Well hiya, there! I'm 💩Ship's Compooter💩. If you've seen me in your games, you probably know me for one of three things: Piloting the ship from literally anywhere but the helm, disappearing as soon as I'm unobserved, and of course, using a Soundboard+Voice Modulation system for comms instead of a boring old meatbag voice. In this guide, I'm going to pass on some of the knowledge I've gained from my time using alternative communication methods and show you two ways to set up a very basic soundboard so you can engage in your own comedic shenanigans during even the most serious of PULSAR sessions!

Minimum Requirements for this guide:

-Two monitors

-A keyboard and mouse

-A web browser

-Windows 10 (tested on Win 10 Pro x64 build 18362.19h1_release.190318-1202)

-Either an android phone, a second computer, or a virtual machine on your main computer. Must be capable of "Steam Streaming" a game at least once.

-The Steam Link Virtual Audio drivers from the above requirement, which are now hosted on my GitHub[github.com] until Steam either adds a launch option to force-install/verify the integrity of the drivers, or provides a prominent download for them on the Steam Link support page.

Helpful Additions that aren't expressly needed but definitely give you more breathing room, control, and reliability:

-Audacity

-An ASIO audio interface (I use a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 2nd Gen)

-Your DAW of choice (NOT Audacity, we'll cover the difference later) with the VST plugin "Voxengo Recorder"

-Voicemeeter. I used to use Voicemeeter Banana but I recently upgraded to Potato for more I/O. Pick whichever edition you want to use.

-Resanance Soundboard. Yes, I'm aware the name is misspelled. No, it's not an accident. Idk what they were smoking when they named it but apparently it is not, in fact, Resonance. Regardless, this is the program you want.

-Beefy system resources with lots of RAM and a whole chunky boi of a CPU if you want to do live audio sampling during gameplay. (Also requires concentration and multitasking)

-More monitors. Between 4 and 6 should be adequate.

-Some basic ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ restraint.

-Questionable though not expressly dubious moral compass.

With all that squared away, let's jump right into it!

Being the Ship's Compooter has taught me a lot about how people view soundboards. I've seen a few copycats, a few originals, and many failed trolls. If you want to use a Soundboard and minimize (though not entirely eliminate) the chances you'll be kicked, my best advice to you would be:

Play a character. I see so many people try to use soundboards and fall flat on their asses before being forcibly removed from the lobby because they thought they were clever to play random YouTube clips through their low quality webcam mic. Look, I get it, you can't wait to dazzle the crew of the H.M.S. Sandwich Tin in Space with your comedic genius, but if you just throw together a random assortment of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ like this, you're almost guaranteed to get kicked on the spot for being an annoying moron.





























"But Compooter," I hear you ask. "Don't you have that very same collection of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ since you took the screenshot? Doesn't that make you a hypocrite?"

Not quite. See, that screenshot is from the near-bottom of my soundboard (sounds are sorted by first added, no way to change that afaik) and are reserved for more comedic situations. The vast majority of the soundboard is comprised of Ship's Computer soundbytes, enabling me to become the Ship's Compooter and reply to almost any question posed.





















































So, play a character. It could be Bender from Futurama, it could be Data from Star Trek, it could even be General Ackbar. The only limit is what YOU can download or sample. Ensure that you've got witty comebacks, or at least a basic reply framework in place. PULSAR's key binds are pretty relaxed, so you can bind plenty of sounds to various keys without any adverse effects. A few examples from my own setup:

F1: "Tactical Alert, vessel approaching!"
F2: "Proximity Alert, vessel approaching. The vessel Is hailing."
F3: "Specify Parameters"
Up Arrow: "Computer Standing By."
Shift+Left Arrow: "Acknowledged."
Numpad 8: "Negative."
Numpad 6: "Affirmative."
Numpad Subtract: "Intruder Alert!"
F7: "Insufficient Sensor Data."

That said, using a soundboard to communicate can be pretty taxing. I'd recommend picking a job that doesn't require a lot of active thinking, like Piloting or Engineering. Weapons has to board and defend against boarders as well as man the main turret, which prevents you from alt+tabbing to the soundboard to prep potential replies to the conversation (which is a lot of what you'll be doing). Scientist has to heal the crew, run programs, scan vessels, relay information, and do a lot of communication involving specific details (i.e "charge Phalanx") which makes soundboarding difficult but not impossible. On the other hand, piloting and engineering are pretty relaxed. With engineering you only have to do stuff while in combat so most of your replies can be a variant of "yes" or "no" for whatever character you've chosen, and as long as you slam coolant by 20% stability, you should be able to avoid every reactor breach headed your way. Piloting is pretty relaxed since a lot of the time is spent exploring the galaxy, avoiding obstacles, and aligning the ship for warp and barrage alike.

