Inkwyrd Audio

Beta. A Windows app for running the sound of a tabletop game (D&D, Daggerheart, Call of Cthulhu, Pathfinder, anything you like!) over Discord.

You get music playlists that crossfade on their own, a soundboard of effects and looping ambience, scenes that change the whole mood in one press, and your own microphone run through noise suppression and your VST3 plugins. It's all mixed in one place and sent straight into your Discord voice channel through the app's own bot. No virtual audio cable, no DAW, no routing.

It also works with no Discord at all, playing through your own speakers, which is the easiest way to try it.

Inspired by Kenku FM and Winamp.

Support the project

Inkwyrd Audio is free, and it stays free. If it's saved you some faff at the table and you'd like to put something in the hat:

Entirely optional, and no part of the app is held back for it. Bug reports and suggestions are every bit as useful, and those are free to give.

Watch the tutorial

Inkwyrd Audio Tutorial walks through setting it up and using it. If you'd rather read, the guides below cover the same ground in more detail.

Contents

• Support the project
• Watch the tutorial
• What it can do
• Download and install
• Quick start
• Guides
  • Finding your way around
  • Playing music
  • Building your library
  • Previewing a track
  • Making and using playlists
  • Setting a track's volume and fade
  • Editing tags and cover art
  • The soundboard
  • Looping ambience
  • Fading sounds in and out
  • Sounds that play by themselves
  • Scenes
  • Your microphone
  • Ducking the music while you talk
  • Connecting to Discord
  • Muting yourself in Discord automatically
  • Using a Stream Deck
  • Skins
  • Settings, updates and your files
• Keyboard shortcuts
• Troubleshooting
• Known limitations
• Reporting a problem, or asking for something
• Licence

What it can do

Music

• As many playlists as you like, with smooth crossfades between tracks and when you switch from one playlist to another. Shuffle is set per playlist.
• A library of every track you've added, viewable as a sortable table or by folder, with a search box.
• Preview any track in your own headphones without the table hearing it.
• Per-track volume and fade length, so one loud file can't ambush the table.
• Loop a single track, fade the music out, and a master volume over everything.
• A tag editor for titles, artists, albums and cover art, written into the files themselves.

Soundboard and ambience

• A grid of buttons you arrange yourself, each with its own name, colour, picture and volume. Up to 16 sounds can overlap.
• Buttons can loop, for rain, taverns and wind under a scene.
• A Killswitch that silences every sound effect at once without touching the music.

Scenes

• One press sets the playlist, the looping ambience and optionally the volume. The whole room crossfades together, and anything already right is left alone.

Your voice

• Your mic runs through noise suppression and your own VST3 plugins (EQ, compression, gates) before it reaches the call.
• Optional ducking: the music dips while you talk.
• Optional automatic muting of your own Discord client, so your voice doesn't reach the call twice.

Control and comfort

• A Stream Deck plugin for skip, shuffle, mic, sound effects, fade out, the Killswitch and scenes.
• Keyboard shortcuts on the Player window.
• Six windows that snap together and remember where you left them.
• Skins: change the colours, fonts and logo, or go further and draw the buttons, sliders and window frames from your own pixel art, the Pixel Phosphor skin shows how.

Under the hood

• Plays WAV, AIFF, FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, MP3, AAC/M4A and WMA.
• Implements Discord's end-to-end-encrypted voice protocol (DAVE), the same one the official Discord client uses.

Download and install

Get the newest release from the Releases page. What changed in each version, all the way back to the first beta, is in CHANGELOG.md.

There's nothing to install. Download InkwyrdAudio-Portable-<version>.zip, unzip it anywhere you like, your Desktop, Documents, a USB stick, and run Inkwyrd Audio.exe from inside. To remove Inkwyrd, delete the folder.

Everything it needs is in that folder, including the Microsoft C++ runtime, so it runs on a fresh Windows install with nothing set up first.

To upgrade, unzip the new version over the old folder, or into a new one and delete the old. Your settings, playlists, soundboard, scenes, track library and skins live in %APPDATA%\Inkwyrd Audio, separately from the program, so they survive either way.

There used to be an installer here, but it's gone now. It did the same job with a Start menu entry and an uninstaller, but it was the part antivirus engines disliked most: an unsigned program that unpacks other programs looks exactly like a dropper to a machine-learning model, whatever it actually does. One download is also one less thing to explain.

If you installed Inkwyrd that way before, uninstall it first (Windows Settings -> Apps -> Installed apps -> Inkwyrd Audio -> Uninstall) then use the ZIP. Your settings and playlists are in %APPDATA% and aren't touched by uninstalling. Running both at once would leave you with two copies sharing one set of settings, which is confusing rather than harmful.

Windows will warn you about this download

It will probably say "Windows protected your PC" the first time you run it, and your browser may say the file "isn't commonly downloaded." Both happen because Inkwyrd isn't code-signed. Click More info -> Run anyway.

