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Improving the Jukebox

December 01 (8 years ago)

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The Jukebox it a great tool, letting us play music, soundscapes and more while gaming away. Unfortunately it's not the most streamlined tool, so here are a few things that I think would make it so much better to use:

1. Add navigation controls.

Pause, Next Track, Previous Track and Scrub through the track to play from a specific point. These are features that are seen in the most basic audio players and yet are missing in the Roll20 Jukebox

2. Allow the user to play both a playlist and a single track simultaneously

It would be great to play a playlist of music while also having an ambient track on loop. We can't currently do this.

3. Allow sub-folders within playlists

Please oh please let us organise our music. My Jukebox is getting way too cluttered.

4. Add the ability to tag tracks with custom tags (ie. 'Dark', 'Cheery', 'Ambient')

Again, this would do wonders for organisation

5. Add the ability to search our Jukebox for specific tracks or tags.

The ability to search within our library has been about for a while, but why not add that function to our Jukebox as well? It would help out a load when looking for one specific track to set the scene during a game.

6. Let tracks shown in the importer show their waveforms and scale to fit the window.

This has bugged me for the longest time. Track names get clipped in the importer and extending the window does nothing to un-clip them. Waveforms would also be handy to identify certain tracks.

Most of these are small improvements but together they would do wonders to improve the usefulness and usability of the roll20 Jukebox.

March 12 (8 years ago)

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I totally agree, the Jukebox is very useful, but it needs to be up to par with the rest of the Roll20 interface. Playlist subfolders/nesting is a must. Currently I have a good mystery playlist, and I want to run a City ambience track on top of it, but there's currently no way to do that. If I had a City Mystery playlist set to "All at Once", and inside I had my city ambience track, and my mystery playlist set to loop or shuffle, it would work perfectly.

March 18 (8 years ago)

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I heartily second every point you have made. Another feature that would be nice is to have a volume control in the "Now Playing" window.

November 09 (7 years ago)

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In addition being able to add a collapsible description would be really useful for specific notes on a piece.

November 15 (7 years ago)

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All these suggestions are great. The jukebox is one of the most important features of the app for me and these changes would really set up what can be done with it.

November 20 (7 years ago)

Pro

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The Jukebox is one of things that I use the most so even the minor issues with it are amplified pretty heavily.

First and foremost a search function would be incredible. Even when I have all my tracks and sound effects organized as effectively as possible it's still hard to find what i need quickly.

I would also request the ability to fade in and fade out tracks, maybe through a toggle button on the left and right of the play/stop button. One on the left means when you start the track it will fade in, button on the left would mean when you stop the track it fades out. Maybe something like this?

Fade In (Toggled off)	Play/Stop (Stopped)	Fade Out (Toggled on)

November 27 (7 years ago)

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Here are some more suggestions:

- While searching for tracks, give us more options than Play and Stop. Let us scrub fast forward, rewind, etc. Currently, for us to vet whether or not music is right for the scene (a soft melody sometimes crashes into a crescendo, an epic driving track sometimes has a drop off, etc), we have to listen to the whole song, which is wildly time consuming.

- Let us crop tracks that we have added. Sometimes music doesn't loop properly because of a lousy edit. Or there's a strange sound at the beginning or end of a track. Or we simply want to use the first movement of a musical piece. Being able to crop out the ends of stuff we don't want and either play or loop it would increase the amount of usable SFX and music massively.

December 06 (7 years ago)

Pro

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I would like to see the ability to load multiple tracks on pages upon opening. This way you can run a ambient loop as well as the music for the scene. The way it works now I have to load the music and then look for the ambient sound manually and load it. It's one more thing to help the DM run the games more smoothly.

Thanks

December 07 (7 years ago)

Mad-Imaginative

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AND A DANG SEARCH HISTORY!!

Nothing sucks more then looking up stuff then wanting to re-look at what you done-gone-have-searched.

I don't care if its something as simple as a key-memory where it just remembers every song you hit enter in the search boxes.

December 29 (7 years ago)

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Andrew M. said:
I would like to see the ability to load multiple tracks on pages upon opening. This way you can run a ambient loop as well as the music for the scene. The way it works now I have to load the music and then look for the ambient sound manually and load it. It's one more thing to help the DM run the games more smoothly.

Thanks

This is already a function. You just have to put the tracks into a Folder, and then in the Page Settings set the folder to Play On Load. Make sure the Folder is set to play all tracks at once, which is an icon of two arrows pointing at each other, rather than shuffle or loop.

January 05 (7 years ago)

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Sadly I can only upvote this once. The jukebox is atrocious. It feels as if the jukebox is a barebones placeholder for feature that was supposed to come out long ago.

It would also help to have a better menu for the jukebox, not a simple list with one element but a grid for example. That is something the art library already has.

