Thunderboard

A tray-resident soundboard for Discord. Global hotkeys, per-sound pitch progressions, profiles. Fluent dark, sized to sit next to PowerToys.

Tauri 2 + Svelte 5 + rodio.

What it does

• Global hotkeys. Fire clips with the window closed, from inside a game.
• Cut-previous. A new hotkey stops whatever was playing. No layering.
• Clicking fires for real. The speaker button on a row, and a pad in gallery view, go out to the call exactly like the hotkey does. Only the offset slider auditions on your monitor alone, because dragging it should not blast the call on every step. This matters most for folder profiles, whose clips arrive unbound — clicking is the only way to fire them.
• Pitch mod. A toggle key. While it is on, repeatedly hitting the same clip's hotkey walks its playback rate — down by a fixed step each press, or to a fresh random rate each press, configured per sound. Rate is pitch (rodio resamples), so down also means slower. The walk resets when you hit a different clip or toggle pitch mod off, and nothing else resets it. Step's min/max are the walk's floor and ceiling, so they are wide by default; switching a clip to Random starts at a gentle ±0.20 instead, because Random re-rolls on every press and the walk's full span turns a clip into a lottery.
• Two outputs. One bus goes to the virtual cable Discord listens to, the other to your headphones so you hear what you fired.
• Profiles. Independent sets of sounds and bindings; switch from the header or with a hotkey.
• Folder profiles. Point an empty profile at a folder and every clip inside it, at any depth, becomes a row — no importing, no copying. It re-scans when you open the window and on the sync button, and rows keep their hotkey, volume, offset and position across syncs. Dropping files on a folder profile puts them in that folder. Deleting a row leaves the file, so the next sync brings it back; delete the file to be rid of it. Synced clips arrive with no hotkey: there are more clips in a folder than there are free combos, so bind the handful you want and click the rest.
• List or gallery. The same profile as a dense list of rows, or as a grid of pads you click to fire. Toggle in the header; the choice sticks. In list view rows drag vertically to reorder, with a line showing where the row will land.
• Drag and drop. Drop audio files on the window, or use the + picker. Either way they are copied into the app's own directory (or into the profile's folder, if it has one), so the board survives you moving the originals.
• Per-clip offset. Downloaded clips often open with a beat of silence, which reads as lag when the hotkey is the punchline. A wide slider trims it; letting go of the slider plays the clip so you can hear whether you got it.
• Tray-resident. Left-click the tray icon to open. The minimize button puts it back; the close button quits and asks first, because quitting kills your hotkeys.

Windows audio setup

Thunderboard plays into a device. Getting that device into Discord alongside your actual voice is a Windows configuration job, not an app feature — the app deliberately does not try to own your microphone.

1. Install VB-CABLE.
2. Thunderboard → Settings: Output device CABLE Input, Monitor device your headphones.
3. Discord → Voice & Video: Input device CABLE Output.
4. Windows Sound Control Panel → Recording → your mic → Listen tab: tick Listen to this device, set Playback through this device to CABLE Input. Your voice and the soundboard now both land in the cable.
5. Discord → Voice & Video → turn OFF Noise Suppression (Krisp), Echo Cancellation and Automatic Gain Control. Discord classifies pitched clips as noise and will gate or mangle them otherwise. This is the single most common cause of "my soundboard sounds terrible".

Use headphones, not speakers. With speakers, your mic picks up the soundboard and feeds it back into the cable.

Step 4 adds ~30ms to your outgoing voice. If that bothers you, replace steps 4 with VoiceMeeter Banana and point Discord at its virtual output instead.

Hotkeys that are actually free

Registration goes through Win32 RegisterHotKey, so a combo another app owns simply fails — the row turns amber when that happens.

These banks assume no numpad — laptop keyboard, nothing needing Fn unless noted. A global hotkey outranks the focused app, so binding one that an app already uses takes it away from that app everywhere; that is why the list is almost entirely Ctrl+Shift.

Bank	Slots	Conflicts
F13–F24	12	None anywhere, and single-press so it survives fullscreen games. No keyboard sends them — remap CapsLock, Menu or Right-Alt onto one with PowerToys Keyboard Manager, or use a macropad. Best option if you're willing to remap.
Ctrl+Shift+1 … 0	10	None. Ctrl+<digit> is browser tabs; adding Shift is free.
Ctrl+Shift+ - = [ ] \ ; ' , . /	10	None. The app's own defaults live here.
Ctrl+Alt+1 … 0	10	None on US layouts. Ctrl+Alt is AltGr on international layouts — skip if you ever type on one.
Ctrl+Shift+F1 … F12	12	None, but needs Fn on laptops whose F-row defaults to media keys.
Ctrl+Shift+Insert/Home/End/PgUp/PgDn, ScrollLock, Pause	7	None. ScrollLock and Pause do nothing on modern Windows, so they work bare.

