Elgato Stream Deck Complete Setup Tutorial

hello and welcome to the live stream today we are talking about stream deck and it's basically going to be a complete setup tutorial so sort of start to finish uh looking at the different models of stream deck and then also how to get it set up right from the beginning basically because a lot of people get stream deck with an idea in mind of how they're going to use it this would be the case with me when i thought i was going to just be using it for switching scenes in ecam for recording videos and then often what happens is when you get it you realize that there are so many other uses that you could potentially have for it and so just spending a bit of time sort of thinking about how to get it set up correctly from the beginning is going to save you a few headaches further down the line and again i'm talking from experience here because i went down a particular path of setting it up in a certain way and then ended up having to sort of start from scratch again so i've talked about that that's all related to folders and profiles but getting a little bit ahead of myself there but we'll also have a look at the different models as well and i'll talk about my recommendations in terms of uh which stream deck is best and which one you should get obviously there are budgetary constraints but there are some different models uh and i've got a few thoughts on that as well so um i think this was dropped in during the trailer but just quick uh say hello to uh dan um and uh great to uh great to see you you've checked in even if it was uh maybe a couple of hours ago but uh this is all being inspired really this uh this video is uh dan was uh chatting in the discord uh just somebody new to um stream deck and so this is kind of what's prompted me to do this video i have got other videos on the site all about stream deck and indeed i've got a whole playlist of beginner's guide to stream deck but things certainly have changed a little bit since i made those videos so as i say i thought it'd be good to just do a complete uh complete run through so first of all what is a stream deck then for the totally uninitiated i suspect that most of uh viewers of my channel know what stream deck is most of my traffic for the channel is driven by people searching for stream deck and it's my stream deck videos that are most uh most popular but in any case just in case you are completely new and not sure what uh the stream deck is it's this little device here and it is essentially a keyboard it's really so much more than a keyboard so uh it can do lots of other things but essentially it is just a series of different keys uh and uh as i say there are different models which we'll look at but one thing that is kind of unique about this is that all of these little keys are in fact individual screens so you can see in fact let me come to this view this might be a little bit easier not that one this one um these individual keys here are physical keys that you can push down unlike a similar device which is the loop deck which has a touch screen um but the the keys on the stream deck are all as i say physical keys but each one has a little screen on them which means that you can change uh the icons that are on them and change the symbols and that's how you can tell exactly what functions they are doing if i come out to this particular view here so this is the uh the profile that i've got for um controlling this live stream and so all the different scene switching i can do from here i can do various other different things but it is not just for live streaming and although it was a tool that was created uh originally for live streamers hence the name stream deck created for live streamers by live streamers it is actually really a powerful productivity tool and although i bought it with uh recording videos in mind the primary use i have for it these days is actually just for general productivity throughout the day when i'm not either recording or live streaming so we'll be having a look at some of that a little bit later in terms of uh all the uh the different things that you can do with it outside of just uh switching scenes and stuff like that so um let's have a little look at the uh different models uh this is the xl that i was uh just showing you so let me just come back to here um it does sort of sit flat on the desk like that but it also has this uh magnetic stand that just simply clips onto the back to have it as more of an elevated angle to it so generally with a keyboard you probably used to just touch typing like this and although you can kind of feel your way around the stream deck because they do have these raised keys um it is nice to have it sort of tilted towards you so you can actually see what all of the buttons are are doing so that is the xl now that has 32 keys there are some other models though so let's just take a quick look at the different uh models that there are in the range um so we've got the stream deck xl which is the one i've just shown you um the original one was actually 15 keys and it was it doesn't have the raised uh back on it it does come with a sort of uh rather flimsy kickstand that you can uh sort of sit it on top of uh but it's not as sort of built in as the stream deck xl uh they uh the stream deck original one as i say was the the first one to come out they then released the stream deck excel a couple of years later and with it they also released the stream deck mini which is basically six keys uh then at some point uh last year it was they basically refreshed the original one to bring it more in line with the design of the xl and with the mini and so that one has got 15 keys as well but it has that sort of fixed base so just having a quick look in more detail this is what the xl looks like and by the way the cables on these are a usbc that plug into the back of the device and then a regular usb 3 that would plug into your computer if you have got a usb c to usbc cable you can also just sort of replace that yourself because it does have a detachable cable in fact that's another thing that is a differentiator between the the xl the 15k mark ii and the six key versus the original 15 key that one had a sort of fixed cable that you couldn't uh couldn't change um so this then is the original one and if i scroll down it might you might be able to see the stand you can still get the original 15 key and it's obviously a little bit cheaper than the uh the other one so there you can see that stand that i was talking about it's a very much a bit of an afterthought and from a design point of view uh it's not the uh not the greatest and certainly doesn't look as uh as sleek as the new mark ii which is the 15k mark ii which also has one additional feature that isn't on the um 32 key xl or the six key mini which is that uh these one this one has a sort of magnetic face plate um so that you can actually change the the color uh the cover on it to give you some different uh different colors and different designs on the front and that just uh sort of snaps on with a magnet as well uh and then the mini that i mentioned here you go just the little uh diddy one it's it's just uh two keys tall by three wide so a little six key one there uh and there is also one other model of stream deck which is a very different in form factor and that's one that i've got under my desk right now and that is the stream that pedal so all the things that i'm showing you that we're going to be able to do with the uh the stream deck on the desk you can also do not just with the touch of a finger on a button but you can also do it with your uh feet as well so in fact uh this switching scenes is what i'm doing actually with the the pedal um so those are the uh the different models and really as i say apart from the the pedal beam obviously just on the floor the others are exactly the same functionality it's just coming down to how many uh buttons that you actually actually have with with the the device as opposed to something like the loop deck which i've covered on the channel before where all of the models have actually got some very differentiating