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Coming from Mechvibes++? Your Packs Work in Mechvibes 3

3 min readBy Mechvibes
Coming from Mechvibes++? Your Packs Work in Mechvibes 3
Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash

Mechvibes++ was a fork of the original Mechvibes, made by Pyro and SaturnDev and first released in May 2021. It added two things many people had asked for: a separate sound when a key comes back up, and sounds for the mouse. It ran on Windows, it was open source under the MIT license, and it had its own following and its own sound packs.

Its last release, 2.4.0, came out in June 2023. In an official statement on their Discord server, the team said Mechvibes++ is no longer actively developed or maintained, set the server to read-only, and advised everyone to move to the Mechvibes rewrite, then called MechvibesDX and now Mechvibes 3. Thank you to them for building it, for looking after its community, and for showing what people wanted from a keyboard sound app.

Mechvibes 3 now does what Mechvibes++ added

  • Key down and key up sounds. A pack can give each key one sound when it goes down and another when it comes back up.
  • Mouse sounds. Pick one pack for the keyboard and another for the mouse, each with its own volume. Mechvibes ships with 4 mouse packs, and the sound pack library has more.

It also runs on Linux and, experimentally, on Apple Silicon Macs, and adds things Mechvibes++ did not have: a library of more than 900 community packs, a browser editor for making your own, Mood ambient sounds and 36 themes.

Your Mechvibes++ packs still work

Mechvibes reads packs made for the original Mechvibes and converts them when they load, keeping your old config.json next to the new one as config.json.v1.backup.

Mouse packs made for Mechvibes++ needed one extra fix. They were built in Mechvibes++'s keyboard editor, so their buttons are stored the way keyboard keys are. Since version 0.8.2 of the app that became Mechvibes 3, those packs are recognised properly: left, right and middle click each make their sound, and the separate press and release sounds are both kept.

Packs from the Mechvibes++ server

The packs people shared in the Mechvibes++ server's sound pack channels are being brought over to the sound pack library, credited to the people who made them. The Mechvibes team is doing this, not the Mechvibes++ team, so please send questions about it to us rather than to them.

If you made one of those packs, sign in with the same Discord account and you can claim it from your sound packs to manage it yourself. If you would rather your pack not be in the library, write to [email protected] and we will take it down.

Moving over

  1. Get the installer from the download page and install Mechvibes.
  2. Quit Mechvibes++ and uninstall it, so the two apps do not both play a sound for every key.
  3. Find the packs you used in Mechvibes++. For each one, either zip the pack's files so that config.json is at the top of the ZIP, or keep it as a folder.
  4. In Mechvibes, open Sound packs and choose the Keyboard or Mouse tab, depending on the pack. Click Add, then Select file, and pick the ZIP. For a folder, open Manage, open the custom sound packs folder, copy the pack folder in and click Refresh.
  5. Pick your packs on the Home page.

If a pack does not appear or stays silent, Sound pack not loading lists what to check. And if you would like others to keep enjoying a pack you made for Mechvibes++, you can share it in the library.