Pocket Bard is an intuitive music and

ambience app designed for Tabletop

Roleplaying Games, available on iOS
and Android (with a Desktop App
coming soon).
Pocket Bard’s straightforward user
interface makes planning and
executing your TTRPG sessions
quick, easy, and fun.
 Our features have been designed to provide
the most variety of music sound possible, with
the fewest number of controls. The best way
to understand each feature is to see it in
action. Here is what each of the
features include!

Explore, Combat, & Victories

Seamlessly transition between exploration
and combat music as needed, and trigger a
victorious stinger when the battle is complete
Intensity Slider
Change the energy level, but not vibe of the
music to set the intensity of a roleplay or
combat encounter to suit your unique story
Adaptive weather and Ambiance
Common effects (Rain, Campfire, Waves,
Whispers, etc.) that can also scale in intensity,
allowing you to move seamlessly from a
torrential downpour, to light rain with the drag
of a slider

Party EQ
A setting that cuts out some frequencies
where the human voice usually sits, to help
have your music and ambience louder, while
still being able to talk over it
We offer a wide variety of free and subscription content,
from general traditional fantasy, to otherworldly sci-fi.
Content packs can be downloaded in the content page.
Tap the ‘...’ on each content pack for a current list of
scenes.
We see all of our content as a work-in-progress. We are
continually raising our standards as we gain experience
and resources, and are constantly revisiting existing
content to bring it up to our current standards.

Fantasy Essentials
Always free. Whether you’re fighting a forest spirit,
or exploring a dungeon, this covers most of your
fantasy basics.

Sci-Fi Essentials
Take off on a galactic adventure, battle husks on a
derelict station, and uncover alien artifacts in our
expansive sci-fi universe. This is our largest
content pack in terms of hours of content, and our
audio team’s proudest achievement so far.

Horror
Explore the Dark and mysterious. Perfect for
adding a spooky atmosphere to your games.

Seafaring
Embark on a maritime journey to uncharted waters
and discover hidden treasures on the high seas.
Pocket Bard has a core team of 3 members, Alex, Chase, and Jason. Alex and Jason
grew up together as friends in a small town in upstate NY. Chase and Alex met,
became friends, then roommates, and then business partners in college.
We started developing Pocket Bard back in 2019, working on it off and on until 2021,
when we began to see the app come to life. The utility of the app became obvious
pretty quickly, and by mid-2021, we doubled down on our efforts.
April 2022 marked our open beta release for iOS & Android, and with amazing
feedback and support from the TTRPG community, we continued to iterate on and
develop the app throughout the year. That fall, we incorporated as Pocket Bard LLC.
The app’s full release was in February, 2023, at which point we encountered massive
issues that plagued the Android version with bugs, and slowed down development
drastically. A surge of 30,000 downloads from a viral TikTok video does wonders for
finding bugs in your app.
Less than a month after the release, we made the call to rebuild the app, nearly from
scratch, using a framework that would fix major issues, and develop faster in the long
run. During this time, Alex kept working on the Sci-fi pack, which, in May 2023,
became our first subscription content pack, and more than doubled the amount of
content we had in the app.
As we prepare to enter 2024, we move forward with a much more stable app, two
additional content packs, Seafaring, and Horror, and enough revenue to allow us to
speed up both our development and growth.
 Jason Chase Alex
Senior Software Developer Audio Director | Software Developer CEO | Composer | marketing Director
jason@pocketbard.app chase@pocketbard.app alex@pocketbard.app

Jason has a background in business and Chase has a background in music As a Berklee College of Music graduate
expertise as a full-stack software technology and a love for philosophy, trained in film and video game scoring,
engineer. Outside of his current focus on and tries to bring a unique perspective to Alex’s primary role with Pocket Bard was
building machine learning infrastructure his role at Pocket Bard. As the de-facto first as a composer. As the need for
for Salesforce's Al platform, Jason lead developer and Audio Lead, he has leadership arose, Alex took on the title
devotes his off-hours to Pocket Bard, the exciting opportunity to blend his and responsibilities of CEO to help
where he actively contributes to the expertise in technology and audio to facilitate teamwork, and move the
website, mobile app, and our back-end create captivating experiences. When business forward more quickly. These
systems. When he carves out some not immersed in coding and sound days Alex spends his time composing
leisure time, you'll find him at a poker design, he enjoys guiding his friends music, filing paperwork with the great
table, staring at candlesticks, pumping through epic adventures as the state of New Jersey, creating social
iron, or immersed in competitive gaming. forever-DM in his D&D group. He firmly media content, responding to Google
believes in persistent personal growth, Play store reviews, and creating press
and always striving to better ourselves kits. Alex sees himself as an eternal
and the world around us. student - always searching for new ways
to view goals, and better ways to
achieve them.
 How can I invite the Pocket Bard team onto
my stream or podcast?
Any business/collaborative inquiries should be sent
directly to alex@pocketbard.app

