Narrator's Jukebox 5.1.0: an important update about YouTube, please read before your next session (Patreon)

Hey everyone. This is one of those posts I would rather not be writing, so I will keep it honest and short, and then we can all get back to our tables.

What happened

YouTube has a rule for anyone who embeds their videos: the video has to stay visible on screen while it plays. Narrator's Jukebox never did that. From the very first version, we tucked the YouTube player away where nobody could see it, and used only the sound. It felt clever. It was also against the rules, and I honestly did not know that until this week.

Someone in the community read our code, noticed it, and reported it. Foundry then asked us to fix it before the package could be listed again, and they were right to. I want to be clear about one thing: this was our mistake, not yours, and not the person's who reported it. They did the right thing.

So 5.1.0 is the fix. The real one, not a cosmetic one.

What changes when you update

YouTube music now comes with a small video window. When you play a YouTube track, a little player appears in the corner of the screen, on yours and on every player's. You can drag it by its top bar to wherever it bothers you least, it comes in three sizes (module settings, per person), and it goes away on its own when the music stops. It cannot be hidden or minimized while the video plays, because that is exactly the rule we were breaking. If your players keep anime openings as their character themes, congratulations, the themes now come with the opening. I am sorry, and also a little bit not.

Ambience and Soundboard no longer play YouTube at all. Each of those would need its own visible video, and YouTube also allows only one playing video per page, so there was no honest way to keep them. Your YouTube ambience and sound effects are not deleted. They stay in your library, greyed out, with a note, waiting for you to give them a local file.

Fixing your library takes about a minute

We knew this part would hurt the most, so we tried to make it painless.

Open Ambience (or Soundboard). A banner at the top tells you how many entries are YouTube videos. "Show them" lists only those.

Hover one of the greyed cards. There is a new button on it: swap for a local file.

Click it, pick a file, done. The entry keeps its name, its tags, its folder, its place in every playlist and preset. Only the file behind it changes.

Presets that still have YouTube layers in them load the local ones and tell you how many were skipped, so nothing explodes mid-session.

If you would rather have no video on anyone's screen, there is a new world setting, Allow YouTube videos, that turns YouTube off entirely. Playlists then skip the YouTube tracks and say so.

You will see a notice once when you open a world after updating. It says pretty much what this post says, and it has a button so it never bothers you again.

Also in this one

The fixes we had ready as 5.0.3 and never got to ship are all in here: soundboard volume that actually means what it says, Stop winning the race against a cue that is still loading, players who joined before clicking anything getting their broadcast loops back, and a few more. Full list in the changelog.

Sorry, and one more thing

If this costs you an evening of clicking through your library, I am sorry. If it costs you a session where the video is in the way, I am sorry twice. I know some of you built whole soundscapes on YouTube, and I built mine there too. This change was not our idea, but the mistake that made it necessary was ours, and I would rather fix it properly than pretend.

One more thing: this change touched a lot of what we had built for SessionFlow, since it leans on the Jukebox for scene ambience and soundboard cues. I am doing a checking pass right now, and as soon as I feel confident, later today, an important bug-fix update for SessionFlow goes out as well.

Thank you for sticking around, for telling us when something is wrong. That is how this thing gets better.

GabúWand & Widgets