This obviously won't save you from every heavy boot hurled at your head. Some captains prefer to play the game in an "uber-serious" fashion, which can often be pushed to such extremes that people will insist that you use your fleshy meatbag voice and will accept no substitutes. Whether they want to "play the game, not roleplay" or "just aren't comfortable", some people get weirded out by soundboard/voicemod users. You WILL be kicked and it WILL happen often. People WILL despise you at times. You WILL have fumbly accidents where you drop your keyboard, or a cat runs across your desk, or you just lean over to plug in your headphones and end up activating like 20 sounds. It's inevitable, we all have our clumsy moments. The key is to get better at it, and eventually be able to pull off a comedic routine using nothing but sampled sounds!

If all that sounds good to you, then read on!

Before we get started downloading, installing, or modifying anything, I want to get a few simple terms clearly defined so that EVERYBODY is on the same page and nobody stumbles into my DMs asking questions.

Main Computer: The computer you want to run the soundboard and game on.

Secondary: Whatever secondary unit you're going to stream the game to.

Steam Virtual Input/Output: Drivers that Windows treats as no different than any other mic or speaker, but instead of picking up/outputting live audio, they can pipe audio from programs.

VBCable: Unreliable garbage.

DAW: Digital Audio Workstation, used for the creation of music, can also serve as a routing and voice modulation system.

Sound Control Panel: The Windows 7 style sound panel which displayed Inputs, Outputs, etc all in their own tabs.

Windows Sound Settings: The modern "metro ui" sound settings that you get when you *initially* open it up. Normally these metro ui apps are a bunch of watered down corporate ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, but in this case the developers at Microsoft have actually added several useful features that the old panel doesn't have.

So you've read up to this point and you want to continue, but you don't have the first clue how to do anything audio related. If it's more complicated than plugging in your headphones, well, you're just ♥♥♥♥ outta luck.

Luckily, the fine folks over at Microsoft Inc. have taken notice of musicians, trolls, and anxiety-laden teens alike, and have included a handy new feature in the windows sound settings that allow even the laziest bum on his couch to pull off gmod-level mic spamming. If you're serious about doing soundboarding, skip this method entirely because it SCREAMS amateur hour. Otherwise, here's how to get kicked from pretty much any session you join immediately!

First, download and install the Steam Link Virtual Audio drivers[github.com]. These are the virtual audio cables we'll be using to do the routing. If you have a "Stereo Mix" you might be able to avoid this step and just route your soundboard through that, but I've never had any luck with actually getting a signal to come through the Stereo Mix. You can also use VBCable, but I don't recommend it as, in my experience, it seems more prone to the dreaded crackling/popping/skipping audio bug. Just use the Steam Link drivers and save yourself the headache.

Next, open your browser of choice and navigate to a soundboard site. Any will do, you certainly have your pick. Play any sound at least once to make sure your browser of choice (Chrome, in my case) comes through as an audio source for the next part.

If you right click your sound icon and click "Open sound settings", you'll be greeted by a page that looks similar to this.





Scroll down to the bottom and under "Advanced sound settings" click on "App volume and device preferences". Find your browser in that list and select "Steam Streaming Microphone" or "Steam Streaming Speakers" as the output, then set the game's preferred microphone to the same output.

Now any audio played through the web browser should be transmitted as though the audio itself were a mic, and will usually come through at or near source quality!


If it isn't obvious, this method has several really ♥♥♥♥♥♥ caveats:

-This method does not allow for microphone usage alongside the soundboard. You *can* use VoiceMeeter for a bit more control over your I/O, but most of you following this part of the guide probably don't want to mess around with audio stuff if you don't have to, so naturally you're probably not going to touch VoiceMeeter. If your Virtual I/O is set as your communications mic and you're trying to use your headset mic to chat alongside it, chances are you won't come through.

-This method has no protection measures in place for dealing with noise cancellation, spikes in volume, clipping, or really any of the ♥♥♥♥ that can go wrong. You can't even have a gate. It's truly the dark ages if you do this, and you are on your own.

-It relies on your sounds being available on that soundboard site forever. One bad web attack or unfortunate accident, and your soundboard could blink out of existence, never to be seen again. Seriously, all it takes is one idiotic manager deciding "hey uh, yeah we don't need these backups. they're like $600 a month to maintain, get rid of them." and poof, your soundboard is as good as gone.

-It relies on the sounds themselves being authentic and not falsely named troll/joke/earrape uploads.

-Just use YouTube if you're gonna do this.

Hooray, you're reading this part of the guide! This means you're either A) smart enough to figure out basic audio routing, or B) vastly overestimating your intelligence. I really hope it's A.

First, download VoiceMeeter. There are several editions available, ranging from just plain "VoiceMeeter" to "VoiceMeeter Banana" to "VoiceMeeter Potato". The main differences are in the amount of control over signal processing each program gives you. Potato is by far the most versatile, but I got by just fine on Banana for quite a while, and it's the go-to recommended audio processing system for streamers.

Second, download Resanance Soundboard[resanance.com].

