Make and Host Your Own Soundboard

One of the projects I work on is the audio archive site for the late Miami radio host Neil Rogers, which I discussed in the post My Tribute to Radio’s Neil Rogers.

Like other radio shows, one of the things Neil did during the show was play sound drops. Last year I created a free soundboard on the site Soundboard.com using some of the recovered drops. The site was fine, but it was a pain in ass to sort tracks. You had to drag each track by hand inside a small window. Not a problem if you have 10 tracks, but as the soundboard grew to over 150 drops, it became cumbersome. It could take 10 minutes to upload a single drop and drag it into alphabetical order.

Frustrated, I reached out to Soundboard.com and offered my suggestion to provide an option or setting that would sort tracks alphabetically. They ignored my request. I waited a month or two and reached out again repeating my request. They ignored me again. Why post your email address if you don’t want your users to contact you? Plus I consider my feedback valuable that would make their product better for all users. But I was ignored.

We live in great times. There is so much free information on the Internet to help us accomplish tasks. In the past being unsatisfied with a product or service was not a call to action. Today it is.

I finally had enough with Soundboard.com, so I decided to code my own. In one weekend, I taught myself just enough PHP, HTML5 and JQuery to not only create a worthy replacement, but a soundboard that is superior to theirs. I did get some help from my pal Joe Crawford on the JQuery. Thanks Joe!

My Simple Soundboard beats Soundboard.com in 4 ways.

1. Loads way faster. Their page takes 5 seconds to load. Mine under 1 second.
2. Tablet and Mobile friendly. Their soundboard isn’t.
3. Sorts alphabetically automatically. No more dragging individual track into order!
4. You can play multiple drops simultaneously. Not theirs.

The Neil Rogers Soundboard

I am making the code available on Github for anyone to use for free, no attribution necessary.

In the end I learned some cool coding techniques. Thank you for the frustration Soundboard.com. You are free to use my code as well.