A soundboard is a useful tool that showcases various sound clips—think effects, jingles, voice snippets, and music—arranged in a grid layout for easy access. With just a click or a keyboard shortcut, you can play any sound you need quickly.
A good Linux soundboard needs to work well with Pipewire as well as PulseAudio and optionally integrate with JACK. It should be built to play and organize audio clips easily, and let you easily trigger sounds with hotkeys and browse organized folders of clips.
This type of tool is useful for live streaming, reactions, game sessions, and other interactive audio tasks.
To provide an insight into the quality of software that is available, we have compiled a list of 8 high quality free and open source soundboards for Linux.
Here’s our verdict captured in a legendary LinuxLinks chart. We only feature open source goodness.
Let’s explore the 8 soundboards at hand. For each title we have compiled its own portal page, a full description with an in-depth analysis of its features, together with links to relevant resources.
| Soundboards | |
|---|---|
| Soundux | Universal soundboard using PulseAudio modules or PipeWire linking |
| Amplitude Soundboard | Feature-rich soundboard |
| Pipewire Soundpad | Simple yet powerful soundboard application written in Rust |
| Soundboardd | Small local soundboard daemon |
| Zap | Makes your livestreams and videocasts more entertaining. |
| Soundboard | Desktop audio mixing application |
| cls | Terminal-based soundboard |
| CasterSoundboard | Soundboard for hot-keying and playing back sounds |
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