1. In Dalamud Settings (/xlsettings in-game), go to the Experimental tab
2. Scroll down to Custom Plugin Repositories
3. Paste this in the empty URL box:

   https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Drovolon/Pulsar/repo/repo.json

4. Click the Plus Icon (+) to the right of that box
5. Click Save in the bottom right
6. In Dalamud Plugins (/xlplugins) go to All Plugins and search Pulsar
7. Click it. Then click Install.

• Make sure you're paired with them in Lightless, or in the same syncshell.
• Make sure you both have Sound Sync enabled.
• Make sure you're in the same area / that you can see each other in-game.
• Open /pulsar and they should appear in the list, if they're playing music. (By default, Auto-Play is enabled, which will play anyone nearby.)
• Adjust volume to whatever you'd like.

Yes. In the Listening tab, listeners can choose who they want to listen to. Listeners can only tune into one person's music at a time, though - no overlapping or mixing is supported.

Go to the Broadcasting tab in /pulsar. First, you need to pick the source for your music:

• Enable the "On Air" checkbox to begin truly broadcasting. Until you do that, you're just listening to a local preview.
• If you have music files on your PC, like .mp3, .flac, .ogg, you have two choices:
  1. Play from a folder: Select the folder containing your music. It will search all sub-folders too. Press play.
  2. Local media player (foobar2000 or DeaDBeeF): see below for further instructions.
• If you have music files loaded into a DAM mod like Thunderdome.exe, you can also select that in the Broadcast tab. Best-effort Penumbra group support exists too. Click the "All Files" dropdown to see if your mod is recognized. If not, "All Files" still works.

Yes. Pulsar runs as a plugin, but otherwise it's independent of the game. You can switch outfits, redraw yourself, move around, etc., without worrying about interrupting audio.

Pulsar has its own independent audio output. You can mute the game and still hear it. Volume is controlled in /pulsar. Or you can see the Pulsar output processes in the Windows volume mixer, like any other app.

Almost anything: .scd, .flac, .ogg, .opus, .mp3, .aiff, .wav, .aac, .m4a, .wma, .alac

Note: only .scd files containing Vorbis audio are supported. This excludes most "sound effect" .scd's.

Pulsar transcodes any file above 128 Kbps per-channel (that's 256 Kbps stereo) to Opus @ 80 Kbps per channel (160 Kbps stereo). Most lossless formats like .flac and .wav will therefore be automatically transcoded to Opus.

Each audio file must be 200 MiB or less. Assuming a 160 Kbps bitrate, this is just shy of 3 hours of audio.

Pulsar transcodes anything above 128 Kbps per-channel (that's 256 Kbps stereo) to Opus @ 80 Kbps per channel (160 Kbps stereo).

For large files, above 100 MiB, it can take a minute or more for it to process, upload, and be downloaded by other people. That is, when you click "Play" others might not hear it for a minute.

Note that Opus @ 64 Kbps per channel (128 Kbps stereo) is often considered "basically transparent" (hard to distinguish from lossless). At 128 Kbps, that's about 3.6 hours.

No. These services really do not want you to be able to download raw music files. They don't support it. Some projects like yt-dlp allow users to unofficially download music, but they're constantly fighting YouTube and other services. I don't have the time to invest in maintaining that, unfortunately.

But hey, on the flip side, once you have local music files, you can listen to them any time you want.

No. Listeners are synced to the broadcaster's position in the song. If you enter a venue where someone's playing music with Pulsar, you'll hear what they hear.

For broadcasters/DJs: this means a single audio file with a long, mixed set works just fine. If someone shows up 1 hour into the set, they'll start where you currently are - not at the beginning.

(This is basically true. Technically, Pulsar targets 5 seconds delay, allowing up to 15 seconds drift.)

Back in the elder days, before streaming services like Spotify and YouTube Music became popular, we had to rip files off CDs, vinyl, or tapes and store them locally. Local audio players are how you'd listen to the actual music in the files.

foobar2000 and DeaDBeeF are local audio players. They let you configure a "Music Library" and play audio files (songs) out of the library. When you put new music in the library folder(s), the audio player automatically adds it to your library. They allow you to organize multiple playlists, queue up songs for playback, view advanced information about files, search and filter the library, and manage file tags.

Pulsar's "play from folder" or "play from mod" features mean you don't need to worry about foobar2000 or DeaDBeeF, if you don't want to. But if you're interested in building large playlists of music, it will be a lot easier to manage in a local audio player.

If you're on Windows or macOS, I recommend foobar2000. If you're on Linux, probably DeaDBeeF.

foobar2000 can run on Linux under Wine, but it's not the best experience.

Out of the box, Pulsar cannot "talk to" either player. Pulsar requires the "beefweb" add-on to be installed.

• For foobar2000, install the foo_beefweb component.
• For DeaDBeef, install the beefweb component.

Technical details: beefweb is a simple component that exposes an API over localhost that Pulsar uses to figure out what files are playing and sync them. The broadcast tab also has simple controls for play, resume, stop, next, previous.

It's the volume control in foobar2000 or DeaDBeeF itself. When you use a local audio player, the audio player is what's playing audio - not Pulsar. Pulsar is just passively watching what's being played and sending it to be synced to other pairs.

No. Pulsar only syncs the file you play, and your position in the file.

Note, Pulsar does some sync preprocessing on the actual file it sends. It's transcoded if it's above the bitrate target. Additionally, ReplayGain is calculated and applied on the listener side, so listeners hear a consistent volume.

Unfortunately, no. To re-use the same sync infrastructure, Pulsar only operates on complete files. The file you're listening to and your position in the file are what's synced.

In the future, if sync services decide to add support for syncing streams, we could investigate the possibility of live mixing. But that's a very tricky problem, and out of scope for now...

In the meantime, you can make a pre-recorded set in a DAW and stream that. It may not be as fun as live mixing, but Pulsar can support multi-hour audio tracks.