Microsoft Defender may go further and block it as a threat. Here is the honest position, because you're being asked to run an unsigned program off the internet and you deserve the whole picture:

• Microsoft's automatic machine-learning scanner has flagged Inkwyrd's downloads before, with names ending in !ml, Wacatac.B!ml, Sabsik.EN.D!ml. Those suffixes mean a model guessed, not that anything was found.
• On VirusTotal the program scores 0 or 1 out of about 70 engines. The one hit, when there is one, is Microsoft's own model. Every major signature-based engine reads it as clean, and no engine names an actual malware family.
• Microsoft's verdict has flipped between builds of identical source code. The same program, compiled twice, scored 0/70 and then 1/64.
• A false-positive report was submitted to Microsoft and rejected. Their analyst's reply was that it "meets our criteria for malware, detection remains". So this is unresolved, not cleared, it would be dishonest to tell you Microsoft has confirmed it's harmless, because they have declined to.

So: if Defender blocks it, don't override the block. Open an issue instead and I'll look into it. Overriding your antivirus on the say-so of the person who wrote the program is a bad habit, and I'm not going to ask you to get into it.

If you'd rather satisfy yourself independently: the full source is in this repository and you can build it yourself, every release lists a SHA-256 checksum below, and you can upload the download to VirusTotal and read the results first-hand.

The real fix is code signing, which Inkwyrd doesn't have yet.

Checksums. Every release's notes list the SHA-256 of the download. Check yours matches before running it:

Get-FileHash InkwyrdAudio-Portable-*.zip

Quick start

This gets you from nothing to music playing, without setting up Discord.

1. Wear headphones. Your mic is mixed into the same output as the music, so speakers will feed back.
2. Run Inkwyrd Audio. A Setup screen appears the first time.
3. Choose a music folder. Under Music folder, click Browse... and pick a folder of music. It's the only thing Setup needs. Optionally pick a folder of short sound effects to put on the soundboard. Leave the Discord fields empty for now.
4. Click Save & Launch. Inkwyrd makes a playlist from your music folder and starts playing it.
5. Turn Monitor on. On the Player window, click Monitor: Off so it reads Monitor: On. With no Discord connection, Monitor is what lets you hear the mix yourself.
6. Open the other windows from the buttons along the bottom of the Player: Playlist, Library, Voice FX, Soundboard, Scenes.
7. Look at your library. In the Library window, the lower list is All Tracks: your music folder's tracks are already in it. That's where you search, preview and edit them. Add more music with Add folder... or Add files....

When you're ready to play over Discord, follow Connecting to Discord.

Finding your way around

Inkwyrd is six windows you can arrange however suits your screen:

• Open or hide a window with the buttons along the bottom of the Player window. A window's X also hides it; the same button brings it back.
• Windows snap together. Drag one near another, or near the edge of the screen, and it pulls itself flush. Resizing snaps the same way.
• Dragging the Player moves everything docked to it. Dragging any other window pulls just that one away, so you can rearrange without taking the layout apart.
• Only the Player can be minimised, and minimising it takes every open window with it, then brings them all back together.
• Closing the Player quits the app.
• Positions, sizes and which windows were open are remembered.

The warning banner on the Player window is where Inkwyrd tells you about anything that would otherwise fail silently: the audio device didn't open, a playlist has no playable files, tracks are missing from disk, or a file couldn't be read.

When a newer version is out, an Update available link appears at the top of the Player window, next to Settings. Click it to open the release page in your browser.

Playing music

Everything here is on the Player window.

The display at the top shows the track's artist, title and cover art, the time played and total, a live spectrum of what's being sent out, and a seek bar. Click or drag the seek bar to move through the track.

The transport buttons:

• Play / Pause - Pause keeps your place.
• Stop - silences the music and starts the list from the top next time.
• Fade out - lowers the music to silence, then stops. Good for ending a scene. It fades only the music, never your microphone.
• Skip - crossfades to the next track.
• Shuffle - on or off for the playlist that's playing.

Master is the volume of everything Inkwyrd sends out: your speakers and Discord.

Mic (to the left of Master) is the volume of your voice only - the music and sound effects stay where they are. Turn it down if you're too loud in the call.

The row below sets how playback behaves. All of it is remembered:

• Mic: Live / Muted - whether your microphone is in the mix.
• Monitor: On / Off - whether the mix also comes out of your own speakers. Turn it on when you're not using Discord. Leave it off when you're in the Discord call, because you already hear everything through the bot, and Monitor would play it all twice, slightly out of step.
• Crossfade - whether tracks blend into each other, and over how many seconds.
• Loop track - repeats the current track instead of moving on, for one ambient piece you want running all session. The slider sets a silence between repeats; leave it on No gap to loop straight round. Skip still moves on.
• Fade out - how long the Fade out button takes.

Keyboard: click the Player window, then use Space to play or pause, S to stop, Right arrow to skip, Up/Down for the master volume, M for the mic and Esc for the Killswitch. See Keyboard shortcuts.

Building your library

The Library window's lower half, All Tracks, is every track you've added to Inkwyrd, whether or not it's in a playlist. It's where you search, preview, tag and pick tracks for playlists.

To add music:

• Click Add files... to pick individual tracks, or Add folder... to add everything in a folder and its subfolders.
• Or drag files and folders straight in from Windows Explorer.

Two ways to look at it, switched with Table and Folders next to the heading. Whichever you used last is remembered.

