How to Customize the Look of Amplitude Soundboard

Updated

Amplitude Soundboard lets you change its appearance in four ways: switch between Light and Dark themes, assign a custom background image to each sound clip on the main tile grid, set the tile size, and set the tile row and column count. These options are documented on the project's site, so you can reshape the main grid without touching the audio setup underneath.

Theme: Light or Dark

The application ships with two themes, and you choose between them rather than editing style files. This is the fastest change to make and affects the whole interface, so it's worth setting first if you care about how the grid reads against its background — a custom tile image that looks good on a dark background may not work as well on a light one.

Custom background images per clip

Each sound clip on the main tile grid can have its own background image. This is per-clip, not global, so a grid can mix labeled tiles, image tiles, and plain tiles. Practical points to plan around:

  • Prepare images at roughly the aspect ratio of your tiles, since a tile is a fixed shape and an image that doesn't match will be cropped or letterboxed.
  • Pick images that stay legible under whatever text or icon the tile shows. High-contrast, low-detail images work better than busy photos.
  • Because the image belongs to the clip, moving or reorganizing clips carries the image with them.

Tile size and grid dimensions

Two separate controls shape the grid: tile size, and the number of tile rows and columns.

Setting What it controls When to change it
Tile size How large each individual tile renders Fewer, larger targets for touch or quick clicking; smaller tiles to fit more on screen
Tile row and column count How many tiles the grid holds per screen Match the grid to your monitor or window shape, or to the number of clips you trigger most

These interact. Increasing the row and column count while keeping tile size large will overflow the visible area; increasing tile size while keeping the count fixed will do the same. Decide the count first based on how many clips you need visible at once, then set tile size to fill the remaining space.

A workable order of operations

  1. Choose Light or Dark theme.
  2. Set the tile row and column count to match the number of clips you want on screen at once.
  3. Set tile size so the grid fills your window without scrolling.
  4. Add background images to the clips that benefit from visual identification — the ones you trigger by sight rather than by reading.

Common snags

  • Images look stretched or cut off. The tile shape is fixed by your size setting, so match image dimensions to it rather than expecting the app to reshape the tile.
  • Grid overflows after a size change. Tile size and row/column count both consume space; adjust one at a time.
  • Theme change makes tiles hard to read. Recheck per-clip images against the new background, since the theme change is global but the images are not.

The project describes itself as free and open-source and in active development, so the exact placement of these controls may shift between versions — if a setting isn't where you expect, check the version you're running against the project's current documentation.