uh some differentially differentiating features uh between them all so uh that's something that's just a stream that you're basically just making a choice of how many actual buttons do you want um and so i'll talk about that a little bit later because you know which model is going to be the right one for you is going to depend on what you want to do with it obviously but the little caveat with that is whatever you think you want to do with it you might find that you end up doing a lot more and in fact a lot of people who end up buying the 15 key um usually it's not too long before they've got their eyes on the 32 key when they they fill up all of the the available slots but uh don't worry about uh only having 15 keys because you can actually add in multiple pages and we'll look at profiles as well a little bit later so you don't really just have that few keys there are actually you know potentially hundreds of different things that you can assign to these things so that's obviously what we'll be digging into uh today as well is looking at how to go through and program all of that um so as i say it is basically a a a keyboard that's what it is and you can do anything you can do with a regular keyboard but actually you can do so much more because uh basically all of these little buttons you can use to trigger a whole series of actions uh not just necessarily one thing so it really opens it up as a powerful productivity tool so why would you use something like this over uh just keyboard shortcuts if you can use it to you know trigger all these things on your keyboard well one thing that i found was um keyboard shortcuts uh are fine if i'm typing and i'm in a you know typing lots of text and i've got both uh both hands on the keyboard um then it's very easy to sort of reach across to all of the different keys but if you've got one hand on the mouse suddenly keyboard shortcuts become difficult unless they're all over on one side of the keyboard because you've obviously got to try and reach across to them so actually having the stream deck as an accompaniment to a you know when you're working with a mouse it means that you can sort of really fly round uh documents or spreadsheets or whatever it is that you happen to be doing and in fact in a sort of previous previous life a few years ago my sort of regular full-time day-to-day thing was as an architect and so i was quite used to manipulating 3d models on the computer there and then i would you generally have sort of one hand on the mouse on this side and then the other hand would be on what we call a 3d mouse so it's basically for manipulating computer cad models in all in all directions and so i was used to basically just being able to design a house with my hand on these two separate devices and so actually the stream deck really sort of replaced that in some other things that i've been doing more recently uh where i tend to be sort of sat with one hand on the mouse and one sort of poised close to the stream deck and it really makes it easy to as i say just trigger all of these things hey dina just uh popping in say hello great to see you here um so uh that is the the models now in terms of the uh the the build quality it's pretty solid really i mean it's uh i have i've had this stream deck xl now for uh over a year maybe 18 months something like that uh and yeah it's i've never never felt that there's any issue with build quality same goes for the loop deck really which is a similar device i'm not necessarily talking about that today but um you know they've just got this really solid solid feel to them uh there's a real weight to it as well and with the xl it's got this kind of on the magnetic base it's got a sort of rubbery bottom to it so it certainly stays where it's put um and you know it's just got a real sort of uh heft to it if you like uh it certainly means that it's not entirely portable uh whereas something like the loop deck i find is very easy to just sort of throw into a case or something or a bag whereas the stream deck is definitely a desktop device i wouldn't necessarily want to be carting this around with me anywhere however that said um it's probably a good time to mention that there is in fact and in fact look at that the loop decks just switched off just when i was talking about it i must have hurt its feelings the um the stream deck as well as the hardware devices there is also a mobile application so it's actually a great way to try out the uh stream deck in terms of the functionality uh because with the mobile app there is a free trial of it if you search in the app store uh search for stream deck you can find the the app there's a free trial of it and then after that i think it's three dollars a month something like that hey wayne just popping in as well great to see you here wayne um the um yeah if you if you get the free trial of it then it's three dollars a month thereafter to continue with the sort of script subscription of it and basically with the mobile app you get 15 keys that just appears on your iphone or ipad or android device or whatever it happens to be uh so you might not necessarily want to continue with the subscription but getting the free trial is a great way as i say just to try out the different uh actions that you can do and the different um things that you can you can do with it so for me i that's the route i went i tried the mobile app first of all and i think i was using it for about a day or two maximum before i ended up just ordering the actual device because it really does sort of allow you to test out the software and see all of the different things that it can do um so really solid device those are the different devices so let's get on into looking into how you go about actually programming it now before i do that though i just want to mention that this is actually a kind of rerun if you like of a live stream that i did on amazon because i do stream every every week to amazon and i do something on a couple of times actually but i do something called the sunday session it is at uh sunday 7 p.m eastern standard time uh you can find me on amazon at uh take one tech dot live and there you will be able to get a uh i'll just drop that into the chat there you'll be able to follow me on amazon and as i say i do this uh sunday uh sunday session which is basically a deep dive into a particular product now i just happen to have done uh this same live stream with a few technical difficulties hence me re-running it now on here but i did that uh this last sunday uh this sunday coming up i will be doing a similar deep dive into the loop deck live so um as i say you can find that every sunday 7pm eastern standard time and if you head over to take one tech dot live that is where you can follow me on amazon it's amazon us but you can watch it from amazon anywhere in the world so uh if you like the sort of content that i'm creating on my youtube channel then you can find more of it over there but i digress let us get back into the sort of whole process of how you go about setting up the the the stream deck so it's all done with the stream deck application so let me just uh come into here for one second there we go um so this is the stream deck application and you'll notice um just down beneath me i've got the actual physical device if i just position it so you can actually see it just down there that's the actual stream deck and what you'll notice is we've got all the keys on here and those are represented uh by those little squares on the screen so um this is where you can see uh let me just start my pro mouse one second it seems to have stopped on me for some reason there we go that should be better just wanna be able to show you some of these things uh bear with me one second it's funny isn't it these things always seem to quit just at the wrong time it's just going to make it easier for me to highlight things if i can show you what i'm talking about on the screen there we go that's a bit better isn't it you can see what i'm looking at now so here we've got this uh basically exact representation of the uh the 32 key if you were using one of the other