Soundboard

The soundboard is a grid of pads. Press one and it plays: to your headset, to a virtual mic so other people hear it, to both, or to whatever set of outputs you chose for that pad.

It ships with vrOS as a first-party extension, pre-granted for audio out and file import, and revocable like any other. See How extensions work.

Reach it from the SND slot on the Dash rail. The standalone soundboard overlay is still there too, so you can pin it in your space like any other panel.

Edit mode

EDIT MODE turns the pad grid into an editor. DONE turns it back.

• Each pad grows a six-dot handle. Drag with the laser to reorder. The slot you are about to drop into is drawn solid, so you always know where the pad is going.
• Selecting a pad opens the editor rail on the right: name, category, colour, file, split, routing, delete.
• Colours are a curated category set, checked for colour-blind legibility. There is no free colour picker, deliberately, because the colours have to stay distinguishable to everyone.
• NEW PAD adds one to the end.
• DELETE PAD is a two-step confirm in place, the same rule every destructive action in vrOS follows.

Split pads

SPLIT PAD turns one pad into two halves, A and B. The editor rail swaps to A and B sub-tabs, and each half gets its own file and its own routing. Use it when two sounds belong on one tile: an intro and an outro, a call and its response.

Choosing a sound

REPLACE on a pad opens the sound picker. It has two tabs.

Library is the catalog of sounds vrOS already keeps. Search it, filter by category, and preview any row before you commit. Preview plays to your headset only, at a reduced level. It never goes out to a virtual mic or a stream, so you can audition mid-session without broadcasting it.

Rows carry their own context: IN USE tells you a sound is already on a pad and which one, and CURRENT marks whatever the pad you are editing has now. The footer counts what the library holds and how much disk it is using.

Browse PC is a vrOS-native file browser: breadcrumb and up, laser-sized rows, non-audio files dimmed rather than hidden. WAV, MP3, OGG, and FLAC.

It is native rather than the operating system’s file dialog because an OS dialog opens on your desktop, out of reach and often behind your head. The desktop app may use the real OS dialog instead. Both paths funnel into the same import.

What importing does

Three steps, always in this order:

1. Copy. The library takes its own copy of the file.
2. Normalize to -14 LUFS. Pad volume is then predictable no matter where the sound came from.
3. Hash-dedupe. Importing the same audio twice does not give you two library entries.

The consequence is the useful part: originals are never referenced. Move, rename, or delete the file you imported and your pad keeps working. A soundboard that breaks because you tidied your Downloads folder is not a soundboard.

Normalizing sets a common baseline. Per-pad and per-output trim lives in the routing editor, not the import.

Routing

Every pad has a mix. The routing editor is one row per output, and each row carries:

• an enable toggle
• a plain-language line saying who hears it
• the device that output currently maps to
• a gain slider
• a live level meter, with a peak-hold tick

The meter repaints only while audio is actually flowing. A silent soundboard costs nothing to leave open.

Active routes are marked, so a glance tells you whether the pad you are about to press goes out to other people or stays in your ears.

Category defaults and overrides

A pad starts on its category’s default mix. Change the mix on a pad and it overrides that default, for that pad only. SAVE AS DEFAULT promotes the current mix to the category default, which is how you set up a whole category once instead of pad by pad.

Devices

Outputs are roles, not device names. Which physical device each role uses is set once in Settings → Audio routing, and every pad inherits that mapping. A role whose device has gone missing shows an amber state there rather than failing silently. See Settings.

The “others hear it” role needs a virtual audio cable installed on your system. vrOS routes audio to the device you point it at; it does not create the device.

Bindings

The soundboard registers commands, and pads can be reached from a controller. Assign a command to one of the pre-declared extension actions in Settings → Extensions, then bind that action in SteamVR under Controller Bindings. vrOS never invents gestures for you. See Input.