Features

Every scene is a button: Combat, Chase, Tavern, Travel, Dread, Festival, Court. Press the one that's happening.

• The music changes and keeps going until you press the next scene. Ambience sits on its own row, rain, fire, a crowd, and stays lit under whatever plays next.
• Tracks crossfade, and none repeats until the scene has been through the rest.
• A door slams when you ask for it. One-shot effects sit beside the scenes.
• Pause holds everything where it is. Stop ends it all, effects included.

Nothing to wire, nothing to mix mid-story.

• Game Masters running a tabletop RPG, in person or online. The soundtrack is live: the fight starts, you press Combat and keep narrating; the party gets back to town and you press Tavern. Your phone works as the remote from the head of the table, and an Elgato Stream Deck turns the scenes into physical keys.
• Streamers and actual-play creators who need music, ambience and effects during a live or recorded session without a second person on sound. Bardio plays through the PC like any other audio source, so OBS and Discord capture it as it is. Every bundled track is CC BY or CC0, and Copy credits on the Packs page gives you the credit list for the description.
• Event organisers putting atmosphere into a room: a convention table, a games night, a live or immersive game. Set the presets up beforehand, run them from a phone while you walk the floor, and play through whatever speaker the venue has. It needs no internet, so a hall with no signal is fine.

I made Bardio for a friend who wanted music for their game and couldn't find anything good at a reasonable price. It ships finished. Install it this evening and run a session with it.

• A Classic Fantasy library: 81 music tracks, four and a half hours of it, with 123 ambience loops and 179 sound effects, already sorted into scenes.
• Nothing to set up: the library installs with the app, and there's no account.
• Not playing fantasy? Bring your own music and Bardio sorts it the same way.

The box works as it comes; the rest of this page is optional.

Drop in a folder. Bardio listens to each track and sorts it into a scene.

• Anything it isn't sure about waits in a short review list with its best guess.
• Glance down the list and confirm the lot at once, or skip the ones you'd rather place yourself.
• It works on files on your machine; a streaming playlist can't come across.

When a track turns up in the wrong scene, tap the tag beside its name and pick where it belongs. Bardio moves it, and the scene you're in plays on; you never leave the board.

A preset is a scene with its ambience and its volumes, saved together. Press Tavern night and the tavern music starts with the fire and the crowd under it, at the levels you set. Press Boss fight and the whole room changes at once.

• Seven come in the box, from Tavern night to Storm on the road.
• Save your own from what's playing: set a room up by hand, tap the + at the end of the row and name it.
• Press it again to stop its music and its ambience, the same as a scene.

Scenes are yours to name, and the board is yours to arrange.

• Add a scene for the thing your table keeps needing. Give it an example or two, and Bardio finds the tracks in your library that sound like them; new music sorts into it by ear from then on.
• Order the buttons the way you reach for them.
• One look per campaign: each keeps its own board, its own scenes, its own presets and one of eight colour themes, from parchment to eldritch, with an accent colour of your own if you like.

So is a tablet or a laptop: anything on the same Wi-Fi with a browser. Pair it once, by scanning the code or typing six digits, and from then on you change the scene from your seat without reaching for the keyboard. If you want, anyone at the table can do the same.

Got an Elgato Stream Deck? The Bardio plugin ships inside the app. Install it from Bardio's settings, drag a scene onto a key, and the scene is a physical button: press it mid-sentence without looking at a screen. Presets, sound effects, Pause and Stop get keys too. It needs Elgato's own Stream Deck app on the same PC.

Bardio plays through one device at a time, and you choose which. Out of the box that's the PC. Pair a phone and the Mixer's Playing on list offers it: tap the phone's name and the sound comes out of that phone instead, or out of whatever it's connected to, a Bluetooth speaker, a soundbar, a pair of headphones. The PC goes quiet and keeps the controls, and so does every other device at the table.

• The laptop at your end, the sound in the middle of the table. A phone on a Bluetooth speaker by the map plays the room; your screen stays quiet beside your notes.
• Move the game and the sound moves with the phone. Out to the garden or the next room, within reach of the same Wi-Fi, the speaker goes in a pocket and you still run everything from any device.
• One mix, wherever it plays. Volumes, Pause and the scene follow across every device, and effects fire where the sound is.
• Nothing to buy. It's the same app on the other device, playing.

If you run the game over Discord, share the Bardio window in the call with sound on; everyone who clicks Watch Stream hears the soundtrack. Your mic stays your mic, and the music skips Discord's voice filtering, so it arrives sounding the way it does at your desk.

• It's Discord's own screen share, so there's nothing extra to install.
• Each player sets the music's volume for themselves, with the stream's slider.
• Using a VTT? Keep the voice call in Discord beside it and share Bardio into it.

• No subscription. You pay once, and the copy you install is yours.
• Nothing phones home. No account, no server, no internet connection needed. The optional extra packs download when you ask for them; nothing else touches the network.
• Your library is files you keep, on your own hard drive.
• It keeps working if we vanished tomorrow.