devices so i've got the mobile here uh you can see that that's uh just the 15 key layout um and then also we've got the pedal and those are the three keys for the pedal and in fact that one is my little magnifying glass so that's how i'm triggering that is just by pressing my foot on the the pedal uh but i'll get into how to uh program this in any case so this is the uh the layout when you first open stream deck it's going to have ignore this one for the moment that's just for me to get back to my main control for the live stream for the time being um but it's going to have basically just this one little key in the middle and that is essentially just a link to the elgato website so once you've seen that you're pretty much done with it and you can just delete it and all we've got here is a series of different actions over on the right hand side and then we've got the space where these actions are going to go on the device over here um now there are different what they call plug-ins which are groupings of actions and so the first one that you're going to notice um in fact let me just uh reorder these potentially in fact i'll just go through like this this will probably be a bit easier so we'll first look at the actual stream deck plugin itself so these are all of the different actions that are related to the the stream deck device itself so you've got things like um brightness for example i can just drag and drop that one over here this is from the uh again the stream deck list um brightness and then here we can change that to be either brighter or darker and then what that's going to do is that's actually as i press that you'll see that it's actually dimming on the screen down below it's actually dimming the device itself so this is the way that you add things on you just simply drag and drop them and then if i press this button now you'll see that the brightness down below is increasing so as simple as that it's just literally drag and drop and now i've got some control over the uh the device uh that happens to not be one i use too much because i tend to just have it set to whatever i want it but no problem if you want to delete a particular action you just simply highlight it and when i say highlight it you can see how this one's got this sort of blue halo around the outside whereas this one hasn't and if i was to click in here that is the sort of active button that you are just editing uh so i can click in there and just simply click on delete so as well as having the uh the button itself hello albert great to see you um uh as well as having the uh the the button itself we've also got this area down here which is where you're going to adjust any parameters that there are with something so for example here we've got one that is a timer so i'm just going to drag this one onto the screen and you can see that uh now that i've got that one selected uh down here we've got some information related to it so first of all you've got the icon uh we can customize icons i'll be talking about how to do that a little bit later um but you can change how all of the icons look so that for example like this one here you can see it's got my take one tech logo so i've just created an icon and dragged it onto there but i'll show you how to do that a bit later but you've also got these other things related to that particular action up here so first of all we've got a title you can title these things let's say i want a four minute coffee timer i could just type coffee and you'll notice that it's appeared on the button there and also it has appeared on this button just down there so whatever we are doing over on that side is appearing on the stream deck down here as well um so that would be a a timer and then let's set that to four minutes so 240 seconds and then the sound would be what you want to play when the timer has finished so if i was to just press on this now uh then it's going to start that countdown you don't see anything on the screen here but if you have a look on the actual button itself uh it has actually started counting down from uh three minutes and you'll just actually be able to see that countdown so if you need to time anything or need to time anything for your stream then you can add little timers and things like that to the the screen so i'm just going to delete that one though for now again as we keep going through um i'll talk about folders and profiles a little bit later because um there is uh there is a common uh path i think that people go to through when they're trying to organize their stream deck which is to create a whole series of nested folders uh but it's not necessarily the best way to do it but i'll come on to that a little bit later i don't want to get too much ahead of ourselves uh they've also got multi-actions now multi-actions are used for this is where it becomes really powerful as a productivity tool where you want it to basically you press one button in actually does a whole series of um actions and this is great for you know if you want to uh maybe when you start up your mac in the morning or your pc uh you want to maybe open a few specific applications or maybe you're just shifting from one work mode to another and you want to be able to open up a series of documents and applications and folders or whatever it happens to be uh you can do that all with multi-actions there's also a whole series of uh more complex use cases as well which we'll talk about a little bit later as well um so let's just move on from the stream deck one because we'll kind of come to these as we go through trying to do some different things but let's come down here to the system section uh with system this is basically just general things that you can do on your uh mac or on your computer and in fact this is really where the the majority of the productivity power of stream that comes in because uh you can do things in here like just open a website of course we've got bookmarks that we can have in our browser but sometimes just being able to get easy access to a specific website with the touch of a button can be quite useful so that just works by simply dragging on the action to any of the particular buttons if you don't like where it is you can easily just drag it and move it around so once you've put these things in place they're not actually sort of fixed there that's one thing that's a bit frustrating about the loop deck is it's not as easy to reorganize and move things around but with a stream that you certainly can and once again we've now dragged that website action onto there and then it's just a case of giving it a title so if i type in my website and then type the url i can't talk and type at the same time it seems take one tech dot io there you go so now i've just assigned that to a button you can see how the text need is not auto wrapping so you just come in here and then put in a return uh the actual text on the the button as well maybe it might be too big or too small we can come and edit the text so you can come in here and make some minor edits you can change the font uh the font size whether it's bold italics underline and you can change the color and you can also change the position of the text so you can see as i'm pressing these the text on here is moving around and then obviously changing color and things like that as well so you do have that that ability to edit what is on the what is on the little screens on the buttons and then when you press the button it's simply going to open up and this is just has opened up over here somewhere there you go it's just opened up my my website take one tech dot io so that is um how you uh can open a website now i mentioned multi-actions uh a moment ago well imagine if you had a series of websites that you need to open for whatever it is you do uh you know maybe your gmail some other things that you're using as part of your work um then you could have a multi-action where you basically just open up a series of websites so let's just have a look at how to do that if i come into here and i'll add in multi-action uh just uh in here then you can go through and just literally in fact i think i