• Table shows Title, Artist, Album, Genre and Length from each file. Click a column heading to sort, and click again to reverse. Sorting by Album keeps each album in track order; sorting by Length puts the shortest (or longest) first. Right after adding music, rows may show filenames and blank lengths for a moment while the files are read.
• Folders groups tracks by the folders they're in, in the same order Windows Explorer uses, with a count on each folder. Selecting a folder selects everything in it, which is the quick way to put a whole album into a playlist.

To search, type in the box above the list. It matches title, artist, album, genre and filename, so untagged tracks are still findable. Words match in any order: "drake blue" finds "Blue Drake". In the Folders view, the folders containing matches open up so you can see where they are. Esc or the x clears the search, and the tree goes back the way you had it. The heading shows how many tracks match, for example "All Tracks (12 of 84)".

To remove tracks, select them and click Remove (or press Delete). That takes them out of the library only. It never deletes the files, and doesn't touch any playlist already using them.

Previewing a track

A preview plays a track in your ears only, to check it's the one you want, without the table hearing it.

1. Open the Library window.
2. In All Tracks (the lower list), move your mouse over a track. A small play symbol appears at the left of that row. This works in both the Table and Folders views.
3. Click the play symbol. The track starts, and the symbol turns into a stop button inside a pulsing ring, so you can see what's previewing. The heading also says what's playing.
4. Click it again to stop. It also stops on its own at the end of the track.

While a preview plays, the playlist pauses and picks up again afterwards. A preview never reaches Discord, and you hear it even when Monitor is off.

Can't see a play symbol? Make sure All Tracks has tracks in it. If it's empty, click Add folder... and add your music.

Making and using playlists

The Library window's upper half is your playlists. Keep as many as you like: one per location, mood or session.

To make a playlist, click New. A box asks for its name; type it and press Enter.

To put tracks in it:

1. Click the playlist to select it.
2. Select tracks in All Tracks below. Ctrl+click picks several, and in the Folders view a folder picks everything inside it.
3. Click Add to playlist, or right-click and choose Add to playlist, or drag them onto the Playlist window. You can drag from either view, or straight from Windows Explorer.

To play a playlist, double-click it, or select it and click Play. If something is already playing, it crossfades across rather than cutting. Switching back to a playlist later in the same session resumes it where it left off.

Clicking a playlist (single click) just shows its tracks in the Playlist window, without changing what's playing, so you can look through one list while another plays.

Rename and Delete manage the list. Refresh re-reads a playlist's linked folder (see below).

The Playlist window shows the selected playlist's tracks; title, artist and length, in the order they play when Shuffle is off, with the playing one marked.

• Double-click a track to jump to it.
• Select several tracks the usual ways:
  • Click and drag down (or up) the list to select a run of tracks. Drag past the top or bottom and the list scrolls.
  • Click one, then Shift+click another to select everything between them.
  • Ctrl+click to pick tracks one at a time.
  • Ctrl+A selects every track in the playlist.
• Remove from playlist, or the Delete key, takes out everything selected. Removing more than one track asks first, since there's no undo. The files themselves are never deleted, and stay in your library.
• Reorder the playlist, which is the order it plays in with Shuffle off:
  • Drag a selected track (or several) up or down and drop it where you want it. A line shows where it will land. Dragging a track that isn't selected starts a selection instead, so select first, then drag.
  • Or select a track and press the Up / Down arrow keys to walk it through the list. The track stays selected, so you can keep going.
  • Tracks that came from a linked folder play in the folder's own order and can't be moved on their own. Add tracks individually if you want to arrange them yourself.
• Right-click a track (or a selection) to Edit tags... or remove it.
• Adding tracks to the playlist that's playing never interrupts it: the current track carries on and the new ones join the running order.

The playlist made from your Setup music folder is linked to that folder. Music you add to the folder later joins the playlist; click Refresh to pick it up straight away. Tracks in a linked playlist can't be removed one at a time, because they come from the folder.

To see where playlists are stored (readable JSON files), use Open playlists folder in Settings.

Setting a track's volume and fade

Every track has its own volume and its own fade length. Both belong to the file, so a track in several playlists is fixed in all of them at once.

1. In the Library's Table view, find the track.
2. Click the small bar in its Vol column.
3. Set:
   • Volume - for the track that's much louder or quieter than the rest. The small notch on the bar is normal volume. A bar shown in the warning colour is boosted above normal.
   • Fade into next - how long this track takes to hand over to the next one, overriding the global Crossfade length. Useful for a track with a long tail, or one that stops dead. Default follows the global setting. Tracks with their own fade say so on their row.

A change applies straight away, even to the track that's playing.

Editing tags and cover art

Tags are what a music file says about itself: title, artist, album and so on. Inkwyrd shows them everywhere, and can change them.

1. Right-click a track in the Library or the Playlist window.
2. Choose Edit tags....
3. Change any of: title, artist, album, album artist, year, genre, track and disc numbers, BPM, comment, composer, publisher, and the cover art (Replace... or Remove).
4. Click Save.

Changes are written into the file itself, so every other music program sees them too, and the Library updates straight away.

Editing several tracks at once: select them first, then right-click. Fields that differ between them show <keep> and are left alone unless you type in them. So you can fix an album's artist without flattening thirteen different titles. Only the fields you actually change are written.

Your files are handled carefully. Inkwyrd never edits a file in place. It copies it, tags the copy, checks the copy still plays, and only then swaps it in. If anything fails, the original is untouched.

