Settings

Press V or run /ssvc to open "Voice settings". If first-run setup hasn't been completed yet, "Welcome to voice" opens instead; it has the same contents and is finished with "Get started".

Settings is a centered dialog (capped at 600 × 360 GUI units). The tabs run down a rail on the left, each with an icon and its full name; on a panel too narrow to afford the names the rail keeps the icons and moves the names into tooltips. At the foot of the rail, under a divider, Documentation opens this site in your browser. The connection state (Connected / Connecting / Offline) sits at the top right behind a coloured light, and the footer carries the microphone and incoming-voice switches on the left and "Done" on the right, which closes and saves. Related settings are grouped into titled cards. On smaller screens the settings scroll while the rail and the footer stay in place.

If the connection has failed, a red banner across the top of the settings says so and how to retry — that being the reason every other setting on the screen is doing nothing.

GeneralCopy Anchor Link

Two icon buttons sit in the footer, on every tab rather than only this one:

• Microphone — toggles the microphone. It stays off while incoming voice is disabled.
• Incoming voice — toggles hearing other players (deafen). Turning it off also mutes your microphone; turning it back on restores the previous mute state.

The tab is two cards — Talking and Listening — with a link to the voice groups menu underneath them, showing the group you are in without having to open it. Settings marked └ are indented under the device row above them: the input channel and microphone volume belong to the microphone, and the two playback volumes belong to the output device.

If your saved device isn't detected, it is shown as "(not detected)" and the system default is used for now.

AdvancedCopy Anchor Link

"Automatic settings work well for most players." Switching to this tab starts the microphone test automatically; leaving the tab stops it.

Microphone testCopy Anchor Link

Audio processingCopy Anchor Link

• Advanced Noise Cancellation is available on Windows x64, Linux x64 and macOS Apple Silicon; other platforms show "Not available on this platform". Until the model is downloaded, or if it fails mid-session, RNNoise is used instead.
• Echo cancellation only uses SocketSVC's own playback as its reference, not Minecraft game or system audio. If a processed frame ends up louder than the original mic signal, the original samples are kept and the filter relearns, so switching speakers/headphones does not require toggling it off and on. During simultaneous local and remote speech, some real echo may pass through temporarily while it relearns.
• Automatic voice detection keeps the last 60 ms before speech starts and sends it with the speech, and keeps transmitting for 300 ms after speech ends, so word onsets and endings aren't clipped. Releasing push-to-talk stops immediately.

The bottom of the tab shows the current processing status, for example "Noise suppression active / Echo delay 120 ms" or "Learning echo".

SurroundingsCopy Anchor Link

What the world does to other players' voices. All three are off by default, and each changes only what you hear.

• Muffle, never mute. Fully muffled is a voice with its highs taken off at a little over half the volume: clearly behind something, never gone. The first block in the way does most of it; three or more is as muffled as it gets. Anything with a collision shape counts, so glass and fences dull a voice too.
• Worked out by your client, from the world it already has. Your client raycasts from your eyes to each player within 96 blocks a few times a second. The server does nothing extra, and nobody else is affected by your choice. A voice whose source your client cannot see as a player — too far away to be tracked, or a plugin's speaker — is not muffled by walls.
• Under water muffles every voice while your head is under water, and a speaker's voice while theirs is.
• Room echo feels out the space around you with rays in every direction: the more of it is wall and ceiling, the more it echoes, and the bigger it is, the longer the echo rings. A forest or a village street is too open to echo. Leaving a cave lets the last echo ring out rather than cutting it.
• Hear your own echo feeds what you transmit into the same room, so you hear the echo of your own voice — the echo only, never your voice played back. It follows exactly what others hear: nothing while you are muted or not holding push-to-talk. Echo cancellation takes it back out of your microphone, so it cannot feed back.
• These apply to player voices and other players' soundboard clips. Cinema screens and other addon sound are not affected.
• With Sound Physics Remastered installed, walls, water and room echo are taken from its settings instead: its block absorption sets the muffling, its underwater filter the underwater muffle, its reverb gain the echo and its Simple Voice Chat hear self option whether you hear your own echo, with its defaults matching 100% here. If Sound Physics Remastered is switched off, or its Simple Voice Chat integration option (its switch for voice chat effects) is off, voices get no effects. Turn Follow Sound Physics Remastered off to use the settings above instead.

InstrumentCopy Anchor Link

Non-microphone inputs, played into voice chat alongside talking rather than instead of it. The instrument is a separate stream, so your own playing does not stop when you speak, and muting your microphone does not silence it.

