Kenku Discord Bot tutorial to use Syrinscape Online Player, Local and Web Sounds!

[Amerisun]

I have a new method for an old tutorial I created for using Syrinscape and Fantasy Grounds using a Discord Bot for sweet stereo sound. If you combine this with an extension called AudioOverseer, so when someone attacks or crits it sends one shot noises through, it's such a great experience for the players and DM alike.

This should also work when the integration comes out in Fantasy Grounds directly to Syrinscape if it is still using the online player functionality. Guess we will see when this functionality hits. This is especially useful as I find most players even when given the URL will not open it or close it on accident and forget about the sounds, but they are always in Discord with you on audio. (if you use Discord of course :-) )

This new tutorial has methods that both uses the Web App functionality player as well as the full app inside of Kenku, or using an external web browser as well as the Syrinscape Fantasy Player by using Virtual Audio Cable for the more technical use cases. So this tutorial now covers all the major methods for using Kenku FM to push audio through to Discord.

Tutorial is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATdnf-KqbKg

The major benefits from the other methods:


Doesn't require VoiceMeeter, simplifying the approach.
Doesn't require Discord Audio Pipe making the installation easy and not as problematic.
Discord Bot has stereo full sound quality, it really sounds best this way.
Can run it on the same machine you run Fantasy Grounds.
Can run the Player on one machine and control the Web App on another machine.
Can run on the same machine you use Discord on with your players.


Depending on which method you choose, the latency can be higher or lower, but I give you all the possiblities and you can choose which one works best for you!

Remember also you can go into Kenku settings and use a little more CPU and power if you set the "Streaming Mode" setting to "Low Latency".

Let me know if you have any feedback or what your experience with it is.

Any comments or suggestions are welcome, hope this helps someone out!

[bmos]

Nice! Kenku is such a great tool.

[maugrim8866]

Very Nice
Great tutorial, thank you for taking the time to create it.

[Valyar]

Kenku indeed is the best tool at the moment. The two drawback I have at the moment are:
- Bot drops for no obvious reason and i have to manually rejoin it.
- I have to reduce the sound of almost all sound sources to a minimum, otherwise the ears will explode.

[Valyar]

Syrinscape released their web player, which means you no longer need the "Online" or the offline player installed. I tried it, looks neat as I can use everything from browser, but when I use Kenku with the Syrinscape Web player I see serious performance degradation and the sound is being interrupted from time to time in very annoying way. With the Online/Offline players, no issue at all.

It seems Kenku is having issue and it is not my rig, which is damn powerful workstation. Does anyone have this issue with Kenku + Syrinscape Web player?

[Amerisun]

Valyar,
How much RAM do you have and what type of CPU? On my main PC I notice it plays flawless, but I have a Virtual Machine I do all my tutorials on that only has 8 gigs of ram. It runs horrible on that machine, it's a bit less powerful though, and it seems Kenku uses a lot of resources unless you have a lot of CPU and Ram (on Windows).

PC that runs fine:
32 Gigs Ram
AMD Ryzen 9 3900x 12 cores boost to 4.6 ghz
RTX 2080 Graphics
Runs at 9% CPU and 9% RAM with just Kenku running. Plays perfectly.

PC That jitters quite a bit:
8 Gigs Ram
4 Core i7 4770S 3.1 Ghz.
Onboard Graphics (probably part of the problem also)
Runs at 45% CPU and 50% ram with just Kenku running.

Youtube is not as bad on the jitter computer, but still makes static noises.

[sirkerry]

Neat, does Kenku FM work on MacOS?

[Valyar]

Valyar,
How much RAM do you have and what type of CPU? On my main PC I notice it plays flawless, but I have a Virtual Machine I do all my tutorials on that only has 8 gigs of ram. It runs horrible on that machine, it's a bit less powerful though, and it seems Kenku uses a lot of resources unless you have a lot of CPU and Ram (on Windows).

The issue is only when Kenku FM is using the Syrinscape Web player via the internal Kenku browser and it does not matter if the system is loaded or not. The workstation is with NVIDIA Quadro, 32GB of RAM and I forgot what CPU was, but it is i7-9**** series and all runs from NVMe. With FGU + tons of other things open during session, it does not even sweat or page (except the regular paging that Windows is doing no matter what). It is just the stupid Electron framework, I guess this is getting the next Java.


Neat, does Kenku FM work on MacOS?
Yep, works like a charm! :)

[Amerisun]

Yeah unfortunately I think some hardware configurations, it struggles with. I have some more info, tried a bunch of things myself, and found a solution.

I was checking out the source code of Kenku FM and it looks like:

1. On Low Latency the frame duration in seconds is .02, on high performance it's .06. (more packets sent in the same amount of time on the low latency)

2. On Low Latency the bufferSize is 256, on high performance its 8192 (smaller buffer on low latency)

The Sample rate and number of channels with bit depth is below, be sure your input / output devices in Windows are setup properly depending on how you're using Kenku.

/** Sample rate of the audio context */
const SAMPLE_RATE = 48000;
/** Number of channels for the audio context */
const NUM_CHANNELS = 2;
/** 16 bit audio data */
const BIT_DEPTH = 16;

54192

Here are his code comments (excellent by the way) on the buffer size and frame duration:
/**
* Size in bytes of each frame of audio
* We stream audio to the main context as 16bit PCM data
* At 48KHz with a frame duration of 20ms (or 0.02s) and a stereo signal
* our `frameSize` is calculated by:
* `SAMPLE_RATE * frameDurationSeconds * NUM_CHANNELS / BYTES_PER_SAMPLE`
* or:
* `48000 * 0.02 * 2 / 2 = 960`
*/

So I messed with my audio settings for a bit, then I noticed just running Chrome full Syrinscape app runs at 37% CPU, where if I run it in Kenku it runs at 50-60%%. Kenku because of the streaming and it has a very small subset of Chromes functionality also might be playing some role here for it wanting to use up a lot more resources.


So I thought if I run Chrome through the Virtual Audio Cable, then setup Kenku to just stream / pipe the information from Chrome to Discord bot and it doesn't have to render or think / do any work other than streaming to Discord, it runs fine for me. Maybe you can try this out? Seems to solve the problem for me with no more static or jumping in the sound, I will be sure to add this information to my mega tutorial coming on how to use the Virtual Audio Cable in conjunction with Kenku. I had to make sure my Virtual Audio Cable was 48k, 16 bits and 2 channel, sounds pretty good from a very low power virtual machine. :-)

[Amerisun]

For anyone following this post, I just edited it and put up the ultimate tutorial with using Virtual Audio Cable also, which I mentioned in my last post to Valyar worked for me on a lower end machine to fix the audio breaking up, etc. Let me know if you have comments on this new video.