A track that's currently loaded in the player can't be tagged, because Windows won't let a file in use be replaced. Press Stop and save again. A track being previewed is fine: the preview stops itself.

The soundboard

The Soundboard window is a grid of buttons for sound effects.

To put a sound on a button:

• Click an empty button (marked +) and pick a file. Pick several and they fill the following empty buttons.
• Or drag sound files onto a button from Windows Explorer.
• Or click Import folder... to put a whole folder's sounds onto the free buttons.

To play a sound, click its button. Sounds can overlap, and the same button can be pressed repeatedly.

To rearrange the board, drag a button onto another to swap them, or onto an empty one to move it there. Everything moves with the button, including its name, so Stream Deck keys keep working.

Right-click a button to:

• Rename it. The name is what a Stream Deck key uses to find it, so update the key if you rename.
• Set its Volume (or click the thin bar along its bottom edge).
• Choose a Colour.
• Set a picture (PNG, JPEG, GIF, BMP or WebP). You can also drag an image onto a button that already has a sound. The picture is dimmed so the name stays readable.
• Loop this sound - see Looping ambience.
• Fade in / Fade out - see Fading sounds in and out.
• Play randomly - see Sounds that play by themselves.
• Replace the sound or Clear the button.

+ and - at the top add or remove buttons. A button with a sound on it is never removed.

Killswitch (top of the window, or Esc on the Player) instantly silences every sound effect playing, loops included, and switches off any sound set to play randomly. It never touches the music: use Stop or Fade out on the Player for that.

A button whose file has gone missing says (file missing) rather than silently doing nothing.

Looping ambience

Any soundboard button can loop instead of playing once. That's what you want for rain, a crackling fire, a tavern crowd or wind: sounds that should run under the music until you say otherwise.

1. Right-click the button on the Soundboard.
2. Choose Loop this sound. A small loop mark appears on it.
3. Click the button to start it. It's outlined while it's running.
4. Click it again to stop it.

The same press starts and stops it from a Stream Deck too, and the Killswitch stops it. Each loop keeps its own volume, so you can set an ambience bed quietly under the music and leave it.

Loops are what scenes switch on and off.

Fading sounds in and out

Any button can fade in when it starts and fade out when it stops, instead of starting and stopping at full volume. Right-click it and choose a length under Fade in and Fade out (from half a second to ten seconds), or Off.

• Fade in happens every time the sound starts: a click, a Stream Deck key, a random play or a scene.
• Fade out happens when a loop is stopped. On a sound that plays once, it fades the last part of the sound as it ends, so a long tail dies away instead of cutting off.
• The Killswitch ignores fades and stops everything at once.

Scenes keep their own fade settings for each sound, so the same rain can swell in slowly in one scene and cut in at once in another.

Sounds that play by themselves

A sound effect can play on its own every so often, such as a seagull over the waves, distant thunder, a creak in an old house, while the rest of the scene carries on.

1. Right-click the button and choose Play randomly.

2. Pick how often:

   • Low - every 2 to 5 minutes
   • Medium - every 45 seconds to 2 minutes
   • High - every 15 to 45 seconds

   Each gap is picked at random within its range, so it never falls into a pattern. The first one comes sooner, so you can tell it's on.

3. A small dice appears in the button's top corner while it's playing randomly.

Clicking the button still plays it straight away, whenever you like. It never plays over itself: if one is still playing when the next is due, that turn is skipped. To stop it, choose Play randomly -> Off, or press the Killswitch.

Random play is for sounds that play once. A looping button can't play randomly, since it never finishes. It also doesn't switch itself on when Inkwyrd starts, the same as loops: save it in a scene and pressing the scene switches it on.

Scenes

A scene is one press that sets the whole room: which playlist plays, which looping sounds are running, which sounds play randomly, and (if you choose) the master volume. For example "Tavern", "Road", "Combat" or "Storm".

Open the Scenes window from the Scenes button on the Player.

To make a scene:

1. Set the room up the way you want it: play the playlist, start the looping sounds, switch on any sounds that should play randomly, set the volume.
2. In the Scenes window, click + Save current as scene.
3. A dialog opens, already filled in from what's playing. Give it a name, untick anything you don't want in it, and pick a colour. Each sound also has In and Out fades for this scene, taken from its button. Change them here without changing the button. Scene transition means the scene's normal change time; Off cuts straight in or out.
4. Choose what it does to the music:
   • Play a playlist - the usual choice.
   • Fade the music out - for a deliberately quiet scene.
   • Leave the music alone - for ambience-only scenes like "it starts raining", which shouldn't interrupt the track.
5. Tick Set the master volume to only if you want this scene to change the volume. It's off by default, because the master volume is also what Discord hears.
6. Click Save.

To use a scene, click it. Here's what happens:

• The music crossfades to the scene's playlist. If that playlist is already playing, it's left alone, so pressing Combat during combat never restarts the fight music.
• The scene's loops fade in and any other running loops fade out. A loop both scenes share keeps going without a break, so rain carries on from Road into Storm.
• If the scene sets the volume, it glides there. Grab the Master slider yourself and the glide stops.
• The scene's random sounds switch on (at the scene's pace), and any other sound playing randomly switches off. One already playing randomly at the right pace carries on undisturbed.
• Other sound effects are never touched.
• Pressing the scene you're already in puts it back. If the Killswitch stopped the ambience, one press brings it back without restarting anything that's still right.

