Feature Request: Soundscape Soundboard

[scottTomaszewski]

Use case

A large part of the tabletop gaming community play in-person games where we want background music playing to help "set the scene." This can be anything from busy marketplace ambiance, to a dripping cave, to a haunted house, or a lively tavern. To see examples, check out bardify (https://www.youtube.com/@bardify) or tabletop audio (https://tabletopaudio.com/).

We dont currently have a great way of controlling this ambiance music from within obsidian - there are some options, but its not great.

When a scene changes, the Game Master usually has many things that need to happen as soon as possible: map changes, music changes, token placement, and mental prep for what the encounter needs like recalling who a person is, their motivations, personality, etc. All this is just to convey that anything the helps quicken this changeover process is much appreciated and there is currently a gap in the music/ambiance support in obsidian.

Features

Ideally, I think some key features would be

• Ability to play a track quickly, easily, and with minimal fuss. Should be easy to handle basic playback features like play, pause, volume.
• Quick search by name or tag. Most of the sources of music will be tagged in some way such as "tavern", "cave", "swamp", etc. There are two times of searching: before play time where we are browsing for something specific and during play when we need some music we weren't expecting and we just need something fast that is close enough to keep the game moving.
• Quick switching. Often we will have multiple tracks for the same scene and we want to quickly switch what is playing. For example, in a negotiation we may start with some intrigue ambiance, then if the negotiation goes poorly we switch to combat ambiance. If dialogue goes favorably, maybe an alliance is formed and the ambiance should change to peaceful. In our notes it would be nice to be able to have all three tracks ready to switch quickly.
• Multi-track concurrent play. A lot of sources will have ambiance tracks as well as actual environment tracks. For example, you might have an ambiance track that plays rain ambiance, but you are also in a city where there is some background chatter. We would want to play both tracks at the same time and control their volume independently.
• Automated integration with popular sources. I mentioned bardify and tabletop audio above, but there are a few more sources of great tracks that continue to produce content. If the plugin can automatically discover new tracks from these sources, that would be awesome.
• Playback in the background. Its been a while, but I think I went down the route of simply embedding the youtube page in an obsidian note and handling playback that way, but I ran into the issue that switching to a new tab would pause the track. With limited screen real estate, we would want the track(s) to play even when they arent the focused tab.

Alternatives

Myself and some others have hacked together some "soundboards" to solve this issue using dataview to display tracks and play them natively, but loading all those embedded videos takes a long time and uses a lot of resources. I think this is using the Media Extended plugin which was abandoned 3 years ago and fills the console with errors.

As I mentioned before, I havent looked into this in a while, but I dont think there have been any recent plugins to help with this.

Conclusion

I know this is a lot, but I figured it would be best to lay it all out there ahead of time before starting down the road. If you have further questions, the #tabletop-game channel in the discord is full of helpful folks and we also have our own discord channel to support each other: https://discord.gg/QfmpFwBX

Thanks!