Syrinscape Fantasy Player 9+

Awesome app. Love that each sound can be individually adjusted for volume to create custom moods. Also really cool to have a few free sound sets to give users a sample and a feel for the app. Great for GM’s who want to easily set the mood in their campaigns.

A couple things that would make this app more user friendly and would increase to 4 or even 5 stars.
1. The app doesn’t run in the background, so music and sounds stop when switching between other apps. Forcing me to use multiple devices to run games as I use other apps for notes, NPCs, initiative tracking etc.
2. The app has an extensive list of ALL the sound sets offered, and no way to filter that list. If you have purchased a sound set that appears at the bottom of the list you have to scroll all the way through every time. Would be great to have a filter to narrow the list making sets easier to find in game.
3. If using the app on your iPhone, make sure your silence switch is turned to the ringer position, otherwise you can’t hear anything, and turn on do not disturb mode. Admittedly this isn’t that big of a deal but took me awhile to figure out. I always have my phone on silent mode.

It’s easy to tell this app has … seniority, to use a polite term.

It faithfully recreates the look, feel, and functions of the web version, bringing the powerful sound triggering and mixing and editing capabilities to my phone. My soundsets and campaigns are synced well, and it’s impressive how much flexibility is packed into this small form factor.

But in the end, I can’t use it. Whatever system APIs they had to contort and bend to make all of this sound engineering go are either not modern or not standard.

Sound does not persist in the background; pulling down my control center or locking the screen unceremoniously cuts off whatever is playing. More crucially, sound is not routed in such a way to let iOS know anything is actually playing, meaning I can’t AirPlay my soundscapes to my TV / sound system, or cast them to my DM’s chromecast, or punt them over to a bluetooth speaker. And there’s no Apple TV app on offer, so in the end there’s no way to get these lovely noises to my speakers.

While running this system on a phone is impressive and neat, actually using it in a real world setting is not something I can do right now.

The app is interesting, but the ui and ux is terrible. This things needs a redesign and a way to register and manage your account from within the mobile app itself. The website is also not mobile friendly and totally breaks when viewing on a mobile device, making registration (and doing anything else on a mobile browser) nearly impossible. Having to jump through hoops to set up a subscription via the web app is also annoying. Let me manage my account and services all in one place!

Finally, the organization of the audio sound sets is bogus. I had to figure out that each sound set uses the abbreviation of the adventure module before the name of the sound set. This should be much better organized (maybe by category like the web app?) and the filter needs to be cleaned up. I can’t recommend this unless this app is entirely rebuilt using modern software architecture approaches. I shouldn’t have to jump between two different apps to use this product.