Each source has its own switch and they work together — a drum pattern under a MIDI keyboard, with a guitar on a line-in over the top. Everything switched on is mixed into the one instrument stream.

Each switch is named after its source, and that source's own settings appear indented under it once it is on — the same nesting the General tab uses for a device and its settings. Settings that apply to everything at once are collected under All sources at the bottom, and appear only once at least one source is on.

Every row on the tab, and every control in the drum and looper editors, explains itself on hover. If a control's name is not enough, rest the pointer on it rather than guessing.

A source that cannot start does not take the others down with it: an unplugged MIDI keyboard leaves the drum machine playing and says why the keyboard is silent. When several are loud at once the mix is ridden down rather than clipped.

Drum machineCopy Anchor Link

A step sequencer with eight synthesised drums — kick, snare, closed and open hi-hat, clap, tom, rim and cymbal. Nothing to install: the sounds are made from oscillators and noise, in the manner of an analogue drum machine, so it works with no sample pack or SoundFont.

The hats and cymbal are built from a bank of six detuned square waves rather than from noise, which is what makes them ring like metal instead of hissing, and the kick and tom sweep in pitch as they decay. Levels across the kit are set so a pattern sits together without any one drum having to be turned down.

Switch on Drum machine, then Edit pattern to open the grid, which fills the window. Click a square to place a hit, or drag across several to fill a run in one go — the first square you press decides whether the drag is placing or clearing. Click a drum's name to audition it.

Columns are shaded at two depths: lightly where a beat starts, more strongly where a bar does — and how many beats make a bar is Beats per bar, so a waltz reads as three. The numbers along the top count the beats. The longest pattern is 32 × 8 = 256 columns, so the squares shrink to fit the window and, when they can shrink no further, the grid scrolls sideways — drag the bar under it, or use the wheel or a trackpad over the grid. The drum names stay put while it scrolls.

Making the grid shorter hides the steps past its new end rather than deleting them, so shortening and lengthening it again brings the pattern back. A pattern saved on a shorter grid repeats across a longer one, so an existing beat keeps sounding the way it did.

The pattern is saved with your settings and keeps playing while you do other things, so you can lay down a loop and then talk, play a guitar on another input, or walk around over the top of it.

LooperCopy Anchor Link

Switch on Looper, then Open looper for an editor that fills the window. It sits at the end of the chain, so what it records is everything above it — a guitar on the line-in, a MIDI keyboard, the drum machine, or all three at once. What you play passes straight through, the way a looper pedal works.

Each of the 16 tracks is one line: its number, five buttons, what it is doing in words, the waveform, and its volume. The track you last touched is highlighted — that is the one the keyboard acts on.

A looper is played with your hands on an instrument, so the number keys matter more than the buttons — they are how every hardware looper arms a track. The buttons stay for reading the state and for reaching a track that is not the one you are on.

The five buttons are:

Each track draws the waveform of what is recorded on it, brightening as the playhead passes and with a line at the playhead itself, so you can see where the hits are and whether a layer landed in time — not just how far through the loop you are. 3× at its end is how many layers deep the track is, and the short bar on the right is its volume. An empty track says press ● to record. A track waiting on the count says counting in and shows an amber record light, not the red one — nothing is being recorded yet, and the take only begins when the count ends. Stop all calls a pending count off.

An overdub gets no count-in: it joins a loop that is already running and already in time.

Metronome, in this editor, is a click on every beat at the drum machine's tempo — it is what you play along to while recording, which is why it lives here. It is heard only by you: the click is rendered separately from the instrument mix and reaches your speakers through the local monitor, so it is never encoded and never sent to anyone else. Switching it on starts the count on beat one rather than wherever it had got to, and the first beat of each bar is higher and louder, because a click that does not say where the bar starts tells you the tempo but not the time.

Tracks keep the length they were recorded at, and all of them share one clock, so tracks of different lengths stay in phase with each other. Play all, Stop all and Clear all act on everything at once.

The controls above stay put and only the track list scrolls, so the transport is still there when you have scrolled down to track 14 with a take running. A single track cannot be longer than 40 seconds.

Custom drum samplesCopy Anchor Link

The built-in generator exists so the drum machine works with nothing installed, not because oscillators are the goal. To use recorded sounds instead, put a folder of samples in config/socketsvc/drumkits/ and pick it with Drum kit.