The scene you last pressed is outlined. A scene change takes as long as the Player's crossfade setting, and never less than a second.

Right-click a scene to:

• Update from what's playing now - the easiest way to change one. Set the room up again, then update.
• Edit... - change it without having to play it first.
• Move earlier / Move later - reorder.
• Delete... - removes the scene only. The playlist and soundboard are untouched.

If something a scene uses disappears (its playlist is deleted, or a soundboard button is cleared or stops looping), its button says how many things are missing and hovering over it says which. The rest of the scene still works. Renaming a soundboard button updates every scene that uses it, and moving buttons around the board changes nothing.

Your microphone

Your mic is mixed in with the music and sent to Discord. The Mic button on the Player (or M) turns it on and off, and the setting is remembered.

The Mic slider on the Player sets how loud your voice is, without touching the music or sound effects. It's remembered too. It doesn't change what ducking counts as speech, so turning yourself down won't stop the music dipping when you talk.

The Voice FX window shapes how you sound.

Noise suppression (at the top, off by default) removes steady background noise, a fan, hiss, room tone, from the gaps between your words. Turn it on for a noisy mic and leave it off for a quiet one: on a clean mic it takes more from your voice than from the noise. It adds about 40ms of delay. The line under the switch says which state you're in.

Your plugin chain runs your mic through VST3 plugins you already own (EQ, compression, a noise gate and so on).

1. Click Add VST3.... It opens at your system VST3 folder. Pick the plugins you want; you can select several. They're added to your list, which is remembered.
2. Click a plugin in your list to put it in the live chain. Its own window opens so you can set it up or pick a preset, as you would in a DAW.
3. Click a plugin's name in the live chain to reopen its window, or Remove to take it out. Plugins run in the order listed.
4. Forget takes a plugin off your list.

Save your settings as each plugin's own presets. The chain itself isn't remembered between sessions. Noise suppression runs before your plugins, so they shape your voice rather than your room.

Ducking the music while you talk

With ducking on, the music and sound effects dip while you're speaking and come back when you stop, so you can narrate without riding the Master slider.

1. Open Settings from the Player.
2. Under Duck the music while my mic is live, tick Enable.
3. Set:
   • Drop the music by - how far it dips. -12 dB is a good start: clearly under your voice but not gone.
   • Speaking is louder than - what counts as speech. Raise it if background noise keeps the music dipped when you're not talking.
4. Click Save & Apply. It takes effect straight away.

The timing is fixed: it dips fast enough not to clip your first word, and waits a moment before coming back so the music doesn't surge up between sentences. It listens to your mic after noise suppression and your plugins, so a noise gate you already use decides what counts as speech. A muted mic never ducks anything, and your voice itself is never ducked.

Connecting to Discord

Inkwyrd plays into Discord as its own bot, so you need a bot of your own. It's free and takes about five minutes.

Create the bot:

1. Go to the Discord Developer Portal and sign in.
2. Click New Application, give it a name (for example "InkWyrd Audio"), and create it.
3. Open the Bot tab. Click Reset Token and copy the token. Keep it private: anyone with it can control the bot.
4. You don't need any of the "Privileged Gateway Intents". The bot only joins voice channels; it never reads messages.

Invite it to your server: 5. Open OAuth2 -> URL Generator. Under Scopes tick bot; under Bot Permissions tick Connect and Speak. Copy the URL at the bottom. 6. Open that URL in your browser, pick your server, and click Authorize. The bot appears in your member list (offline until Inkwyrd connects it).

Get the server and channel IDs: 7. In Discord, turn on User Settings -> Advanced -> Developer Mode. 8. Right-click your server's icon and Copy Server ID. 9. Right-click the voice channel the bot should join and Copy Channel ID. Make sure it's the voice channel (the one under the speaker icon that people join), not the text channel above it.

If that voice channel is private, the bot needs to be let in. A private channel only admits the roles and people named in its own permissions, and a bot you've just invited isn't one of them. The Connect permission from the invite link applies to the server as a whole and doesn't override a channel's own settings.

To fix it: hover the channel in Discord, click the gear (Edit Channel) -> Permissions, add your bot's role under Roles / Members, and allow Connect.

You can tell this is the problem because Inkwyrd connects, the bot appears in your member list, and it simply never joins the channel. Discord doesn't report a voice join it won't allow, so there's no error anywhere: it just never happens.

Put them into Inkwyrd: 10. Open Settings, paste the Bot token, Server (guild) ID and Voice channel ID, and click Save & Apply. 11. Inkwyrd connects straight away, and the status line at the top of the Player shows how it's going. Changing these details later, once it has connected, takes effect the next time Inkwyrd starts; it offers to restart for you.

Where your token is kept, and how to cancel it. Inkwyrd saves the bot token in its settings file at %APPDATA%\Inkwyrd Audio\Inkwyrd Audio.settings, as ordinary text that isn't encrypted. Anyone who can read that file can use your bot.