January 11 (7 years ago)

Plus

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I totally agree with everything on this thread, especially the extended controls for the tracks. Being able to fast forward, and pause especially would be game-changing.
I'm not sure if this is a technical challenge (I assume it is), but if the volume adjusted in real time using the slider, then we could manually fade out tracks, but it's currently quite choppy or time-consuming to do so. I know DriftingNitro mentioned an automated version of this. While it would be easier for a DM to just use a button like that, I like the idea of getting to decide how long it takes to fade out, so I wouldn't mind a manual fade out if it was possible.
I would also really like to see a better solution for getting custom tracks on the Jukebox than uploading to Fanburst. Being able to directly drop music in from our computer or use YouTube links would be incredible!

January 11 (7 years ago)

Pro

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I second this list of suggestions. Adding another, add the ability in the transmogrifer to transfer playlists rather than just all of the individual tracks in the order that you selected them.

January 12 (7 years ago)

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I completely agree with 2, as well as everything else (but especially 2). I find it really annoying having to manually change the music track because I can't have a playlist playing simultaneously with an ambient sound.

January 13 (7 years ago)

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The jukebox definitely needs a lift. I've stopped adding music because I'm scared everything will explode like it did with Soundcloud.

February 18 (7 years ago)

Pro

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I would love to see this some of these suggestions implemented, especially number 3. I have about 50 folders of music and sound effects that I continuously go back to and need to save in case of future events.

April 11 (6 years ago)

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I'd like to give my +1 as well, especially number 3. The Jukebox is an very basic tool, to the point where it feels like I have to do my own "hacks", and actively fight against it for it to let me organize it reasonably. I've got a lot of tracks, and not having anything to efficiently organize them beyond one level of playlists is incredibly frustrating.

May 25 (6 years ago)

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Is there anyone on the Roll20 team that can make any comments regarding whether there is a plan in place for future upgrade or overhaul of the Jukebox. I firmly agree with all the suggestions above. Having the ability to have music and sound effects coupled with ease of control, navigation, and organization really can bring a groups gaming experience to a whole new level.

May 26 (6 years ago)

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Eragus said:
Is there anyone on the Roll20 team that can make any comments regarding whether there is a plan in place for future upgrade or overhaul of the Jukebox. I firmly agree with all the suggestions above. Having the ability to have music and sound effects coupled with ease of control, navigation, and organization really can bring a groups gaming experience to a whole new level.

Yes, exactly. This has been my #1 desire for Roll20 for quite some time now, but I have no idea whether it's even really on the radar. It's at the point where I almost wonder if I shouldn't be seeking some completely different alternative for music/sound effects in games, which is really a shame. As a big fan and supporter of Roll20, I'd love to see core features like this evolve to become more robust and useful. (After all, what really makes Roll20 special is the features not available from programs like Skype or Discord--shared play space, character sheets, dice, the Jukebox, etc.) Here's hoping we can see something on the horizon, at least, for the Jukebox!

May 27 (6 years ago)

The Warlock VDS

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I don't why we still can't upload custom music to Jukebox from our own /cd drive! It's simply too inconvenient to manually create an account on a musical application, upload all our soundtrack online, hope it won't get removed, and then take it to roll20. I mean, this would be a fantastic addition to roll20, and I have no clue why we haven't got it already!

May 27 (6 years ago)

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The problem with hosting content on Roll20 is that, if it's copyrighted, Roll20 could be liable. So they avoid that issue by having a 3rd party host it. I assume the lack of integration with that 3rd party (Fanburst, at the moment) is the cause of a lot of the problems with the jukebox. Still, the fact that it's been almost a year and a half since I posted this thread and we still haven't heard anything about it, nevermind getting an actual functionality update, makes me wonder if the Roll20 devs can even be bothered with the jukebox.
Honestly, I'm just waiting for a keen web Dev to come along and make a site like roll20 but with a decent audio player and content organisation options.

October 03 (6 years ago)

Edited October 03 (6 years ago)

Plus

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Seconding all of these suggestions! Also what I'd love to see is the track length...I'm often looking for enough background music to fill up a certain length of time so that the repetition doesn't grate on my players, and it would be nice to be able to tell that a song is only 1 minute long versus half an hour without having to listen all the way through while glancing at a clock.

October 23 (6 years ago)

Pro

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Upping all of this. The inability to play ambient tracks over a music playlist is getting really irritating and requests about the jukebox are old enough (I found threads going back three years that are all saying the same thing) that it's almost crazy that staff haven't gotten around to fixing it yet. The "play simultaneously" is great and all, unless you have 10 songs and one ambient track in the playlist. Or your ambient tracks aren't even on the playlist because you don't want them shuffled in with the music and you've got too much going on to manually change the track. I tried playing only ambient noise and no music recently and it was just... eugh.

Even just the ability to skip to the next track would help in this circumstance, if you keep the jukebox in a popout, because if it starts playing the ambient you could just skip it.

And I get what you're saying, Luke, but I don't think integration is going to affect say playing one track and a playlist together? Some of these things may definitely be due to roll20's lack of third-party integration but others (my biggest gripe, tagging tracks, search function, subfolders) just seem like coding issues. I'm not a coder by any means but I can't imagine this is a super complicated fix, you know?