just jumped ahead a little bit there the multi-action was from here from the stream deck section you can also add this by the way by just clicking in any button and add create multi-action and then to add in the different actions within that you just double click on it like this and then here you can see it says drag an action from the right and drop it here so if we had you know three websites that we wanted to open uh you could just simply drag them all across like this and then go through one by one and actually add in the urls of each of those and then you can also add a title in so so if i opened this website you'd see the title then appears just underneath it there so this is how you can actually see in a multi-action uh all the things that you are opening um just a couple of quick questions oh hey chris great to see you here um and the uh and albert's asking do you need to have or own a stream deck to use the stream deck app no you don't it is a completely standalone thing so uh you just download the stream deck app for the computer um and then you would download the i assume assume you were talking about the ios app here and then you download the ios app and it just links up in exactly the same way um actually over wi-fi so no you don't need the regular stream deck to be able to use the stream deck mobile app uh which is why it's actually a great way to try out the the stream deck before actually buying the hardware device um i still pay for the subscription for the mobile app even though i do have the hardware device because it comes in handy sometimes to have that secondary one uh or also if i'm traveling then um i can still have you know stream deck controls on my mobile uh whilst you know to control the the computer or for live streaming or zoom calls or things like that so that is how to use multi-actions we'll be coming back to multi-actions because there's lots of ways that you can use these uh for you know series of productivity uh steps that you might want to take uh to sort of speed up your your workflow um hey aubry great to see you here popping in as well uh i'm trying to put comments up on the screen by clicking on the youtube pop-out window but i need to click here don't i that would help great to see you aubry um so let's go through and have a look what other system controls you've got the next one is um i'll i'll skip over the next one actually i'll come straight on to hotkey a hotkey is basically just anything where you would uh previously do it with a keyboard shortcut sequence or like combination of keys um or i suppose it could just be an individual key but you know like if you were doing control command v for copy and command uh other way around command c for copy and command v for paste you might want to just have a button for that or for any other potential shortcut you could have and as i mentioned before the reason why it's quite useful to have these as buttons as opposed to using the keyboard shortcuts is there are times when you might not have both hands on the keyboard if you're using the mouse or something like that and it's awkward to reach um so uh with this one here this keyboard shortcut or it's uh called a hotkey actually uh you can just come down here and uh where it says hotkey click to assign uh if you were going to use a copy for example you could just do command c uh do that try that again command c um sometimes by the way with these and then give it a title sometimes when you're doing a uh sort of a series of um you know some of my keyboard shortcuts that i've programmed might be control command option shift you know something where you type in really a lot of modify keys those ones apart from the actual letter you know command shift alt option those ones they're called modifier keys and so sometimes you might find that it's not really taking all of them if you try and just click in here and when it says observing keystrokes when you just actually press the combination you might find that it's not actually grabbing them all if that's the case you can actually almost leave a little pause between them so if i was to do say i don't know command option t i could literally just come in here click here and just in quick succession one after the other type almost type them in in the string and then you'll find that it will usually uh grab them sometimes you can also just click this little drop down here and you can actually add specific uh modifiers in this way there's a big long list of them but uh yeah if you if you ever find you're trying to do it and it's not grabbing them just try doing them sort of one after the other in quick succession and then you'll find that uh it should uh grab them much like much like that so that is keyboard uh shortcuts or hotkeys here um so that's where yeah all of these things that um you know you can't necessarily remember the keyboard shortcuts for all of these applications especially if you're using some complex apps that have you know just a ton of shortcuts then being able to program them into the stream deck is useful because you don't then have to remember the actual keyboard shortcut itself and if you create a dedicated icon for it then that's going to make things a lot easier to to do i'm just looking at can you pre-fill in details such as username and password you could do that with um um for websites you could you would have to do that with a secondary action uh i tend to do stuff like that with um with keyboard maestro so you can have it go and fill in specific things in specific locations um what you can do with a website is you can use this get request so if you're going to you want it to do something where it's going to fetch some information but it's not really username and passwords and there is a little bit of a danger to having it pre-fill in username passwords and two-factor authentication keys and stuff like that so uh that might be a bit of a uh a bit of a dangerous one to have programmed into your stream deck in any case but i do do something similar for some websites with with keyboard maestro so um i'll talk about keyboard maestro a little bit later uh hey keely great to see you here um so let's uh keep moving through some of these other actions that we've got so we've looked at website we've looked at hotkey well just to come back then to this second one which is hotkey switch and this is going to be something where you've actually got something that has basically two different states where it might be something that you're switching on and off and you might use a separate keyboard shortcut to either turn it on or off um or it could be just the same keyboard shortcut however you want to be able to sort of toggle it um well that's what this is keyboard switch your hotkey switch so if i drag this onto here you can see that it looks like a little switch there it is in its on position and in fact if i come down here you can see that we've actually got what the thing looks like when it's on and what it looks like when it's off or vice versa and i mentioned before about being able to change the icons which we'll look at later this one you can actually change the icon for both states so you'd be able to show you know whether it was on or off um and here just as before we entered the hotkey well now basically we've got two hotkeys because we've got the on one and the off one it could be that you're going to use just the same hotkey for each it is just the same key to toggle um but it also does um uh it also could be a separate hotkey as well um so let's have a little look um down here we've also got uh open so open is to open either a an application a file or a folder so um if you've got a series of apps that you want to start up you know when you uh when you get going in the morning then just pressing a button to have them all trigger and open up you could do that with a multi-action but it's as simple as coming down here to the where it says the app or the file it doesn't mention folders but you can open folders as well so click on choose it's going to bring up just your regular finder window or application picker file picker whatever you want to