That's fine on a computer only you use, and worth knowing about otherwise. Two things follow from it:

• Don't send anyone that file - including when you report a bug. Send the log files instead (Settings -> Open log folder); the log deliberately never records your token.
• If you think it has got out, go to the Developer Portal -> your app -> Bot -> Reset Token. The old token stops working immediately. Paste the new one into Settings.

The same applies to the client secret if you set up automatic muting. Your bot can only join voice channels and speak, on servers you invited it to, so the worst case is somebody playing audio at your group, not access to your Discord account.

Starting before anyone else has joined is fine. Discord sets its voice encryption up as a group, and it won't finish doing that until there's somebody to share it with, so a bot sitting alone in a channel waits. While it's waiting, the status line says "In the voice channel, nobody else here yet, so nothing is being sent to Discord" and your music plays locally only. The moment a player joins, sound starts reaching the channel on its own. Nothing to press.

Inkwyrd rebuilds the connection by itself if Discord drops it. Discord ends a call whose channel has been empty for a while, and moves bots between its own servers from time to time. Either way you'll see "Reconnecting to the voice channel..." and it carries on. You don't need to restart it.

Once you're connected, turn Monitor off. You're in the call too, so you already hear everything through the bot.

Muting yourself in Discord automatically

When your mic is live in Inkwyrd, your voice reaches the call twice: once from your own Discord client and again through the bot. Inkwyrd can mute you in Discord whenever your mic is live here, and unmute you when it isn't.

This is optional. If you only use Inkwyrd for music and effects, skip it. It uses the same Discord application as your bot:

1. Add a redirect. In the Developer Portal, open your app, go to OAuth2 -> Redirects, click Add Redirect, enter https://inkwyrd.com/rpc exactly, and Save Changes. Nothing is ever sent there, Discord just requires one. It must be that exact address, and first in the list if you have several.
2. Fully quit Discord - right-click it in the system tray and choose Quit Discord - then start it again. Discord only reads your application's settings when it starts.
3. Copy the client secret: Developer Portal -> your app -> OAuth2 -> Client Secret -> Reset Secret, then copy it. Keep it private.
4. In Inkwyrd, open Settings. Under Mute me in Discord while my mic is live, paste the client secret, tick Enable, and click Authorise.... Discord shows a consent box: click Authorize. The status line under the field confirms it.
5. Click Save & Apply.

It mutes your own Discord client on your own machine, so it needs no special server permissions and works in any server.

Using a Stream Deck

Inkwyrd has a plugin for Elgato's Stream Deck. Every key works while Inkwyrd is running.

Installing it. The plugin isn't in the download yet, it's built from this repository's source. You need the Stream Deck app (version 6.5 or later) and Node.js.

1. Download this repository (Code -> Download ZIP on GitHub, or git clone).
2. Open a terminal in its streamdeck-plugin folder and run:

   npm install
   npm run build
   npx @elgato/cli link com.inkwyrd.audiodeck.sdPlugin
   

3. Quit the Stream Deck app from its tray icon and start it again. Inkwyrd Audio Deck appears in its list of actions.

Setting up the keys. Drag actions onto keys. For a Soundboard key, select it and type the button's name exactly as it reads on the Soundboard (capitals and spaces count). For a Scene key, type the scene's name (capitals don't matter).

What the key tells you:

• A tick means Inkwyrd received the press.
• A warning triangle means Inkwyrd isn't running, or a Soundboard or Scene key has no name set. A press that didn't reach Inkwyrd is dropped. It never fires later when Inkwyrd starts.
• A tick with nothing happening usually means a mistyped name.

There's more detail in streamdeck-plugin/README.md.

Skins

A skin changes Inkwyrd's colours, fonts, corner rounding, title bar height and logo and, optionally, draws the buttons, sliders and window frames from pictures of your own (see below).

To change skin, open Settings and pick one under Skin. It applies straight away. Inkwyrd (built-in) always takes you back.

Seven skins are included, in two styles and four colour schemes:

The pixel-art skins draw the buttons, sliders and window frames from pictures and use the Silkscreen pixel font.

Included skins get updated. When a new version of Inkwyrd improves one of these skins, your copy is replaced with the new one, but only if you haven't changed it. If you've edited any of its files, Inkwyrd leaves it exactly as it is. If you've deleted one, it stays deleted. (Each included skin's folder holds a small .inkwyrd-example.json file that records what Inkwyrd installed, which is how it can tell.)

To make your own:

1. Pick the skin closest to what you want, then click Export current.... That saves it into your skins folder and opens the folder.
2. Edit the skin.json inside it.
3. Click Reload in Settings to see your changes.

A skin is a folder under %APPDATA%\Inkwyrd Audio\skins, holding a skin.json and optionally a logo image:

skins\Amber\skin.json
skins\Amber\logo.png

Everything in the file is optional. Anything you leave out uses Inkwyrd's own value, so a short file is fine.

{
  "schemaVersion": 1,
  "name": "Amber",
  "version": 2,
  "colours": { "accent": "#ffb340", "text": "#efc98a" },
  "fonts": { "title": "Segoe UI Semibold", "label": "Segoe UI", "digits": "Consolas" },
  "metrics": { "cornerRadius": 6, "titleBarHeight": 46 },
  "logo": "logo.png"
}

version is your skin's own revision number. Raise it whenever you change a skin you share, so people can tell which one they have.

Colours are #rrggbb, or #aarrggbb for transparency.

