Pocket Bard App 9+

Excellent music composition, multiple different themes and excellent sound effects that you can control to emphasis a crit or creep out your players. Adds a new dimension to tabletop RPG’s (not just DnD). Also makes great background sound to help get into a more creative mindset when writing adventures, short stories or novels. Probably would work great with other forms of art also, but i can’t speak to that. Easy interface and seamless transitions between musical scores. Crazy impressed, especially after meeting the team of musicians and developers at a con and seeing how much effort and sweat went into building this app.
Edit: make sure to download the fantasy starter pack after you download the app. They are both free and well worth the minimal effort required.
As a side note, I hope the one guy who left a 1 star review gets a job soon and stops taking his financial woes out on a team that is offering an excellent FREE product.

Hi Kraaahfgth! Thank you so much for leaving this review. I wasn't at the most recent con, but it's so awesome that our team left you with such a positive impression! We love that you're finding Pocket Bard to be an intuitive and powerful audio tool to weave through out your day. We didn't initially create Pocket Bard to be used outside of gaming, but our community has taught us so much in such a short amount of time, and we couldn't be more excited to see how users like you embrace what we've made. As always, please let us know if you have any suggestions or feedback at support@pocketbard.app Happy gaming and we hope you enjoy what we have planned next!

First the good - the app is well built, fun and intuitive to use, and the sounds are great! I look forward to more soundscapes being made, and more sound packs being released. I even cannot wait to see how the devs increase functionality within individual packs, like scene specific sound categories and what not. Having the same basic categories, like ambiance and weather, across all scenes make a ton of sense and works fantastic.

$7 a month is a steep price, however. I would certainly pay money for a pro version were it a one time charge. I would even enthusiastically buy sound packs piecemeal to gain permanently full access to them. $7 for one sound pack would be an easy impulse buy that I would only slightly regret, but a monthly subscription model just does not feel like the fit for a service like this. I will continue to use the app, but implore the devs to look at other monetization methods, as I feel like a subscription basis will be a consistent turn off for many potential customers.

Also, devs just HAVE to get working on a tavern soundscape, how else am I supposed to start my adventures?!

Thanks so much for your feedback! We're happy to hear that you're having fun using the app, and we're always stoked to hear that it's easy to pick up and use.

Regarding the subscription - we're actively working to increase the value by adding more songs, sounds, and overall bang for your buck! We've thought a lot about our pricing model, and currently see the subscription as the only viable way to get the app to be where we want it long term while offering an expanding library of free content. If you're interested in our reasoning, we have a detailed explanation on our Discord!

And your ears must be ringing - our team is hard at work scoring and recording our Tavern Expansion :) that's our top content priority right now.

-Nick

I love this app so let me get that out of the way. I think the idea behind it is amazing. However it has some bugs. For one the explosion one shot doesn’t work on any of the scenes for me except the original scene it comes with. I purchased the subscription so I have all the other ones. The other problem is I noticed a lot of scenes like the city and town have whisper for ambiance. Bit whisper sounds like demonic whispering. It doesn’t fit. However the tavern has the crowd sound. Which fits way better. I think the devs need to go through and replace the whispers with the crowd effect cause it makes way more sense. Unfortunately you can use the crowd effect in other scenes cause then it changes everything when you switch. Also maybe devs should come up with a way for us to create our own scenes with the sounds already available. That would be amazing and add a whole new option for customization. Cause I notice there’s lots of scenes with one shot assets I like but the explore or location sounds don’t fit.

Hey Tyco0621, thanks so much for this review! We'd like to apologize for your experience and our lack of clarity around what users are able to do within Pocket Bard. Specifically around your feedback concerning the Ambiences and OneShots. By going to the Play tab, tapping a location, and tapping the Edit button in the upper right corner, you are actually able to customize which Ambient and OneShot effects are available within the scene. You can take effects you don't need away, add additional effects, or even tap the "pin" icon so that these effects will be available across all locations. No ambience is locked behind any specific location other than the "location" ambience.

Concerning the explosion OneShot not working across locations, we believe that we have implemented an in-app fix for this issue. Once you confirm that you are running the latest version of Pocket Bard (2.2.3) please navigate to the Content Page. If you don't see the "update" button in the upper right corner of the screen, please pull down on that page to refresh the contents. You may see the update button appear or you will see a message that says "all content is up to date." We believe that this is the root of the problem.

Once you have ensured that all content is up to date and you are still experiencing this bug, please navigate to the play page, tap the edit button in the upper right corner, go to One-Shots, remove explosion, and then press and hold on the explosion button to delete the effect. Once the effect has been fully deleted, attempt to download it again and see if the issue persists.

I hope you find this information helpful! Thank you so much for your support and for taking the time to let us know what we can do to improve Pocket Bard! We are in it for the long haul and will do everything possible to make our app better every day. If you'd like to follow up about this or submit any additional feedback, our door is always open. Please reach out at any time to support@pocketbard.app - Thanks again!