call it and so if i just come into my applications then i could select any one of these just pick something at random automator why not click on that and you'll notice that it has actually pulled in the app icon and it's also got the title so it's pulled in the title the name of the application but because we've got the app icon you may think well actually i don't really want to have the title over there because i've got the app icon that i can see what it is from that well where you've got this title field here um i mentioned that you can change the font and the size and all of that kind of thing well you can actually just choose not to show it so if i toggle this one off then now you'll see that we've just got the nice clean icon with no text over the top so that is the uh that is the thing there um so that is how to open a uh an application and if i click that it will open the application uh however if you uh just select a file instead it will open the file and if the app to open the file in isn't open it will obviously just open it just the same as if you were clicking on it in a finder so if you have got some specific things that you use quite regularly uh i don't know template files tracking files or whatever it happens to be that you are fine you're constantly going in and out of um then you can actually just assign the the file itself to a button and then you press that and then you'll just be able to get into it from wherever um and incidentally that's a a sound bit of advice really for um using stream deck is there is a temptation with this to try and just plan absolutely everything out that you're going to possibly want to do with it from the beginning um and then you sort of don't really get into the flow of using it so what's useful to do is sort of notice the things that you are doing regularly um that um that you know you do as part of your daily routine and then look for a way to automate those things as and when they arise rather than uh the approach that i took when i first got into uh well actually again keyboard maestro years ago was i tried to plan out you know the 2000 potential shortcuts that i might need and then i did it all and properly forgot them so getting into a routine with this and getting it into a workflow the best part the best way to do that is kind of build it up bit by bit with things that you know that you're going to be using uh all of the time and as i say you can use this open command to open uh files but also folders so if you just have a folder that you're on constantly referencing on your computer you can do that as well the next one we've got here is a text so this is a text snippet so if you use something like text expander on the mac and there are various options that are similar on the the pc as well which is where you type a short little key string in and then it will basically populate a whole string of text well you can do that here with the the touch of a button you've got a bit more limitations on it in here compared to something like text expander which is really quite a comprehensive app for uh all sorts of um text expansion but where you might want to be adding different parameters in and all this kind of stuff whereas this is essentially just a case of you type the text you want in here and then when you press the button it goes and uh populates that in the um in the uh the the wherever you happen to be so i've got one for example for if i just press this button here uh it's going to just populate a string of text which is to my amazon live my amazon account so you can create these little text snippets and that's where i tend to use this is for little ad hoc snippets that i want to do for example during a live stream it's very useful for uh for that but you could equally use this for you know stock responses to emails or messages or uh you know if you're running late i'll be there in a minute that kind of thing uh whatever it happens to be and then just assign it to a button and then you can see here you've got an option to press enter after the the message has been submitted so if you wanted to just actually put it in and then submit the message uh you can do do that in there as well uh let me just come back here for one second oh it's okay um i just got a little alert then i thought wonder what that was um so um so that is the uh the uh text snippets uh and you've also got uh multimedia controls down here as well now um everything that i've done so far has been kind of one action and you drag it on and it kind of does one thing whereas this one is an example this multimedia control of where it's one physical action on here uh but actually if you look down here where it says action we can click here and it can do a whole series of things and we're going to select which one we want it to do so because this is multimedia controls this is for basically play pause you know all the kind of multimedia controls that you've generally got across the top of your keyboard function keys but we can assign these here as well to playback skip tracks and play music or volume up and down that kind of thing so one thing here you might want to have a whole set of controls to control these you don't have to drag the same action on over and over again though you can actually just right click on this one to copy it and then just paste it so we can just sort of duplicate that those are all exactly the same but what we might want is that's previous track so maybe this one we want to have as play pause maybe this one is a next track maybe this one is i don't know volume up and then this one is uh volume down like that uh just saying bye to jeff jeff in the discord there saying uh good night great great to see you jeff uh good night um so uh yeah for those that are not aware i do have the uh live streamer backstage thing going on or the backstage pass rather in the discord so if you're not already a member of the discord uh you can find that at if i come back over here for a second uh take one tech dot io family and join the discord server and so there's lots of conversation going on in there but also if you are interested in joining my uh channel memberships you can find the join button just down below this video and at the backstage pass level um then you get access to the the backstage area of the live stream and we have a little bit of a chat before the live stream starts and then also when we finish the live stream we just sort of continue the conversation in there so you can find that with channel memberships just down below this video but i digress slightly saying goodbye to jeff um so in the uh in here back in here again this was the multimedia controls and then now yes basically we can control these up and down with these uh with these keys so that there is all of the different system controls that we've looked at um but you'll notice that as well as the system controls uh there is a whole load of other plugins that i've got down here as well um so i'll have a little look at some of those um but uh first of all i'll just mention that uh all of the sort of uh camera switching and things like that that i'm doing right now i'm doing with an application called ecam live so ecam live is live production software for the mac uh the best live production software there is um and that's why i use for my live streams but it's also what i use for creating all of my videos but also for really leveling up my uh zoom appearance as well because all of the sort of production quality that you can bring to live stream and video you can also take in using their virtual camera function into zoom as well and that allows you to uh yeah basically really just look a little bit head and shoulders above everyone else in your zoom calls you can get a free trial from take one tech dot io and uh sorry take one take dot i o slash ecam and uh you'll get a uh free trial there and then you can find lots of videos on my site i'm just getting distracted by some very very on unnecessary uh chat comments but so there is where you can find uh find out more about ecom live before i get too distracted and if you really want to level up your