Fonts name a font family. title is for headings, label for all ordinary text, and digits for the time readout (a monospaced font stops the numbers jumping about). A font that isn't available falls back to the default.

A skin can bring its own font, so it works on computers that don't have it installed: put the font files next to your skin.json and list them in fontFiles, then name the family under fonts as usual. Include the font's licence file with them if it has one. Pixel Phosphor does this with the Silkscreen pixel font.

"fontFiles": [ "Silkscreen-Regular.ttf", "Silkscreen-Bold.ttf" ],
"fonts": { "title": "Silkscreen", "label": "Silkscreen", "digits": "Silkscreen" }

cornerRadius rounds panels, buttons and fields (0 for square). titleBarHeight is kept between 28 and 80 pixels, so a window can always be grabbed.

logo names an image next to your skin.json (PNG, JPEG, GIF or SVG) to use instead of the drawn ink bottle, in every title bar and on the Player's display. SVGs are drawn without blur, filters or text, so keep them to plain shapes.

If something's wrong with a skin, Inkwyrd keeps working. A file it can't read leaves the previous look in place and says why under the Skin picker. A single colour it can't understand keeps that one colour and uses the rest of your file.

Pictures for buttons, sliders and frames (sprite skins)

A skin can also replace how the controls themselves are drawn, with pictures from one image, a sprite sheet in the skin's folder. The Pixel Phosphor example skin does this: open its folder and its sprites.png to see one.

Every picture is optional. Anything you don't draw is drawn the normal way in your skin's colours, so you can start with just the buttons.

"sprites": {
  "sheet": "sprites.png",
  "scale": 2,
  "pixelArt": true,
  "items": {
    "button":        { "rect": [0, 0, 16, 12], "slice": [4, 4, 4, 4] },
    "button@down":   { "rect": [16, 0, 16, 12], "slice": [4, 4, 4, 4] },
    "icon.transport.play": { "rect": [0, 20, 8, 8] },
    "window":        { "rect": [40, 0, 40, 40], "slice": [6, 6, 6, 6], "tile": true }
  }
}

• rect is where the picture sits in the sheet: [x, y, width, height] in pixels.
• slice keeps the edges from stretching: [left, top, right, bottom]. The corners stay their real size and only the middle stretches, so one small picture fits a button of any width and a window of any size.
• tile repeats the edges and middle instead of stretching them, good for textures and patterned frames.
• scale is how many screen pixels each sheet pixel becomes (1-8). Pixel art drawn small looks right at 2 or 3.
• pixelArt keeps pixels sharp and square when scaled (the default). Set it to false for smooth artwork.
• sheet2x (optional) names a second sheet at exactly twice the size, used on high-resolution screens.

What you can draw. Add @over, @down, @on, @onover, @ondown or @disabled to a name for that state; anything missing falls back to the plain picture, and a disabled control with no picture of its own is dimmed.

One control only. Add a control's name after a dot to give just that control its own picture: button.transport.stop, slider.thumb.master. An icon. picture is drawn at its own size in place of the button's words: icon.transport.play. The Player's controls are transport.play, transport.pause, transport.stop, transport.fadeout, transport.skip, toggle.shuffle, toggle.mute, toggle.monitor, toggle.crossfade, toggle.loop, open.playlist, open.library, open.voicefx, open.soundboard, open.scenes, open.settings, and the sliders crossfade, loopgap, fadeout, master and mic. The title bar's own glyphs are icon.close, icon.minimise and icon.maximise. Toggles are lit (@on) while their option is on.

A misspelt name, a picture that reaches outside the sheet, or a slice wider than its picture is listed under the Skin picker and skipped, the rest of the skin still loads.

Export current... saves colours, fonts and sizes only. To start from a sprite skin, copy its whole folder instead.

For making sheets, tools/skin-builder in the source code generates a complete sprite skin you can then redraw by hand.

Settings, updates and your files

Settings opens from the button at the top of the Player window. It floats over the other windows while it's open.

Click Save & Apply to keep your changes. Closing Settings with its X discards them. Everything applies straight away, except changing Discord details after Inkwyrd has already connected: that takes effect the next time it starts, and it offers to restart. Your version number is shown at the bottom right.

Updates. With the update check on, Inkwyrd asks GitHub once at startup whether a newer release exists. If one does, an Update available link appears at the top of the Player window: click it to open the release page in your browser, or hover over it to see the address first. It never downloads or installs anything, you get the new version from that page yourself.

Your files all live in %APPDATA%\Inkwyrd Audio (paste that into Explorer's address bar to open it): settings, playlists, the soundboard, scenes, your track library, per-track volumes, cached tags, your plugin list and skins. Copy that folder to back everything up. Keep the backup somewhere private: the settings file holds your Discord bot token as plain text (see Connecting to Discord).

Log files are in %APPDATA%\Inkwyrd Audio\logs, and Open log folder in Settings takes you straight there. log.txt covers the run you're in; log-previous.txt is the run before it, kept so that a crash you reported after restarting still has its evidence. They record what Inkwyrd did; which files it loaded, how the Discord connection went, how long startup took, and a report if it stopped unexpectedly. They never contain your bot token. Attaching both to a bug report is the single most useful thing you can do.

