts are either just as old, or older, as the last news post.

However, they’re both worth a try. So go ahead and grab a copy of either RPG Audio Mixer or RPG Sound Mixer, or even both, and see if they work for you!

Also, I’m a bit curious. What all of you use to play your music and/or sound effects? Do you just use one program, or a variety of programs, to do what you want?