Defaults: pitch mod Ctrl+Shift+', stop all Ctrl+Shift+;.

config.json carries a version. Installing a build whose version is newer throws away every binding the old one handed out and reissues them from Ctrl+Shift+1 onward — the numpad-era defaults were unreachable on a laptop, so leaving them in place would have left dead keys. It runs once, then never again.

Avoid: anything Win+… (the shell and PowerToys own most of it), Alt+Space (PowerToys Run), Ctrl+Shift+Q/T/N/W/V (these register fine and then break your browser), and Ctrl+Shift+` (VS Code's new terminal). The app greys these out with the reason when you try to bind one.

Punctuation hotkeys and your keyboard layout

This one cost the most to find, because the shortcut registered successfully and then did nothing, forever.

KeyboardEvent.code names a physical key using US labels. The key that types | on a Latin American Spanish keyboard is in the US backquote position, so capture stores it as Backquote — which is correct, and also why the chip used to read ` for a key whose cap says |. global_hotkey then turns that name into a virtual key with a hard-coded US table: Backquote → 0xC0. But on that layout the physical key reports 0xDC, and 0xC0 is the ñ key. So RegisterHotKey happily bound a key the user never pressed.

Letters and digits are immune — their virtual keys are identical on every Latin layout. Only punctuation moves, which is why sound hotkeys on Ctrl+Shift+1 worked while every attempt at a stop key failed.

retarget() now resolves the physical key through MapVirtualKeyEx against the active layout and hands global_hotkey the name whose US mapping lands on the real virtual key. It is the identity on a US layout. Labels go through navigator.keyboard.getLayoutMap(), so a chip shows the keycap you actually press.

Two consequences worth knowing. The layout is read at registration, so switching input language and then changing any setting re-binds against the new one. And a bare punctuation key bound globally is swallowed everywhere — bind | to stop and you cannot type | in Discord either.

Two things that look like dead buttons

Both of these cost an evening to find, so they are written down.

Settings would not open at all if Windows reported two output devices with the same name — the device list is a keyed {#each}, and Svelte throws on a duplicate key, which kills the whole component before it paints. Nothing is logged where you would see it. output_devices() now sorts and dedups, which is correct anyway: every device here is matched by substring, so a repeated name was never a distinct choice.

Reordering uses pointer events, not HTML5 drag-and-drop. The window has Tauri's dragDropEnabled on for dropping audio files in, and on Windows that hands the OS drop target to Tauri, leaving in-page dragstart/dragover unreliable. Rows are dragged by hand: a 4px threshold separates a drag from a click, the trailing click is swallowed so it does not also expand the row, and row midpoints are measured once per drag because the drop line is absolutely positioned and nothing reflows mid-gesture.

Why re-binding hops to the main thread

tauri-plugin-global-shortcut holds its registry mutex for the whole of a hotkey callback, and re-registering wants that same mutex. So re-binding from inside a callback — or from a worker thread while a key is being pressed — is a circular wait that hangs the main thread and takes every global hotkey down with it until you restart. rebind() therefore queues the work as a main-thread task, which keeps the mutex single-threaded. Don't call apply() directly.

Known limits

• Fullscreen-exclusive games swallow RegisterHotKey. Run the game borderless windowed. Fixing this properly means a low-level keyboard hook, which is a keylogger-shaped thing to install; not doing it by default.
• Pitching down lengthens a clip. At 0.35× a 4s clip runs 11s. Cut-previous and the stop hotkey are how you get out of it.
• Deleting a sound removes the entry, not the file — another profile may point at it. The folder icon in the header opens the sounds folder for hand-pruning.
• A folder profile re-scans on open and on demand, not on a watcher. Files added to the folder while the window is already open need the sync button.
• The NSIS installer is unsigned, so SmartScreen will warn on first run.

Develop

pnpm install
pnpm tauri dev
pnpm tauri build      # -> src-tauri/target/release/bundle/nsis
cd src-tauri && cargo test   # pitch walk, config migration, folder sync

Config and clips live in %APPDATA%\com.davidmg.thunderboard\ (config.json, sounds\).