Inkwyrd never overwrites a file it can't safely read. If one was written by a newer version of Inkwyrd, or has been damaged, it's left exactly as it is and the warning banner tells you. Changes to that part of the app won't be saved until you go back to the newer version or fix the file, so nothing in it is lost. (The one exception is the tag cache, which is rebuilt, because tags can always be read again from your tracks.)

Keyboard shortcuts

Player window (click it first):

Elsewhere:

Shortcuts only work while Inkwyrd's window has focus. For control while you're in another program, use a Stream Deck.

Troubleshooting

I can't hear anything. If you're not connected to Discord, turn Monitor on. Without Discord it's the only way to hear the mix. Also check the Master slider, and the Player's warning banner (it says if the audio device failed to open, or a playlist has no playable files).

I hear everything twice, slightly out of step. Monitor is on while you're in the Discord call. Turn Monitor off: you already hear the bot in the call.

People hear my voice twice. Your own Discord mic and Inkwyrd's are both live. Set up automatic muting, or mute yourself in Discord.

There's feedback or echo from my mic. Wear headphones. Your mic is mixed into the same output as the music.

I can't find how to preview a track. Hover over a track in the Library's All Tracks list and click the play symbol that appears. If All Tracks is empty, click Add folder... and add your music first. See Previewing a track.

The status line says nobody else is here, and Discord gets no sound. That's expected rather than a fault. Discord won't finish setting up its voice encryption until someone else is in the channel, so Inkwyrd waits there with the music playing locally. As soon as a player joins, the sound starts going out on its own. See Connecting to Discord.

The bot is online, but it never joins the voice channel. Nearly always a private voice channel. A private channel only admits the roles listed in its own permissions, and your bot isn't one of them until you add it. Hover the channel, click the gear (Edit Channel -> Permissions), add your bot's role and allow Connect. See Connecting to Discord.

Failing that, check you copied the voice channel's ID rather than a text channel's, and that the channel isn't full. Discord never reports a voice join it won't allow, so nothing appears as an error; Inkwyrd will tell you what it found in the status line.

Discord says my bot token was rejected, or the bot stays offline. Copy the token again from the Developer Portal (Bot tab), and when you paste it into Settings make sure you replace what's in the box rather than adding to it. Inkwyrd checks the shape of what you paste and will tell you if it looks wrong. If the bot never comes online at all, the log says why: Settings, then Open log folder.

My Discord changes didn't do anything. Once Inkwyrd has connected, changes to the bot token, server or channel apply the next time it starts. Accept the restart it offers, or close and reopen it.

"Can't tag this track." It's loaded in the player. Press Stop, then save again.

The warning banner says a file is being kept as it is. That file was written by a newer version of Inkwyrd, or is damaged. It hasn't been touched, but changes to that part of the app won't be saved. Go back to the newer version, or restore the file from a backup. See Settings, updates and your files.

A Stream Deck key shows a warning triangle. Inkwyrd isn't running, or the key needs a sound or scene name. See Using a Stream Deck.

Windows or Defender blocked the download. See the note under Download and install.

Known limitations

• The download isn't code-signed, so Windows warns about it and Defender may block it. See Download and install and please don't override a block.
• There's no installer, so no Start menu entry or desktop shortcut. Make your own shortcut to Inkwyrd Audio.exe if you want one: right- click it, Show more options -> Send to -> Desktop.
• The Stream Deck plugin has to be built from source.
• Changing your Discord bot token, server or channel after Inkwyrd has connected takes effect the next time it starts. It won't drop a live connection to reconnect mid-session.
• Keyboard shortcuts only work while Inkwyrd has focus. Global hotkeys are planned.
• Because Inkwyrd draws its own window frames, Windows Snap Layouts (the flyout over the maximise button) and Win+arrow snapping don't work on its windows. Inkwyrd's own snapping does.

Reporting a problem, or asking for something

This is a beta, and reports are what make it better.

• Something's broken: open a bug report. It asks a few questions; which version, which download, what you were doing, and all of them help.
• Something's missing: open a feature request. Say what you're trying to do at the table, not just what button you want; that usually leads to a better answer than the one first imagined.

Please attach your log files to a bug report. Settings -> Open log folder, then attach log.txt and log-previous.txt. They say what the app was doing and record a crash if there was one, and they don't contain your bot token. A screenshot of the Player's status line or warning banner helps too.

Licence

Inkwyrd Audio is free to use, and its source is public to read, but it isn't open source. Copyright (c) 2026 InkWyrd, all rights reserved. The full terms are in LICENSE, and the short version is:

• You may download it, install it and use it free of charge, for anything you like, personal or commercial, on as many of your own computers as you want. You may read the source and build it yourself.
• You may not redistribute it, publish your own builds of it, put out a modified version, or charge anyone for it.

The source is published so you can see exactly what the program does before you run it. That matters here, because the downloads aren't code-signed yet and Windows will warn you about them; "read the code yourself" is the honest answer to "should I trust this?".

If you want to do something the licence doesn't allow, open an issue and ask. It's a small project and the answer may well be yes.

Inkwyrd Audio is built on other people's work, all of it properly licensed and credited in THIRD_PARTY_LICENSES.md, which is also installed next to the program. Those licences are theirs, not affected by the one above, and a few of them grant you rights this licence can't take away.

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