ecom live skills you can also try out my ecom live master class because one of the things that i found with the videos on my site is e-cam has been updated so frequently that uh often videos that you'll find on youtube um are slightly out of date and there are now easier and better ways to do the things that we can do with ecamp and so the ecam live masterclass was created specifically for um to be your sort of online resource for all things ecamp so you can head out over to ecomlivemasterclass.com to check that out and actually if you try the ecom live master class then you can get two free months of e-com live um as one of the perks with that so the e-com live masterclass is 147 dollars but it includes 150 of perks and special special promotions for you as well and one of which is if you're new to ecamm you can get an extra two months free of ecam so that's ecom live masterclass.com so uh back to this and uh thank you very much for the mods for uh just getting on top of those spelm comments um so let's get back to the uh the uh application itself and i we're going to talk about these different uh plugins that we've got here so each of these ones we've looked at the stream deck plugin and the system but there are all of these other things here so um these are some of them are sort of built in that you'll have when you first open stream deck there'll be some of these already here and in fact the way that you can um uh there i'll just get to your comment in a second so there's a comment coming in anyone know how to make a stream deck multi-action where you take a screenshot and then open that screenshot on monitor x um yes what you could do is whatever the keyboard shortcut is for it's command shift um if you were going to take a full screen keyboard if you're going to take a full screen screenshot on a mac it would be command shift option command shift 4 is it or is that for an area that's for an area so command shift 5 i think is just command shift 5 does the full screen the only issue with that actually is you can see that it's um you have to actually select the uh the space that you wanted um [Music] so let me give that one some more thoughts it should be easy but i'm not uh my brain is not computing it right now i'll come back to that though let me just uh actually flag that and start that i'll come back to that comment uh walnuts84 by the way hello and welcome welcome to the stream um so yeah these are different plugins there will be some that will be there when you first start up the stream deck and others that you can add in and i'll show you how to do that but what you can also do is reorganize these so this little icon that we've got at the top here um you can come down here and basically toggle on any one of these that you don't want to see so for example i mentioned that ecam live was the best live streaming software there is uh which is why i've deactivated the obs plugin because i don't use that that one um you can also uh reactivate the uh or deactivate any of the individual um actions as well so if you find that you don't use any of these specific ones uh then you can you can just deactivate those there so yeah simply orbs the um uh command shift three is for the whole screen uh the thing i'm trying to think then is actually getting it to open that screenshot in the um to a specific monitor um that's the that's going to be a little trick there because as a default it's not going to specifically open the screenshot and so you'd have to have to have it so that you could basically get the last screenshot there's a way to do this but it's a little bit tricky i think um there would be a way to do this but uh yeah it might be a little bit a little bit tricky um anyway i'll let let me give it some more thought i'll get back to that hey rich great to see you here as well um and that's exactly it keeley opening on a specific monitor um we'll need some other apps like moom or keyboard maestro indeed and specifically it's even just the point of opening up the screenshot because it will save the screenshot with a certain title uh the way that i would do it is i would have some automation that basically um when you take the screenshot there's an extra little step in here which grabs the latest thing with start the latest file starting with the word screenshot from the uh wherever it is you have it saved to and get it to open that in the in the thing so there is definitely an extra bit of a an automation that would need to be uh be done there um but yeah i'll go i'll give that some more thought i'm not sure i'll get around to that today but i'll i'll uh i'll i'll figure out a way to do that um so uh i'm digressing once again it's another one of those squirrel moments that's the problem with me you give me give me a little technical problem to solve and my mind just goes off on it so i'll i'll continue to be distracted that through by that throughout the live stream um but then once you've uh you've selected the the plugins that you want from here that are the the ones that i just sort of built in uh you can also then move these up and down so to rearrange them and put them where you want them uh but what you can also do is if you want to add in some new ones then you can't find the ones you're looking for in here uh there is what they call the uh stream deck store but uh don't be uh uh fooled by this it says it's a store but actually at the moment everything in here is free so it's not like uh you have to pay for this stuff there people make plugins for stream deck that are all free uh there's also uh icons and music and things like that that we'll get to in a little while as well i'm sure at some point they will open it up for people to be able to put paid products in there like icon packs that you have to pay for but for the time being everything in there is is free so when you open the stream deck store and by the way i skipped over how to do that uh this little icon just up here at the top um you if you click on that it will open up the stream deck store and the first page you'll go into is this discover page it's really useful if you are someone who use uses stream deck regularly uh you know like by regularly if you've got one you probably use it like all the time every day but if you do it's still useful to go into the uh stream deck store because it does have things like the uh what's new with stream deck monthly roundup for july and i often just pop in here and just have a little look because you'll find that there are new plugins that you didn't realize existed and so then you'll uh you'll figure out you know some new things that you can do that you didn't realize were possible so coming in and having a look at this little splash page is uh certainly useful and then it highlights certain uh products and uh plugins and all that kind of stuff so it's quite kind of useful to just come and have a little check in with here check in here from time to time um next one down would be uh plugins that's where we're going to be able to get all of these different actions for different things and you'll see that there is a big long list so you'll come in first of all it should just be selected to all so this is all of the different plugins that you can get for uh stream deck at the moment by the way if you are looking on a mac it will show you only the ones that are available on mac and same with pc so there may be some that you see in here if you're on a pc that are not available to you but more than likely it's the other way around there are far more available on pc than there are for mac so you may have more than this that you're looking at if you are on a pc uh but then it's just a simple case of uh you know if you see one that you want to use like the twitch studio perhaps you can see the big install button here if you have already got it installed on your uh in your stream deck you'll notice that it's got an uninstall button here instead so you can clearly see which ones you've already got and which ones you haven't uh and then as i say just simply click on the uh little um install button and then it will just go ahead and prompt you to