Music
Music cards is meant to evoke strong emotion in your players. It is meant to help them get in the mood of the scene, like making their hearts start racing with some big drums as you announce "roll initiative!".
Music Sections
Most scenes can have a range of emotions. Your party may be walking through the forest, then BAM!. The Fire Nation attacks.
To help with that, Bardic Tools allows you to create sections for music. A section is just a collection of music tracks that go together. Sections are mutually exclusive. If you're playing a card on a section, and click "play" on a card from another section, the current card will fade out.
If you have enabled playlist mode in your scene settings, each section will behave like its own playlist that loops infinitely. They can also be tied to presets, as shown in this tutorial. That way, you can change the whole scene with the click of a button!
You can create a new music section by clicking the button at the bottom of the music lane: // TODO BL: IMAGE
From here, you can drag and drop cards into it, like any other part of the board. On the left, you'll see the name of the section (useful to link with presets). If you hover it, you'll see buttons to rename and delete the section. On the right, you'll see which presets are currently linked to that section. This is extremely handy as you're prepping your scenes, so that you don't have to keep everything in your head!
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If you want a full example of how to use sections to prepare a scene, check out this tutorial.
Music Cards
Music cards work more or less like a regular soundboard. They will play when you press play, pause when you press pause, and stop when... well, you get it. However, there are a lot of scene-wide settings that affect how music plays! We encourage you to play with the settings to figure out what combination works best for your scene. For instance, you may want music to work more like a playlist, where only one track is playing at a time, and the next track starts immediately after the current one ends.
Here's a run-down of the different controls:
- The Card Title is a title for that particular card. You can have the same sound on two different cards, and give one title to each if you'd like. You can edit the title by clicking on the pencil icon, or double-clicking on the title itself. There is a character limit for card titles.
- The Attribution and License information. They are clickable links tied to particular sounds, and won't change regardless of where you move the card, or if you change the title. Only sounds provided by Bardic Tools have license information in them.
- The Volume controls, which are self-explanatory.
- The Playback controls. They consist of a Play/Pause button, a Stop button that goes back to the beginning of the sound, and a toggle for looping the sound.
- The Progress bar. Useful for visualizing where in the music track you are currently. It's also clickable! You can click along the track to move the song forwards or backwards.
You can click on the progress bar to move the sound further forward or backward!
Yes, we know we say this above as well, but this is in a nice green box, in case you missed it the first time.