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Music Playground

Instruments, effects and speakers are devices: ordinary scene objects that carry a device document (userData.device = {kind, params}) and a WebAudio subgraph the engine builds for them. Because a device is an object, it replicates, saves, undoes and duplicates like any other object - move it and it sounds from where it stands.

Devices come from modules

Core ships the engine, the clock, the cables and the interfaces; the instruments come from modules. Install Music Lab (a Piano, a Speaker, a Transport, a Drum machine, Sampler pads), Music FX (a mixer and five pedals), Music DJ (two decks and a crossfader) and Music Voice (a mic, a looper, a synth, a theremin) from the Modules manager; every player in a room needs the module a scene uses, and a scene asks for them by name when you load it. The sidebar's module rows add demo rigs; the viewport's Add menu lists every device kind under Add ▸ Devices (a module that groups its kinds gets its own row, Devices: Music Voice).

A scene remembers which module each device came from. Open one on a machine that lacks the module and a dialog, This scene uses modules, lists what is Not installed or Switched off and offers Install (n), Enable (n) or Load anyway — installing is per machine, so every player does it once. Load anyway keeps the devices as silent placeholders with their settings intact; they wake up the moment the module is installed.

Cables

Sound goes nowhere until it is cabled. Every device has plugs on its back; click an output plug, then an input plug (desktop, in Play mode or the editor) or drag with the trigger (VR) to run a cable. A speaker is the only thing that reaches the room: cable an instrument into a speaker, or through a pedal chain and a mixer into a speaker. Unplug it and it is silent. Cables are part of the scene - they replicate, undo, save with the scene, and a prefab of a rig brings its cables with it.

Knobs, the toolbox and the Inspector

Every device declares its parameters; they show as knobs in VR (grab and turn), in the Music toolbox and in the Inspector's Device section. A knob turn or a fader drag is one undo step, however long the gesture, and peers hear it move while you turn it.

The Music toolbox appears in the sidebar under Modules as soon as any device kind is registered (also on the viewport menu under Module tools). It has three parts:

  • Device — pick any device in the scene and edit its parameters.
  • Presets — Save as… the current settings under a name, Apply one later, ✕ deletes. Presets are kept per device kind in your browser; applying one is what replicates.
  • Mixer — one row per device with a level meter, a fader, M (mute) and S (solo). A device with no level parameter and no outgoing cable shows a dash. Mute and solo are yours alone; the level they set is shared.

The Inspector's Device section shows the same parameters for the selection. With several devices selected it says Applies to N selected devices and a change fans across all of them as one undo step; a device that lacks that parameter is skipped. Open in Music toolbox jumps across — presets and the mixer live there.

The shared transport

One transport per scene - tempo, play/stop, swing, bars per loop - shared by every peer. The Transport device is its face; the drum machine, the looper and anything scheduled on it run from the same beat, so every peer's kick lands on the same beat and a late joiner starts on the next one. Nothing is streamed during playback: each peer schedules the same pattern from the same document through a look-ahead scheduler.

Automation from the flow graph

The Music group of flow nodes drives devices from graphs: Device Param writes a parameter every frame (an LFO on a filter), Device Level reads a live level, Transport reads the beat, and Note Trigger plays a note per pulse - so an On Impact sensor can fire a drum, or a Time node can sweep a cutoff. The rule behind all of it: anything a graph computes or the transport schedules must be a pure function of its inputs, because every peer computes it alone; an impure callback desyncs silently, with no error anywhere. See Flow Nodes for the full list.

Recording and samples

Record. The Mic device (Music Voice) captures the raw microphone — a separate capture from voice chat, with no noise suppression and never gated by push-to-talk — so the browser asks for the microphone once more the first time (Microphone permission denied if you refuse). Click the red button on the Mic to record a take of its Take length; click again to stop early. The take lands at the root of your Explorer as an audio item (mic-…), shared to every peer by content hash, with a Recorded … toast. A take is at most 120 s, and one that would exceed the sharing limit is refused before it starts.

Sample. Drag any audio item from the Explorer — a take, a file you imported, a one-shot from the Music Lab Kit pack — onto a sampler pad or a DJ deck to load it there; the toast names the pad it landed on. The Music Lab Kit pack in Packs is a CC0 starting library of drum one-shots and loops.

Bounce. The Looper records whatever is cabled into it, quantized to bar boundaries: click its red button and the take starts on the next bar and runs for Bars. The loop is an audio item like a take (loop-…), and because the looper references it by hash the Scene manifest carries it — an exported .tpscene bundles its samples along with everything else.

Building a room

The Jam Room starter — a piano into a speaker, a beat lab and a pedal chain into a mixer, all cabled — is authored for the Templates ▸ Games tab and offers to install Music Lab and Music FX when you load it (it is not in the published template feed yet, so the tab may not list it). Until then, add devices from the module rows and cable them yourself. Save any rig as a prefab - it comes back cabled - and drop it into the next scene.