say are you sure you want to install it and you click on yes click on install and then it will just go and uh install it on your stream deck um and there you can see the little time bar moving up there and so then that will again appear in that sidebar so let's just come back out of here i'll come back into the store a little bit later when we start looking at icons uh but i just wanted to highlight a few that um i mean there's really what you do with stream deck is going to depend on all sorts of things you know what you what your use cases are uh what you you know what you do for in in your day-to-day uh business that you might want to do with it but there are a couple here that are worth sort of mentioning um so obviously the uh the stream that one is the one that you're going to be using to control stream deck and system pretty much i think everyone's going to use that to some point for doing stuff on their computer but then for example i use ecam live ecam live has got i would say the most comprehensive plugin of anyone that i've seen of any application they're just constantly adding new little functions to it so all of these actions here are ones that i use to control ecam live so um it just means that i can control everything from the stream and also from all of my videos that i produce can all be just controlled by uh by this the stream deck so uh hats off to ken and glenn the guys behind ecamm uh to be continually adding new things in here um but there are other applications as well um so discord we've got some here to control discord so uh obviously uh very popular amongst streamers but uh more and more popular among normal folks who are realizing that uh keeley was right and it is an awesome platform for building community and so you can check out mine at uh take one tech dot io family we've got the discord community over there um but the plugin here is specifically for controlling when you are in what they call voice channels in discord so think of it like a sort of a zoom call within discord if you like um so we've got some things to uh to do here uh you know mute and so on um so we've got those controls in there so that's one way you would have to go and actually search for the discord plugin and add it in speaking of zoom uh we do still uh use zoom a lot these days um and so there is a plugin for zoom as well and this allows you to do some of the uh general things that you might want to do in a zoom meeting uh so for example muting uh mu turning off your video uh sharing your screen uh leaving the meeting to avoid that awkward moment where you say bye-bye and then everybody kind of goes searching around how do i get out of this meeting uh well now you can uh you can just assign that to a button so you can be like right see ya poof i'm out of here press the button um now there is actually um although you can see here there are only around 10 different actions in zoom there is a whole series of keyboard shortcuts for um things that you might want to do in zoom and so you'll be forgiven for thinking that what you could do is for all of those other things the best thing to do would be to come into your system uh use the keyboard shortcut the hotkey action and just program all of those different shortcuts in zoom to hotkeys uh hotkey actions in here and then you could control all of zoom with it the issue with that is bear in mind that hotkeys only work when you are in that particular application so for example if i use command c to copy it's only going to copy what i'm copying you know from the application i'm actually in whereas often you might find with zoom in particular that you are um maybe you are doing a screen share so you're demoing something in another application and zoom might not actually be the front most application so in this particular case with the zoom plug-in um they do have this one here which is called custom shortcut and what that allows you to do is um you can add type in the keyboard shortcut for zoom and it will pass it on to zoom even if zoom isn't the front most application and what that allows you to do is really have full control over zoom even if zoom it doesn't happen to be at the front and in fact this is one of the icon packs that i created if i come back out of here not that one where is it this one here so i actually created all of the icons for these and you can find these in my store so it is at uh i should have typed this one out this is one that i haven't got typed out take one tech dot io store there we go uh that is where you can find um and it's in the description actually so if you're watching on the replay you can find it in there uh this is where you can find my icon pack so i've actually already pre-programmed this i'll be showing you later on when we get into uh profiles about how you can um basically import profiles as well so if you don't want to go through and program this all yourself and create all of the icons yourself um then you can just go and grab this from the from from the store so it's one of a number of different icon packs that i've got available in fact let me just take this opportunity to show you uh if i come over here like this there we go this is my my website if you come over to store um then here you'll find the the two courses on the ecom live master class and the zoom master class and then down you can see i've got these different icon packs for zoom ecom live youtube keynote uh and a couple of others there as well so uh these basically just are all pre-set up so you can just import them into your uh your stream deck so i uh digress once again as often i do let me just get back over into my little demo thing to be able to show you this there we go um so the zoom one is one that is uh you know i think most people these days you zoom at some point so that is a really handy plugin you've also got ones here which go sort of hand in hand with zoom really if you are doing presentations into zoom meetings because we've got one uh plugins for powerpoint and for keynote and that allows you to sort of advance your slides forward and next slide um again obviously you can do that if you've got a little you know one of the little remote keyboard uh remote presentation clickers um you could uh you can use that in there um but um often it's easy just to have you know the stream deck as being mission control so you can control everything from uh from that as well um so i have when i'm on a zoom call i've got my zoom controls i've got some ecam controls to flick between the scenes that i've got going into zoom and then if i am doing something where i've got a presentation going then i'll be using some of these actions as well so it really just does become that you know with the stream deck in front of you that is what you're using to control everything um so let's just keep going through here and i'll show you a couple of other ones that you might find it useful uh we'll get on to this automation one a little bit later um there are also some controls in here for um youtube and twitter and twitch and those are for specifically for when you are um well the twitter one is actually to just send out a tweet so you can just drag and drop this on here and then you're gonna have it connected to an account uh and i'll show you how to do that in a moment as well uh but then you just type in the text and basically whatever you type in there when you press the button it's just gonna send that out as a tweet you can also attach a uh an attachment to it as well um but then with youtube you can add a chat message so if i want to add a message into the chat um this would be a message and if i press that now it should with a bit of luck uh just come straight into the chat i wonder if i've not got it connected to the correct account at the moment it's not popping up but if i've got that correct uh connected correctly to this account uh then that would just pop in as a chat message but it is a little bit um uh it's obviously not working because i'm doing a live demo of it but in any case that is what that is for you've also got viewers as well so it'll pull in how many viewers are on the live