Third, install the Steam Link Virtual audio drivers[github.com]. Unless VBCable magically works for you, you're still gonna want these. For me, VBCable stutters and skips without ever sending the audio through, so I use the Steam Virtual I/O.

Fourth, if you haven't already, install everything you just downloaded. You should've done that already but tbh people are counter-intuitive so I wouldn't be surprised if you've just left them in the background this whole time.

When you launch VoiceMeeter, you'll be greeted by a window like this that has a bunch of sliders and buttons, as well as a few dials. Stay calm, smoke a bowl if you need to, and relax. Once you assign mental names to these, they're a piece of cake to understand. You're good, homie. Mk? Mk. I'll walk you through this in more detail below, but basically:

A=Speakers, Headphones, whatever your main output device is.
B=Microphone, Virtual Input, Aux, and all other outgoing signals.

















First, click up where it says "A1" and select whichever output device you want VoiceMeeter to treat as the main output. Side note, my computer seems to have problems using the WDM interface and I can only get it to work without distortion using MME. If you run into problems with a signal that's WAYYY too loud, try setting everything to MME instead of WDM.







Next, go to your sound settings (right click sound icon, settings) and set your Primary Output device to VoiceMeeter Input and your primary output device to VoiceMeeter Aux Output. I know the names are counter-intuitive, just think of it like this: Your desktop audio is going into VoiceMeeter's Input, VoiceMeeter then does some processing magic and through the joy of being your primary audio output, pushes the signal through to A1 where you then hear it! As for the aux output being your input, the signal from the "aux" is separate from your desktop audio. We'll get into that in a minute.

Now to actually set up your mic inputs. Left click the area where it says "select input device" and select whichever mic you want to be your normal, unprocessed mic. Mute it or route it away from A1 or you'll get your voice fed back to you. This voice will be available to you in the event of total soundboard failure but isn't the focus of this guide.

Repeat the process above for the second input, but this time select either Steam Streaming Speakers or Microphone. Both of them are functionally identical for these purposes, meaning you basically have two Virtual I/Os given to you thanks to Steam.

Next, open up Resanance and scroll through the lower list until you find the Steam Virtual I/O you selected in the previous step. Check the checkbox beside it, make sure that the virtual mic volume is up, and click Enable. With your VoiceMeeter settings unchanged, the virtual input should be routed to A1 same as your normal mic, and you should hear the same chime as the Windows Speech Recognition "Ready" sound.

If that signal comes through okay, then the Soundboard is being piped through VoiceMeeter. Congratulations! Now comes the tricky part. It's not super difficult but humans are dumb panicky animals so I'm expecting like 90% of you to struggle with this. Under your virtual input slider, you probably see B1, B2, B3, etc alongside the A counterparts. A is output (i.e speakers), B is input (i.e mic, virtual aux out). What you need to do is figure out which B output routes to the VoiceMeeter Aux Output that you selected as your main mic earlier. This is best achieved using something like Discord's mic testing system, under settings>voice and video. Once you get it coming through, ensure you deactivate any "audio enhancements" such as noise suppression or echo cancellation as these will make the signal sound like it's coming through a wet blanket.

Bonus Round: Sampling audio in real-time using audacity




Install Audacity and set your microphone input to VoiceMeeter Aux Output, then route your browser through the Steam Virtual I/O of your choice. Optionally, if you want to record new samples without them being piped to VoiceMeeter Aux Output, you can set Audacity's mic input to the Steam Virtual I/O you assigned the browser to.


























And there you go! Your signal chain should look something like this:

You are now ready to start adding samples and sounds to your Soundboard! Have fun! Don't go too crazy, but have fun ;)

Inevitably when janking stuff like this together, you get the dreaded crackling/screeching/distorted audio. There are many things that can cause this and I'm just gonna sort of run through them all machine-gun like.

-Try making sure your audio devices are all set to the same bitrate and sample rate (i.e 16bit 44.1khz) in the sound control panel. A mismatch can result in distorted, broken audio since the devices are encoding audio at different - and thus incompatible - bitrates/sample rates.

-Try disabling and enabling your audio devices. Sometimes that works.

-Try turning your computer off and on again. Yes, I'm serious. No, this isn't a bit. Do it. Do it now. Start>power button>restart. Go on. We're all waiting.

-Try setting the devices in VoiceMeeter to MME instead of WDM or KS. In my experience, WDM seems to require a large buffer to work correctly. Your experience can and probably will be different, cause my computer is unique and seems to do its own thing sometimes.

-Try restarting VoiceMeeter's audio engine.

-If you're using an external audio interface as your A1, unplug it and plug it back in. Make sure to shut down VoiceMeeter first though, or it'll freeze and crash.

-Just sort of fiddle with it. Go full on fiddle diddler. As Grant from CollegeHumor so eloquently put it, "Your computer fixes itself by magic sometimes, right? Well your car's the same way."

And so is your soundboard, random PULSAR player. So is your soundboard.