Sound Control Board

What Is Sound Control Board?

Sound Control Board provides an advanced extension to the Audio Modulation systems for native Unreal Engine. It includes a unique front end user interface for organization and control of all Sound Control Bus Mixes for your project as well as helper functions and menus to make the design and flow of mixes easier for the user to control.

Who Is It For?

Any designer/developer that frequently makes use of the Audio Modulation features and/or would like to utilize these features to their full capabilities. Control Board makes it easy to keep all of your mixes in one place and control your buses at runtime. Handy features like auto loading profiles make AB testing quick and efficient.

Summary of Features

Custom Control Board asset for organizing all Sound Control Bus Mixes of your project
8 unique widgets for all built in Sound Control Parameter types, as well as support for custom types
Drag and Drop bus functionality
Functions for quickly designing and building Sound Control Bus Mixes and controlling at runtime
Color coding of mixes for clean organization and categorization
Color coding sort function
Wrappers for the Audio Modulation Activate/Deactivate Mix and Save/Load Profile functions
Auto Load option on profile change for quick A/B testing
Quickly snap to any mix in your list
Customization settings to personalize your own Control Board!

Creation and Navigation

Sound Control Board is an extension of the Audio Modulation plugin. Therefore it can be found in the same section as the Audio Modulation assets.
To create a new Sound Control Board asset:

Right Click in the Content Browser
Navigate to Audio->Modulation
Select Control Board

Upon opening a new Control Board asset there will be two tabs, the Mixes tab and the BoardZone tab.
We will discuss each in detail separately.

These tabs can also be opened/closed by selecting them from the Windows tab above.

The Mixes Tab

The Mixes tab is where you will organize all of the Sound Control Bus Mixes that your Control Board contains. It consists of two sections:

Boards - Contains functions that operate on the entire Control Board asset
Board Data - An array of FBoardData Structures, each containing a Sound Control Bus Mix, and a color for organization

The order of the Board Data array directly corresponds to the order of the layouts that will appear in the Board Zone. The Board Data array has the same functionality as other array objects in the editor. Items can be added, removed, or rearranged.

Activate/Deactivate All - Activates or Deactivates every Sound Control Bus Mix in your list
Sort By Color - Organizes all the mixes based on their assigned color value (4)
Set, Clear, or Delete an array item (of type Sound Control Bus Mix)
Color Value - Used to color code mixes for different categories to your liking. Double click the color light to set a color for this specific array item. This also updates the Mix Title color in the BoardZone for this mix.
Snap - Snaps the selected mix to view in the BoardZone

The Board Zone Tab

When a mix (SoundControlBusMix) is added to the BoardData array it will then appear in the Board Zone. A Board will automatically populate with appropriate widgets for every Mix Stage in the mix. If it is an empty or null mix then an empty board will still be spawned.

You can think of an individual board as a front end user interface for the Sound Control Bus Mix object.

The following shows the correlation between the Mix Stages and a layout in the BoardZone

The Board Zone has 4 primary sections with a toolbar up top.

These 4 sections are all scrollable with the mouse wheel or contain a scroll bar. Each section has designated widgets that are dependent on the Sound Control Parameter associated with it's mix stage.

Knob Section - Contains widgets for Pan, and TimeOfDay
Horizontal Sliders - Contains all user created parameters, as well as Pitch, BitDepth, and SampleRate
Vertical Sliders - Contains all Volume parameters
Visualizers - Contains visualizer widgets for HighPassFilter, LowPassFilter, and LowRateFrequency parameters

The toolbar on top contains various information about the mix as well as helper functions and actions

Name of SoundControlBusMix object associated with this board. Color is associated with the Color Value in it's BoardData
Profile Widget - Can be used to easily increment, decrement, or set manually the profile of the current mix
Actions Button - Contains various actions for the selected mix

Board Features

Quick Actions

Right clicking on an empty area on then board will open the Quick Actions menu. The Quick Actions menu provides several helper functions to assist in construction of your mix.

Add New - Creates a new Sound Control Bus from the selected Sound Control Parameter. The bus is automatically added to the mix and appears on the board.

Add Existing - User selectes an existing Sound Control Bus to add to the mix.

Activate/Deactivate Mix - Wrappers for the Audio Modulation functions of the same name. Activate or Deactivate the current Sound Control Bus Mix.

Actions Button

The Actions Button is located in the top right corner of every board and provides additional functions for the mix.

Activate Mix - Activates current mix (Same as Quick Actions option)
Deactivate Mix - Deactivates current mix (Same as Quick Actions option)
Solo Mix - Solo the current mix (wrapper for the Audio Modulation Solo Mix function)

Profile Actions provides the Save/Load functions for the Audio Modulation profiles, as well as a toggle option Auto Load On Profile Change

When set, Auto Load On Profile Change will automatically load the profile switched to with the Profile widget (below). There is no need to switch to a new profile and then select Load as Control Board will handle this for you.

It is worth noting that because the profile is automatically loaded, it is advised that this be usually turned off unless doing A/B testing or otherwise need to load profiles quickly. If you make adjustments to your mix and are wanting to save to a different profile, switching while this is turned on will load the next profile, effectively erasing your settings before you can save them.

Profile Widget

The Profile widget can be used to quickly swap between profiles. Use the arrows to increment/decrement your profile index, or double click the index to set it manually.

The BoardZone itself is also scrollable. You can scroll between all of the mixes in your BoardData and use their cooresponding board.

As noted in the Mixes Tab section, use the Snap(5) tool to automatically scroll a specific board into view.

Drag and Drop

Buses can also be added to a board via Drag and Drop.
Simply drag one or multiple Sound Control Buses from the Content Browser into the area of a board you'd like to add them to, and they will be added to the mix and displayed.

Widgets

There are 8 unique widgets provided with Control Board, one for every default Sound Control Parameter

Volume

Can be set by dragging the slider head up or down

Pan

Set by holding with the Left Mouse Button and dragging left or right

HighPass

Set by clicking or dragging the visualizer to the appropriate frequency

LowPass

Set by clicking or dragging the visualizer to the appropriate frequency

LowRateFrequency

Also provides a BPM conversion

Set by clicking or dragging the visualizer to the appropriate frequency

TimeOfDay

Set by holding with the Left Mouse Button and dragging left or right

Default

This is the default widget used for all user created parameters as well as Pitch and BitDepth

Set by dragging the slider head left or right

SampleRate

Set by selecting Sample Rate from a drop down list

Sliders and Visualizers can also be set by double clicking their current value and setting it manually

The LowRateFrequency widget can be set by either the frequency, or the BPM.

Values are clamped to the default max and min for each parameter.

Right clicking any widget will allow you to remove it via Remove Bus option

Customization

Customization settings are provided in the Project Settings section to configure custom colors for your Control Board and visualizers.

Navigate to Project Settings -> Plugins -> Control Board

Board Color - The background color of the board zones
Title Color - The color of the Control Board title graphic
Text Color - Color of text for all widgets
Auto Select Text Color (Recommended) - Automatically sets text color for best readability on top of Board Color
Widgets
- Visualizer Draw Color - Color of main interactive draw of visualizers
- Visualizer Center Line Color - Color of center line in LowRateFrequency widget
- Visualizer Background Color - Color of background for all visualizer widgets

For questions or about Sound Control Board or to report an issue please email help.avelion114@gmail.com

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