Name each file after the drum it is — WAV, MP3, OGG, Opus, FLAC or AIFF:

config/socketsvc/drumkits/
  my kit/
    kick.wav
    snare.wav
    closed hat.wav
    open hat.wav
    clap.wav
    tom.wav
    rim.wav
    cymbal.wav

Matching ignores case, spaces and punctuation, and accepts the abbreviations sample packs usually ship with, so BD.WAV, 909 Kick Drum 01.wav and kick.wav all land on the kick. SideStick is the rim and crash is the cymbal. Open and closed are read wherever they appear in the name, so Open HH, HH Open, Hat Open and OH are all the open hat, and a bare hat or HH is the closed one. Two-letter abbreviations (BD, SD, HH, OH, CH, CP, CY) have to be words of their own, so a China.wav or Vocal Chop.wav sitting in the folder is left alone rather than taking a drum's place. If two files name the same drum, the more specific name wins — kick.wav over bd.wav.

The Drum kit setting lists anything it did not use, and why: a name that matches no drum, a second file for a drum already taken, or a file it could not read. If a drum is still playing the built-in sound, that line says which case it is.

Any drum without a file keeps its synthesised sound, so a folder holding nothing but a kick is a valid kit, and the setting lists which drums that applies to — if your clap is still the built-in one, its file name matched no drum. A file that will not decode costs that one drum rather than the whole kit. Adding, replacing or renaming a file in a folder you have already selected takes effect on its own; there is no need to pick the kit again. Samples at any sample rate are converted, so the 44.1 kHz files most packs ship work as they are, and a closed hat still cuts off an open one.

Playing from a DAW (FL Studio, Ableton, Reaper...)Copy Anchor Link

Switch on Line in, send the DAW's output to a virtual audio cable, then pick that cable as the input device. Everything the DAW makes — its own synths, any VST3 you own, a guitar through its effects chain — arrives in voice chat.

To keep hearing the DAW yourself, either use a multi-output device that feeds both the cable and your headphones, or leave Hear yourself on in SocketSVC.

The device's own format is used as-is — stereo is downmixed and any sample rate is converted to what the voice pipeline needs, so a cable left at 44.1 kHz stereo works without reconfiguring it.

Line in suits anything that already makes its own sound: an electric guitar through an audio interface, a keyboard's audio output, or a virtual cable carrying a soft-synth you already use.

On an interface with more than one socket, set the instrument's own Input channel to the one the instrument is plugged into. It is separate from the microphone's channel on the General tab, so a guitar in input 2 and a microphone in input 1 can share one interface without either picking up the other. Changing it reopens the device, which briefly cuts the instrument.

Hear yourself is on by default for both kinds. MIDI has no other sound at all, so without it you would be playing in silence. A line-in is only self-monitoring if the hardware it is plugged into happens to do that — many interfaces do not — so it starts on there too rather than leaving you wondering whether anything is working. Turn it off if you are already hearing the instrument some other way, otherwise you will hear it twice.

MIDI listens to a MIDI keyboard or guitar and makes the sound itself. Note velocity, the sustain pedal and pitch bend all work. It sounds like a synthesiser, not a sampled piano: see Why the built-in synth is oscillators.

The "Play instrument" key has no default binding — set one under Controls if you want push-to-play.

Sound banks (SoundFont)Copy Anchor Link

Drop .sf2 or .sf3 files into config/socketsvc/soundfonts and pick one under Sound bank. Notes then play that bank's recorded instruments — a real piano, guitar or strings — instead of the built-in oscillators, and Bank preset chooses which of the bank's instruments to play.

Sound bank, Bank preset, MIDI device and Input device each open a searchable list rather than stepping one entry per click. Type to filter: every word has to appear somewhere in the name, in any order, so grand piano and piano grand both find the same preset. That matters most for Bank preset — a General MIDI bank has well over a hundred presets, which is not a list to click through. Free General MIDI banks are widely available; .sf3 is the same format with Ogg-compressed samples, which is how a full GM bank fits in tens of megabytes instead of hundreds.

Loading happens in the background, since a large bank takes a moment; the status line says so, and the oscillators keep playing until it is ready. Velocity, the sustain pedal and pitch bend work either way.

Drum kits work: a one-shot sample stops at its own end, and a preset that splits its instruments across the keyboard is honoured, so each key plays only what belongs to it.

Not every SoundFont feature is implemented: samples, tuning, loop points and volume envelopes are, while modulators, filters, LFOs, chorus and reverb are not. Those shape a sound; the sample, its pitch, its loop and its envelope are the sound.

