RPG SoundController

Motivation

Those who play role-playing gamings perhaps use the RPG SoundMixer. If not, I can only recommend it, the program is perfect for background music and the occasional sound effect. The SoundMixer has some disadvantages, though, which bothered me more and more:

• You can only use the keyboard to control it. If you want to use e.g. a touch screen, bad luck.
• You have to remember all the keys, or you need to write them down on some piece of paper, which will get lost among all the other pieces of paper at the gaming table.
• You can't run it very well on a media-center PC in the living room.

The last point deserves some further explanation. You like to have the music collection on the media-center PC, and that PC is also connected to the good speakers or to the hi-fi system. But, well, how to control the SoundMixer then? Or if you run the SoundMixer on a notebook, how does the sound come to the speakers? All of the alternatives aren't that nice:

1. You use a remote keyboard. You have to put it on the gaming table as an additional device, and normally it's not extremly handy, too.
2. You use a remote control. Programming it is not that easy, though, and the keys are barely enough to control the SoundMixer; it's even more difficult to remember whether '1' is used for dungeon or for fight music.
3. You transmit the sound itself from the notebook to the PC through a wire or through wireless transmission. For wireless, there are few good and affordable solutions, though. And a cable may be difficult to lay across the living room.
4. You remote-control the PC through a remote desktop like vnc. That's somewhat slow, however, and you still need to use the keyboard.

To remove these disadvantages, I developed the RPG SoundController. That program consists of two parts: the first one (the server) runs on the same PC as the SoundMixer, that is on the media-center PC. On that PC are the sound files. The second part (the client) runs on another PC - especially small netbooks, in particular those with touch screens, are very suitable - and it puts the command through the network to the server. The server in turn delivers the commands to the SoundMixer.

The client is configured with an XML file, which defines the modes / sound events with their keys. That file has to fit to the loaded file in the SoundMixer, of course. The installation includes an example file which fits to the demo project of the SoundMixer. It should be largely self-explanatory; further hints see below.

Features

• Freely customizable through the config file
• Finds the server in the network automatically
• The client is skinnable
• The font in the client can be changed (hint: you can make the buttons larger that way for touch screens)
• Can still be controlled through the keyboard (if you want)

Restrictions

The server works only on Windows XP (not Vista or 7). The reason is that it has to adapt the system to be able to deliver the keys to the SoundMixer. It also needs the .NET framework 2.0. For newer Windows see below.

The SoundMixer must be started by the server. That also is easier, because you don't have to start two programs. But you still have to load the right file in the SoundMixer manually.

The client needs Java 6, and therefore runs on all systems which have that - both Windows (XP, Vista, 7) and Linux.

Download

The program (both client and server) is distributed under the terms of the GPL.

Client: Setup for Windows (ca. 3 MB)
Client: Setup for Linux (ca. 3 MB)
Client: Sources (ca. 45 KB)

Server: Setup for Windows XP (ca. 2 MB)
Server: Sources (ca. 245 KB)

ChangeLog

Configuration File

Some hints for the configuration file:

• Keys must be given in such a way that they can be converted into a KeyStroke by Java. Normally, you can just use the letters. For special characters, see here, but the program supports only a few special characters anyway.
• If several sound events are continuous in a mode, the client interprets that situation by default in a way that only one of these events shall be active at the same time. That is good for background music. If you want several such events running in parallel, you have to put them into different groups. Of each group, at most one continuous event is active.

Windows 7

As mentioned, the server runs only on Windows XP. But in my experience, the SoundMixer itself doesn't run well on Windows 7. My recommendation is to use a virtual machine with Windows XP. But be careful: the machine must be configured so that it can be accessed from the network. This is easy with the VMWare Player, and doesn't cost anything (apart from the XP licence).