October 24 (6 years ago)

Forum Champion

Sheet Author

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Just wanted to pop in and let you all know that we are listening, and have brought this thread and the other jukebox threads into our discussions as we consider the fanburst situation.

We're probably going to be working on jukebox improvements for a while, and I can't promise any specific feature. But we do pay attention to these suggestion threads; we hear you and appreciate everyone's comments.

October 24 (6 years ago)

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I was about the post a very similar topic, it's is the one thing in Roll20 that doesn't make it a 5-star service.
The 2 tracks playing at the same time will probably not happen, I would be very happy if it did, but they probably don't want another soundcloud situation...

But the subfolder stuff would be a lifesaver, I can only imagine that it is coded in a way it would be really hard to unravel, like "Playlists can only hold music" sorta way, that is probably ingrained all the way to the databases or something. If that were that case I would be happy if there was just a non-playable holder were you can only put playlists, so a bit more restrictive than the journal tab but still usefull!

By Stephanie's post they are probably going to release it as a complete overhaul though, in a way that doesn't screw over everybody's playlists... oof probably a headache, hope they do it though :)

October 25 (6 years ago)

Patrick Von Raven

Pro

Marketplace Creator

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Stephanie B. said:
Just wanted to pop in and let you all know that we are listening, and have brought this thread and the other jukebox threads into our discussions as we consider the fanburst situation.
We're probably going to be working on jukebox improvements for a while, and I can't promise any specific feature. But we do pay attention to these suggestion threads; we hear you and appreciate everyone's comments.

Thanks for keeping us appraised! Have you guys considered further integration with Battlebards? They already have a lot of what is being asked for here, from uploaded personal tracks to a sound mixer board.

October 25 (6 years ago)

Forum Champion

Sheet Author

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BattleBards is great, and we're glad to have them as a music source. It's unlikely that's a solution for us in this case, but we aren't ruling anything out at this time.

December 10 (6 years ago)

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Yea, I was about to post a similar thread, specifically with having a playlist + additional tracks playing at the same time. I love having battlemusic going, and then throw in once-off battle sounds at key moments, but that isn't possible currently.

December 11 (6 years ago)

Pro

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@Roll20Team So the topic is tagged as "On Dev", yet when I go onto the Dev Servers, none of the suggestions from the original post is on the Dev Server. The only difference between the Dev Jukebox and the Live Jukebox is the option to add your own audio. This is a neat feature that I'm really happy for, don't get me wrong, but it's not any of the changes that this thread suggested. So the "On Dev" tag is inaccurate for this post.

December 11 (6 years ago)

Forum Champion

Sheet Author

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Hi, Evan!

Thanks for your feedback on the tag! While the top-level suggestions aren't currently on the dev server, they will be as we roll out more features from the jukebox roadmap posted in the Pro forum thread. Additionally, this thread has become something of a catch-all for several jukebox improvements, at least one of which is on the Dev server right now.

And, honestly, there are over 30 threads related to the jukebox. I may have rushed a bit when tagging them. Mea culpa.

February 14 (6 years ago)

Forum Champion

Sheet Author

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With today's release, you can now upload your own audio to Roll20.

I will leave this thread open for the other features requested.

February 27 (6 years ago)

Pro

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Stephanie B. said:
Just wanted to pop in and let you all know that we are listening, and have brought this thread and the other jukebox threads into our discussions as we consider the fanburst situation.
We're probably going to be working on jukebox improvements for a while, and I can't promise any specific feature. But we do pay attention to these suggestion threads; we hear you and appreciate everyone's comments.

Please consider the suggestion in the following thread.

April 16 (5 years ago)

Edited April 16 (5 years ago)

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being able to hear my uploaded audio would be a welcome improvement...

May 02 (5 years ago)

Forum Champion

Translator

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Hello all!
I'm happy to report that nearly all requests have been included in the Bring Your Own Beat update, which is now on the servers for everyone to use. There are much more thorough descriptions of all the functionality added or updated in other places, but as a quick summary:

Upload your own audio files in My Audio
Manage Playlists and Tracks outside of the Virtual Tabletop
Multi Channel Audio allows a GM to layer many Playlists and Tracks
Exporting and Importing Playlists between games and the Manage Audio tool
Track Fade In and Fade Out options
Waveform information (always) and Track total length (when playing)
User Interface improvements
Playback controls for scrubbing, next track, previous track
Better synchronization for all players
Tagging for My Audio tracks, as well as tags for audio provided by Roll20
Improved search functionality

Notable exceptions from this Suggestion and discussion that are not included:

Track pause control - We were not able to confidently include synchronized track pausing into this release.
Fast Forward or Rewind - Streaming audio does not lend itself to these kinds of controls, but we hope Scrubbing, track length, and Waveforms solve the problem.
Nesting Folders - We added the requested functionality in the Now Playing section with Multi Channel Audio to make each individual playlist more versatile, as well as better tagging and search for organization.

As you try out this update, please make note of any issues you come across here. I'll be closing this thread to refund the votes. Please use them to make other great suggestions we can build for your games.

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