Your own recordings as an instrumentCopy Anchor Link

A SoundFont is a real sampled instrument, but you have to find one, and making one is a project in itself. To play your own recordings instead, put a folder of them in the same config/socketsvc/soundfonts directory — it appears under Sound bank alongside the .sf2 files.

Name each file after the note it was recorded at, in WAV, MP3, OGG, Opus, FLAC or AIFF:

config/socketsvc/soundfonts/
  my piano/
    A0.wav
    C2.wav
    C4.wav
    A4.wav

C4.wav, C#4.wav, Db4.wav and the MIDI number 60.wav all work, and the note is read from the end of the name, so Grand Piano A4.wav and piano-A3.wav are fine too. A file whose name says nothing about pitch is assumed to be middle C, so a single unnamed recording still plays.

A note with no file of its own is played from the nearest recording, resampled by the pitch ratio. One file therefore covers the whole keyboard, and each one you add narrows the stretch around it — four or five across the range is usually enough to stop it sounding obviously transposed.

Stretching costs quality, and the cost is not symmetrical. Notes near a recording are clean. Notes played well above one lose top end and pick up a faint ringing, because the recording's own high frequencies fold back as the playback speeds up — audible from roughly an octave and a half up, and plain by two octaves. Adding a recording higher in the range is the fix; nothing downstream can recover what folding destroys.

Why the built-in synth is oscillatorsCopy Anchor Link

With no bank loaded, SocketSVC synthesises notes itself, and it sounds like a synthesiser rather than a real instrument. The JDK does ship a General MIDI soundbank, but every route to it — rendering it to audio, or reading its samples — lives in a package the Java platform does not export, and a mod cannot change another player's launcher to open it. That is why sound banks exist as an option, and why the fallback is oscillators.

VST3 pluginsCopy Anchor Link

Not supported, and not planned to be hosted inside SocketSVC. VST3 has no Java binding, so it would need a native host built per platform; its SDK is GPLv3 or a signed Steinberg agreement; and a third-party plugin running in the game's own process can crash Minecraft outright, which is why audio software sandboxes plugins in a separate process.

The supported route is Line in: run the plugin in whatever host you already use, send that host's output to a virtual audio cable, and pick the cable as the instrument device. Every plugin you own works, with nothing able to take the game down with it.

If MIDI makes no soundCopy Anchor Link

• "No MIDI input device found" in the status line means nothing on the machine can send notes. Only hardware MIDI ports count: the JDK's built-in "Real Time Sequencer" is not one, despite looking like an input, and is deliberately not offered.
• Turning the instrument on works at the title screen too, and monitors locally, so you can check a keyboard before joining a server. Nothing is transmitted until you are connected.
• If you hear yourself but nobody else does, check you are connected and that the server allows socketsvc.soundboard.
• If the device will not open at all, it offers no capture format SocketSVC can read; try setting the cable to 16-bit stereo at 44.1 or 48 kHz in its own control panel.
• If the sound stutters or cuts in and out while monitoring, that was a bug in the monitor mixer up to this version: a tick where no audio happened to be ready skipped the write entirely and let the output device run dry. It now writes silence instead, so the device is never starved, and the monitor's own buffer is capped at 160 ms so playing a note is heard promptly.
• If you hear nothing at all, check Hear yourself is on — with a line-in it is the difference between silence and sound on any interface that does not monitor by itself.

Requirements and limitsCopy Anchor Link

• The server must support the soundboard channel, which is how a second concurrent stream reaches other players. On a server too old for it the instrument falls back to riding your microphone stream, which means it stops being independent of it.
• The socketsvc.soundboard permission covers the instrument too, and listeners' soundboard volume applies to it.
• Up to 24 notes can sound at once; beyond that the quietest is reused.

InterfaceCopy Anchor Link

DiagnosticsCopy Anchor Link

Not things you see, but things you turn on to work out what is wrong — which is why they are a card of their own rather than the bottom of Interface.

Player volumeCopy Anchor Link

"Only changes what you hear. 0% mutes a player."

• Speakers — when the server defines spatial speakers, they are listed at the top with one 0–200% slider each, saved per server and speaker ID.
• Players — one row per player connected to voice, with their skin head and a speaking level. Players who spoke most recently are listed first; players who never spoke are listed last.
  • Voice volume 0–200% (default 100%). 0% silences only that player, 100% is normal, 200% increases gain subject to the shared peak limiter.
  • Click the player head or their name to toggle mute; unmuting restores the last non-zero volume. Anywhere left of the slider works, so it is an easy target in a long list.

