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Audio: make the scenes follow the music

Coming soon. Audio reactivity is coming in a later beta update, so the ♪ AUDIO chip is gray for now. This page is how it will work.

Plugin Player listens to the music and moves the scenes with it:

• all the time: the bass, mids and highs push a few of the scene's own dials on top of the preset you picked (Cube Bloom's edges glow harder on the kick, Corridor's core breathes with the bass). Your preset is never changed: take the music away and the preset is exactly what it was.
• on the beat: every few beats the scene does one of its own moves (Cube Stack's cubes jolt a quarter turn, Corridor sends a ring down the tunnel and flows the panels into a new deal every 2 bars, Cube Bloom spins or barrel-rolls on the bar, Frame Stack flips its cards).

Nothing is ever faster than 3 times a second, and the moves that flash are slower than that.

1. Pick the input (the ♪ AUDIO chip)

The ♪ AUDIO chip is in the header, next to CAM. ▾ opens the panel. Under INPUTS, click one:

The app remembers your pick and opens it by itself next time. Plugged in somewhere else (a new USB port) is fine: it finds the input by its name.

What the app asks Windows for: the input with echo cancellation, noise suppression and automatic gain all OFF (they are made for calls and they flatten a kick drum).

2. Read the panel

• The meter: LEVEL, BASS, MID, HIGH. They should bounce. Sitting at the top all the time: turn SENSITIVITY down. Barely moving: turn it up, or turn AUTO LEVEL on (it rides the level for you; on by default).
• BPM: the tempo it found and how sure it is: LISTENING (give it 4–8 s of music), LOCKED, SURE, or TAPPED. The lamp flashes on every beat; 1 / 4 … 4 / 4 counts the bar.
• AUDIO ON / OFF: every scene follows the music, or none does. This scene: ON / OFF / (DEFAULT) is the same for the scene that is playing (each scene has its own default).
• AMOUNT: how much the music moves things. 100 % = each scene's own amounts, 200 % = double, 0 = nothing (below 5 % the beat moves stop too).
• THIS SCENE WITH THE MUSIC: what the scene does: which dial follows which band, and which move happens every how many beats. The same list is on CONTROLLER_MAP.md under each scene.

On PERFORM, the PARAMS shelf marks every dial the music moves with ♪ BASS (or MID / HIGH / LEVEL / BEAT). The slider shows the preset's own value; the music goes on top.

3. Tap tempo (no input, or the music is hard to read)

• Controller: hold L2, press ▲ on every beat (4 taps). Works on the SCENE and the FX channel.
• Keyboard: T on every beat.
• The panel: the big TAP button.

Tap the ONE: after a pause, a single tap says "this is beat 1". The moves that happen every 4 or 8 beats then land on the bar. AUTO forgets the tapped tempo; the music decides again. A tapped tempo holds until you tap again, press AUTO, or the music is clearly at another tempo for 16 seconds.

AUDIO ON / OFF from the controller: hold L2 and press ▼. Keyboard: Shift+T.

4. Outdoor shows: tips

1. Ask the DJ for a line. Most club and DJ mixers have a booth or record out. A cable from it into a small USB interface (any 2-input one) is the steadiest feed there is. Ask for it at sound check, not during the set.
2. No line? A mic close to a speaker, pointed at it, away from the crowd. Turn SENSITIVITY down until BASS stops sitting at the top.
3. Wind shows up as BASS. If the bass bar never drops, the wind is on the mic: shield it, or tap the tempo.
4. Run the SHOW CHECKLIST. Its AUDIO row says what is coming in and what to fix ("no sound coming in", "a mic hears the crowd").
5. When the beat goes wrong mid-set: tap it (hold L2, ▲ ▲ ▲ ▲). One tap on the one fixes the bar.

5. Audio interfaces and ASIO

Plugin Player uses the standard Windows audio system (WASAPI), the same one Chrome and Zoom use. It does not use ASIO, and it does not need to:

• Almost every pro audio interface installs both an ASIO driver and a normal Windows driver. The normal one is what shows up in the INPUTS list (Focusrite "Analogue 1 + 2", Behringer "UMC", Native Instruments, Pioneer DJ mixers over USB …). Pick that.
• Latency: the normal Windows driver adds roughly 10–30 ms more than ASIO. For music that matters a lot; for visuals it does not: the beat moves are driven by a clock that predicts the next beat, so they land on the beat, not 20 ms after it.
• Another app using the interface through ASIO (Resolume, a DAW, a DJ app): usually fine. Most drivers let ASIO and the Windows side work at the same time, as long as both use the same sample rate (set the interface to 48 kHz or 44.1 kHz in its control panel and leave it). Some interfaces' drivers allow only one app at a time: the input then shows IN USE, or opens but stays silent. Then: close the other app's audio, or give Plugin Player a different input (a second interface, the laptop mic, SYSTEM AUDIO).
• IN USE can also mean an app took the input in Windows' exclusive mode: Windows Sound settings › the input › Properties › Advanced: untick Allow applications to take exclusive control of this device.

6. When something is blocked

The chip turns red and the panel says what to do:

Line inputs (an interface) are also "microphones" to Windows: the same privacy switch covers them.

7. Guest mode

Guests can tap the tempo, turn AUDIO on / off and change the AMOUNT. Changing the input is locked in guest mode (switching inputs mid-show loses the beat).

8. For your AI assistant

• The four values are level / bass (20–200 Hz) / mid (200–2000 Hz) / high (2–9 kHz), 0..1, with a fast attack and a slower release, plus beat (1 on every beat, falls back in about 0.2 s).
• A scene's music is plain data in its card.json: audioMod (dial ← band, multiply / add / set, an amount) and audio.beat (every N beats, one of the scene's own button moves). The preset's value is never written; the music's value is used for each frame only, inside the dial's range and your range brackets.
• Tempo: found from the onsets in the last 8 s, folded into 70–180 BPM; a beat clock with the found (or tapped) period and phase fires the moves.