Will the free-for-life Fantasy Essentials ever be expanded?

Will there be a desktop app?
While it’s unlikely that we will add a significant number
of additional scenes to Fantasy Essentials, we will be Yes! Releasing a desktop app is one of our highest
cleaning up, improving, and adding more music to the priorities. We will most likely first be releasing a
already existing scenes. There are many scenes we desktop open beta version for everyone to try and
feel need more music, and some that are too varied in share their feedback. We’ll make sure to keep the
their tone. We will be revisiting all of this to improve community updated as we progress!
the Fantasy Essentials experience.

What music and app programs does the team use to make While I’m waiting for the desktop app, how can I use
Pocket Bard come to life? Pocket Bard in my online games?
The new build of Pocket Bard has been created using Check out our #desktop-temp-workarounds channel
.NET MAUI. For our Audio Middleware engine, we use on our Discord Server for how-tos and walkthroughs
WWise from Audiokinetic. about streaming Pocket Bard through Discord
and/or OBS.
Is Pocket Bard music royalty free? Can I use it on my stream?
Yes and yes! We love visiting streams that use the
Pocket Bard App for their music and ambiance. All we
ask is some reference to the app during your stream What are your design philosophies?
and/or as a part of your overlay or panels. Please see
our #media-kit channel on our Discord Server for Simplicity, adaptability, and seamlessness. Whenever
more information. Give us a shoutout in whatever way we make design decisions, we deeply consider
fits best for your production. We always appreciate a whether or not the feature or design fits our
tag on Social Media as well! philosophy.
 Why do you have a subscription model instead of one-time purchases?
Our team is focused on the long term for Pocket Bard. In 5 years, we
believe the app will look, sound, and feel very different than it does
today. We don’t believe that any feature in the app, or any given
content pack we release is ever “done.” Everything always has room for
improvement, and our vision is to create the best app and the best
content we possibly can. As our experience and resources grow, our
The app isn’t working optimally or as expected, standards for the app will continue to go up.
what should i do?
What this requires is a sustainable source of revenue that is not
1. Email support@pocketbard.app dependent on any singular aspect of the app, and here’s where the
2. Inform us via the #support-ticket function on problem with one-time purchases comes in. With a one-time purchase
discord our discord server model, there’s one financial incentive: release more content packs.
3. Leave a negative review (just kidding) There is no incentive to improve the content that has already been
released, to improve the app’s design, UI/UX, or add other important
features.
We’ve seen other apps with one-time purchases fail to improve long
Can I upload my own sounds and/or music? term, because, just to stay in business, they have to just keep releasing
new, increasingly obsolete content packs. We don’t want this to happen
No. The way the app is currently built would make to us.
this a very difficult feature to implement. However,
in the future we hope to have the resources needed We also want our free content, like Fantasy Essentials, to keep
to revisit this and create a system for user improving over time. The subscription allows those who can afford it
generated content. and want the extra content to contribute to the development of the app
in a way that benefits all our users, not just paying ones. We have a
variety of costs associated with hosting, distributing, and improving all
of the free content, and this lets us keep it free forever.

What content comes with the premium subscription? There’s also the accountability aspect - if our subscribers don’t like how
the app is progressing, or if a better product comes on the market, they
Located in the app the three dots at the top corner of can cancel at any time, as they should.
each pack will show you what is included with the
premium subscription for that pack! As of November We think a lot of people think of subscriptions as a way for businesses
2023, we currently have a Sci-fi, Seafaring, and to squeeze every last dollar out of their audience/users. This is not why
Horror pack available through the subscription. Each we have this model, and we're focused on creating a sustainable
of the packs include themed sound effects as well! product that serves the community and feels worth every penny!