Each player's soundboard audio is no longer given its own row here — use Players' soundboard on the General tab instead.

Volumes are saved and survive reconnects and game restarts. When not connected the tab shows "Connect to voice to adjust other players' volume."; on an older server without roster support it shows "Waiting for players. Older servers do not support this list."

Headphone spatial audioCopy Anchor Link

Positioned voices are processed with MIT KEMAR head-related transfer functions (HRTFs) so headphone users can tell whether a voice comes from in front or behind. There is nothing to configure, but note the limits:

• The protocol only supplies horizontal X/Z offsets, so you get front/back and left/right localization, not elevation or head-pitch cues.
• Generic HRTFs cannot guarantee that sound feels "outside your head" for every listener and headphone.
• Use stereo headphones with other surround processing disabled for the best result.

Status iconsCopy Anchor Link

Icon	Custom icon name	Where it appears
	Mic - Unmuted	Microphone button, on state; HUD: you are speaking
	Mic - Muted	Microphone button, off state; HUD: your mic is muted
	Audio - On	Incoming voice button, on state; nameplate: that player is speaking
	Audio - Deafened	Incoming voice button, off state; HUD: you are deafened; nameplate: that player is deafened
	Disconnected	HUD: voice is not connected; nameplate: that player is not connected to voice
	Soundboard playing	Nameplate: that player's soundboard is playing, shown after any other status icon

HUDCopy Anchor Link

The HUD sits unframed at the bottom left of the screen and shows one state, in this priority:

1. Voice not connected (shows "Connecting..." text while connecting, and "Reconnecting..." while an automatic retry is pending)
2. Deafened
3. Microphone muted
4. Speaking

Nothing is shown while connected, unmuted and idle. On a server that doesn't run SocketSVC, the disconnected icon shows straight away — there is nothing to connect to, so it doesn't say "Connecting..." first. On a server where Simple Voice Chat or Plasmo Voice has connected instead, nothing is shown, leaving the corner to that mod's icon. The HUD is also hidden by F1, by turning off "Speaking indicator", and while any screen is open.

NameplatesCopy Anchor Link

Icons are drawn to the right of another player's name, never inside it, so toggling an icon never shifts the nametag. Priority is disconnected, deafened, speaking; otherwise nothing is shown. A soundboard-playing icon is appended after it.

• "Speaking" reflects audio actually played back on your client.
• An unknown roster or your own disconnection does not falsely mark everyone offline.
• Deafened status is synchronized through a separately negotiated extension; update both ends for it.
• TAB list and chat names are not modified.
• Turn off all nameplate icons under Advanced → Interface → Player nameplate voice icons.

Custom icon packsCopy Anchor Link

The Customize tab lets you build icon packs from your own images to replace the six status icons above. Any picture works; it is auto-cropped to square and resized.

In the pack gallery, left click a tile to apply it and right click to edit it. "Default by DragonL" can only be applied, not edited.

Export and importCopy Anchor Link

• Export... saves the active pack as a zip in the icon folder (named <name>-<timestamp>.zip) and opens that folder. Icons that weren't customized are filled in with the defaults, so the zip is self-contained.
• Import... picks a zip from the icon folder and imports it as a new pack (never overwriting an existing one, and not activated automatically). If the zip has no recognized icons, it reports "That zip didn't contain any recognized icons".

Zip entries are recognized by icon file name: pack.json (the name), speak.png, mute.png, mic.png, defend.png, disconnected.png, soundboard.png. An animated icon is a folder with the same name containing anim.json plus 0.png, 1.png, and so on. The file names are historical internal names and don't necessarily describe the artwork — see Status icons for the mapping (for example, mic.png is "Audio - On").

FlashbackCopy Anchor Link

This tab appears when Flashback is installed. Flashback's own voice setting only shows up in its menu when Simple Voice Chat is installed, so these settings are the real switches for SocketSVC.

The server's actual values aren't sent to the client, so set these to match the server. "Recorded players" below lists the voice sources heard in the current replay, each with its own 0–200% volume, saved separately from live player volumes.

The recording itself is built into the Fabric/Quilt JAR on some Minecraft versions only — see Compatibility.

Config fileCopy Anchor Link

All client settings are stored in config/socketsvc.json in the game directory and written when a settings screen closes. The following option has no UI and can only be changed by editing the file: