PinSound - General Question(s)

[LaughingElephant]

Hello! I apologize if the 'general' section isn't the right area for this. I looked through and wasn't sure where else to pose this.

 

I have noticed a number of tables have a PinSound alt sound option. I'm wondering if it's something that can work with a front end like Popper.

 

I see that the PinSound system has to be running alongside the table, but am unsure if it's possible for it to "load" automatically.

 

I've tried setting up an altsound from Pinsound for Theatre of Magic that seems really fun, I'm just having trouble getting it working. Before I get too far into it I want to make sure it would run when loading the system and starting the table from the front end, or if the PinSound application needs to be executed first before loading up the table. 

 

I have grabbed a previous version of the application that still works with PinMame per another post in this forum. 

 

Thanks in advance for any advice, experience, and discussion!

[AquaticPlayToy]

I use PinUp Popper to automate the launching and closing of PinSound.

 

Within PinUp Menu I put this code inside StartUp Script 

 

start "" "C:\vPinball\PinSound Studio\PinSoundStudio.exe"

"C:\vPinball\nircmd\nircmd.exe" wait 1000
"C:\vPinball\nircmd\nircmd.exe" win hide process PinSoundStudio.exe

 

Note there is an additional program nircmd I use which can be downloaded freely from here

 

For the closing script I use

 

taskkill /im PinSoundStudio.exe
"C:\vPinball\nircmd\nircmd.exe" wait 1000
taskkill /f /im PinSoundStudio.exe

 

I noticed that sometimes exiting a table PinSound would continue playing so within the Visual Pinball Startup script I adde this code

 

"C:\vPinball\nircmd\nircmd.exe" muteappvolume PinSound.exe 0

 

And upon a VPX table close I added this

 

"C:\vPinball\nircmd\nircmd.exe" muteappvolume PinSound.exe 1

 

So far seems to work well

 

Edited February 26 by AquaticPlayToy

[senseless]

On 2/2/2026 at 3:22 PM, LaughingElephant said:

I have grabbed a previous version of the application that still works with PinMame per another post in this forum. 

I've played around again with pinsound yesterday and found it broke with pinmame a while back and just provides an error the sound system is not supported (using option 2 in pinmame for sound). 

Which version are you using and does it run despite the open issue reported with the current version of pinmame? Can you share the link? Love to get pinsound working again. Alternative is that I need to switch to altsound (using option 1 in pinmame) but I like a pinsound for it's sound quality. 

[LaughingElephant]

6 hours ago, senseless said:

I've played around again with pinsound yesterday and found it broke with pinmame a while back and just provides an error the sound system is not supported (using option 2 in pinmame for sound). 

Which version are you using and does it run despite the open issue reported with the current version of pinmame? Can you share the link? Love to get pinsound working again. Alternative is that I need to switch to altsound (using option 1 in pinmame) but I like a pinsound for it's sound quality. 

 

Honestly I don't remember, I gave up on the Pinsound replacements and just look for either alt sounds or just the normal table sounds. My apologies.

[senseless]

With altsound 2.0 I think I also don't need pinsound anymore. There are great sound mods available ;).

Thanks for the reply!

[scutters]

Link to the last version of Pinsound that works for Bally/Williams roms with pinmame 64bit or all in 32bit in this post; https://www.vpforums.org/index.php?showtopic=47635&p=486333

 

You may struggle to get hold of pinsound mixes in the correct format for that now though.

 

21 minutes ago, senseless said:

With altsound 2.0 I think I also don't need pinsound anymore. There are great sound mods available ;).

 

True, but i at least still use pinsound because in it's old format it was easy to remove all music from a table (so i can just play my own instead and have only table sounds, callouts and effects from the pinball)