Narrator's Jukebox 5.0 is here: The Maestro Update (Patreon)

You raise the baton, the orchestra obeys

Some updates are a list of new features. This one is a promise: when you conduct your table's soundscape, it obeys. Completely, instantly, on every screen at the table.

Narrator's Jukebox 5.0, The Maestro Update, is available today for W&W Adventurer and W&W Arcane Circle members.

Why this one has a name

Every Narrator's Jukebox update so far has been a number. This is the first one that earned a name, and the name explains the whole release: the Maestro is you.

Almost everything in here began as a message from this community. A bug report with screenshots taken mid-session. A reproduction so precise it felt like a gift. A feature request that kept coming back until it convinced us. We shaped the update like a small symphony, in movements, because that is honestly how it felt to build it.

So here it is, movement by movement.

Movement I: Command

When you press stop, silence should fall. Everywhere. Instantly. That sounds obvious, and it was not always true, and that bothered us more than we can say.

5.0 brings The Big Red Button: a proper Stop All, on the main window and on Mini Mode. One click and everything goes quiet for everyone: music, ambience layers, soundboard cues, even scheduled random sounds. We tested it in live multi-client sessions until we trusted it completely.

And while we were in there, we hunted down the oldest ghosts in the module:

The phantom YouTube track is gone. If you switched from a YouTube track to a local file and then paused, resumed or seeked, the old audio could come back on top of your music. This one haunted some of you for months and it was entirely our fault: we faded the old player out but never truly let it go. Every channel now has exactly one owner, and cancelled means cancelled.

Pianissimo means pianissimo. An ambience layer you authored at 20% could reach a player's ears at 80% and only correct itself later. Creation and volume now travel together in a single message, so layers are born at exactly the volume you wrote.

Sync that tells the truth. Remote commands now report honestly when they could not be applied, and Debug Mode logs carry enough detail that the next mystery can be solved from a timeline instead of a séance.

Movement II: The Tour

The most requested feature since 4.2, by far: your library can finally travel with you.

Export your whole library (music, ambience, soundboard, playlists, folders, mood boards, presets) to a single file, and import it into any other world. Merge is careful with what you already have: duplicates are recognized instead of copied, favorites are kept, and playlists stay pointing at the right tracks. Replace asks you to be very sure first, and offers a one-click backup right next to that question.

And there is a second door into the Jukebox now: Import Foundry Playlists reads Foundry's native playlists and welcomes them in one click, names, order and repeat flags preserved, duplicates detected. Years of curated playlists, home at last. Run it again later and it only picks up what is new.

Movement III: The Archive

A library with hundreds of tracks deserves real organization, so this movement is all about care:

Nested folders. Folders inside folders, up to three levels deep, in Music, Ambience and Soundboard. Build Combat, then Boss Fights, then Dragons, and drag tracks or whole folders wherever they belong.

Folder sorting. Alphabetical or arranged by hand with little nudge arrows. Each library remembers its own choice, and switching to alphabetical never loses your manual arrangement.

Batch editing. Select several tracks and edit them together: thumbnail, tags, folder. One dialog, one save.

And the small change that makes folders feel yours: a real icon picker. The old fixed icon grids are gone. In their place, a searchable picker with 290 hand-tagged icons. Type dragon, get dragons.

Movement IV: The Stage

The whole main window was rebuilt on ApplicationV2, Foundry's modern application framework. Invisible when it works, and it is the reason this exists now:

A native pop-out window. On Foundry v14, the Jukebox can detach into its own real window. Drag it to your second monitor, keep Foundry clean on the main one. All the audio machinery stays in the main window, so the music never skips a beat while you do it.

The stage also got faster everywhere. We went through every clickable thing in the app hunting one enemy: the click that works but does not answer. Track rows light up the instant you press play, even while a YouTube track is still loading. Soundboard cues pulse while they spin up. Loop toggles flip immediately. Long batch edits show a working cursor. If something fails to load, the window is honest about it and steps back.

And the dialogs learned to forgive. Mistyping a URL used to close the window and throw away everything you had typed, which was awful, and we are sorry it took us this long to notice how awful. Now the dialog stays open, shows the error under the exact field, and lets you fix it. A stray click outside an edit window no longer eats your changes either.

The Spotify feel, turned up

The look got some love too. The Inter typeface now ships with the module (under the SIL Open Font License), so the identity no longer depends on what anyone's machine has installed. Playlist cards learned a little hover dance. And the library header now picks up the color of your cover art, the way a certain green music app colors its headers.

The volume labels finally explain how the mix works, on every surface: the GM authors the mix, and every listener keeps their own ears.

For the macro authors

A small love letter to everyone who scripts their sessions: 5.0 ships with The Official Songbook, nine supported copy-paste macros built only on the public API, right inside the module as SONGBOOK.md. Play a track by name, fire a mood, load an ambience preset, set volumes, and a Stop All that actually works on every client.

If you were using the community Stop All macro, this one is for you. It will keep working across updates, we promise, because now there is a test suite making sure of it.

(For module authors: playAmbienceLayer now accepts a volume atomically, exportLibrary and importLibrary are scriptable, and api.open() finally does what its name says. It had been quietly broken since the day it shipped. Our apologies to anyone who tried it.)

Before you update, one honest note

5.0 raises the minimum Foundry version to v13. If your world is still on v11 or v12, please stay on the 4.2 line for now: it keeps working and remains available, and Foundry will keep serving you the right version. Everyone on v13 or v14 will see the update inside Foundry as usual, no manual steps needed.

New around here? Narrator's Jukebox is part of Foundry's official premium content program: link your Patreon to your Foundry account once (foundryvtt.com, Edit Profile tab), then install it from Foundry's module browser like any other module. Available to W&W Adventurer and W&W Arcane Circle members.

Module page: https://foundryvtt.com/packages/narrator-jukebox

The next movement

The baton rests, but the orchestra is already tuning. The next named update is sketched: The Composer, about shaping the music itself. Per-track fades, smarter cue variations, and the music trimming some of you have been asking about. No dates yet. We want it to deserve its name.

Thank you

This update exists because of you. Because you reported the weird, hard-to-pin-down audio moments and stayed patient while we chased them. Because you asked for folders inside folders enough times that we finally listened properly. Because you trusted us with your tables.

Over the next days we will be replying to each of you personally on Discord, because many of these entries have someone's name on them in our changelog, and we have not forgotten whose.

Thank you for being here. Thank you for believing in Wand & Widgets. And thank you for letting us score your stories.

With love, from one storyteller to another. ❤️

Gabú Wand & Widgets