Motivation

I wanted to add a soundboard for my DND sessions, but I faced some issues:

• Existing soundboards will have their audio echo-cancelled by discord while aggregating the output.
• The loopback app is really cool and works well, but it's outside my budget.
• Existing soundboard bots require typing in the names of the clips, but I want something more instant.

Solution

This is solved by having a global hook to specific keyboard shortcuts, that plays sound clips to a discord voice channel, whenever I press them. These shortcuts are currently a key combination of ctrl+cmd+n, where n is a digit from 0 to 9. This can be extended to a custom macropad with printed logos for the sound clips!

Setup

This only works with Nodejs 12 / darwin / x64 as I have only manually compiled the node library for this architecture. I tested this on Node 14 and wasn't able to do it, but you may attempt to compile iohook for other environments by following these steps: wilix-team/iohook#124 (comment)

1. nvm use 12
2. npm i
3. Replace all files in node_modules/iohook/builds/node-v72-darwin-x64/build/Release with iohook.node in the project root directory
4. Place your clips in the clips folder. Number them accordingly from 1 to 10.

Usage

1. TOKEN=<your bot token> npm start
2. Enter a voice channel
3. Type s!start in a bot accessible channel
4. TODO: add custom mapping reads - take a look at src/keycodes.ts to see the current combinations.
5. When you are done, s!stop to disconnect the bot.