New Composers! New Scenes! New Features! Oh, my!
Hello!
It's been a busy few days! Unfortunately, this week I've started at my new full time job, so I haven't had as much time as I'd like to work on Bardic Tools.
But don't despair! I still have a smorgasbord of updates tha I think you'll love.
First of all... Discord!
Over the last weeks, I've had amazing chats with some of you via email. In those, more than one person said that they would love a more direct way to suggest improvements and give feedback on new features before they go live.
I love that! Great feedback has already made Bardic Tools so much better than I thought possible (keep reading for examples), so the more of that we get, the better.
So, I decided to run an experiment: Let's start a Discord server!
I hope it becomes a place where I can keep in touch with you and what you want. I'll try to post what I'm working on, and listen to any improvements you want to suggest.
Interested? Come on over!
New Composers!
Speaking of Discord, I asked a few friends there what sorts of scenes they wanted. One of them had a very interesting idea: A swamp scene.
We agreed that it would be awesome to have bluesy, slide-guitar-y, smack-dab-in-the-middle-of-Louisiana scene that we could play when our players visited the inevitable swamp hag.
Here's the thing. None of the sounds Bardic Tools had were blues-y enough. I didn't want something epic, I wanted something smooth yet unsettling, like a strong liquor that hits a bit too hard.
So, I got searching. After quite a bit of trial and error, I found a partner that had just the right kind of music.
Introducing: InAudio sounds. Listen to this:
If that's not the perfect song to explore the bayou with, I really don't know what is.
And blues is not the only thing they do! After scouring their work, I hand-picked almost 30 new tracks for The Library! That brings us to 150 sounds total!
For those of you wandering, here is the finished scene, "Hag's Hut Blues":
Please excuse the audio quality, I'm still learning how to record videos
If you have any other favourite composers, please let me know!
New Features!
I don't have any super big features to announce today, but I have lots of small improvements that make the experience so much smoother!
Here's a quick-fire of all the new things you can do in Bardic Tools:
Manage Subscription
Up until now, the only way to cancel your subscription was to email me. Not cool.
So, I added a button that will take you to Stripe's customer portal, where you can cancel your subscription, update it, change your payment method, and all those cool things.
You can find it in your profile:
Deleting Scenes
One very kind user halped me realize that, if you're experimenting a lot, you'll end up with a bunch of scenes really quickly. That's... yeah, I can definitely see that.
The process to delete a scene wasn't super straightforward, but now it's just the same as with everything else: Click the close button!
Neat! Thanks, very kind user!
Library Previews Play One at a Time
If you've used the Library to find sounds, you may have stumbled upon this problem:
You start playing a sound. As it plays, you keep scrolling to find other sounds. You find another one you like, but the first one is still playing! Now you have to scroll all the way back up, stop the first one, and then scroll down again.
That sucks.
So you don't have to do it anymore.
Now, only one sound will be playing at a time:
Wrap Up
That's it! Thanks for reading!
Your continued support makes this little dream of mine possible.
See you next time!
P.S.: I'll just leave another link to Join The Discord here, to save you a scroll.