stream uh but again i'm not uh don't think i'm connected to the account that i'm streaming on at the moment so let's have a look at how you connect these accounts uh well that would be in the settings um and so if you come into settings you've got accounts in here and this will show you the um the twitch twitter and uh youtube accounts that you are connected to uh so you can only be connected to one at any given time and you just go through and add in your credentials in there and then that will make these things work so this is for the as i say the twitter one the youtube there is one for twitch as well i don't uh don't use twitch so but you can add in some similar things in there as well um so keeping on going down these different uh plugins uh one there that i just uh that was the one that i showed you as an example to add it in was philips hue so if you've got philips hue lights you can control these from here uh another one that might be useful is um sometimes the uh the plugins that you install they will they will install as um a plugin like this where you've got a little folder of all of the actions are that are within it sometimes though what you're installing is literally just a single action and so sometimes those will appear somewhere else and i'll show you where they are um often they might just appear in this custom area here and these are basically things that are just a single action although we can look at some of the parameters we can use for them a bit later um but uh one that i just wanted to highlight here was this ifttt so if this then that is a website ifttt.com uh this is a a sort of web-based automation website that allows you to set a whole series of uh uh parameters and it's then their name obviously comes from if this if something happens then do something else and you can create all of these little automations well there is a plugin for it for stream deck and so that if you want to be able to trigger things that you you know anything you can do with ifttt uh you can now do with the stream deck because basically you just drop this in and then it can pass that command onto if this then that also on the automation side of things another one here is this km link which is about keyboard maestro so i'll i'll come on to that in a moment as well and incidentally we're talking a lot about uh live streaming so i've talked about twitch and youtube and obviously the stream deck is uh something that was built by streamers for live streamers as well uh although it is you know a huge productivity tool um but if you are interested in live streaming then you may also be interested in my podcast the live stream at backstage podcast the first full proper episode was recorded this week it is live every week at tuesday at 7 p.m eastern standard time on uh linkedin live and also on amazon live as well and this week it was uh jp high tech so i had a great conversation with him uh the podcast itself is going to be released um in the next day or two actually i'm going to try and do it so that it's recorded on tuesday and it's out by thursday i was going to do it the following week but i think i can speed up my workflow there a little bit so uh yeah expect the jp1 to be dropping soon if you go to livestreamerbackstage.com you'll get to the podcast and it's available in all your favorite podcast players as i say it's recorded live on amazon and linkedin but i will all but also be posting the recording which will be slightly edited you know what i'm like with editing uh minimal editing where possible but that is also now going to be posted onto my youtube channel as well so expect when the actual podcast drops in the podcast player the edited version will also be uh coming out onto the youtube channel so if you want to just watch the replay you can catch it there but definitely if you want to join in the conversation then you can find it over on as i say amazon live or linkedin live now this week or this next week on next tuesday i'm going to be talking to uh dr efrain lopez or dr elo as many people know him and one of the things i've been really impressed with him is his consistent content workflow that he has built up whereby um i'm just constantly seeing his stuff and one of the things about being a live streamer is repurposing your content but also you know building awareness about what it is you're doing and i think that elo's just been uh doing something really great with that of late it's uh it's just something that's caught my attention so i'm really interested to learn from him about his uh the way that he's got set up and as somebody who is similar to me in which you know he's got a small window of opportunity every day to focus on his content creation uh amongst you know a full-time job and juggling family life as well really keen to get some insights from him so that's the livestream backstage podcast available on amazon live linkedin live replay on youtube and also obviously in your favorite podcast play as well um so with that said let me just come back i'll just check in with the chat because i've seen a few comments and they've been getting away from me slightly uh chris keyboard maestro again i know it's at the the uh the um uh the thing about keyboard maestro is and i'll i'll just come clean with the reason why i've struggled with this is a beginner's guide to um to keyboard maestro there is so much that it can do i've been struggling with figuring out like what is the um uh the the best sort of sequence to go through with this in terms of uh sort of laying it all out from a beginner's perspective i've done i think three or four videos on it now uh although only one that is specifically kind of the beginner's guide video the video one of it um it just can do so much that i've just got to try and fit it's almost i mean it is really a full sort of course in itself really um so uh so that's i think that's where the the the the friction has been and whenever i've got some sort of friction um it's kind of oh i'll have to come back to it and that's that's probably why i've kind of delayed it slightly it's just uh just trying to grapple with um what's the best way to lay this out for beginners so that it's um um that they're told told what how to use it in a logical logical progression if you see what i mean um so um but yeah i i i i it is high on the uh it is high on the list i just need it to float that little bit further to get to the top [Laughter] um so um yeah that one about two-factor authentication um [Music] so that that one there chris about the um open a website login and then go to authy and look for the two-factor authentication key um if you're using authy on the on the desktop that we could do that with keyboard maestro i'll perhaps talk with you offline about that or in the discord i'll i'll do a little thing about that in the discord because um yeah you can do that i've got whole sequences of stuff that is similar to that where you're on a website and it's got to go from one to another do a series of steps and then you know put in details and and so on um [Music] let's uh let's have a little look um going through here um did i say hello to dina i don't know just noticed your comment there if i didn't thank you dina um [Music] so cool cool okey dokey i'm uh going to try and catch up um so your your local tire center um i'm guessing you're not my local thai center but who knows um does super macro supermarket i'm not sure what super macro is trying to utilize my uh my stream deck even more great video what is super macro i'm not sure what super micro is i don't know what that is you'll have to have to expand on that a little bit more but you've got me intrigued i like macros so i'm sure to like super macros um right let's go uh back over to uh to hear them uh so we've had a look at the uh different uh plugins and the way that you basically add the plugins i've talked about a few of a few of my favorites that you can use um and it's a case of really just going through that store and taking a look at the full list really because you'll see some here that just sort of leap out to you [Music] oh mouse movements and clicks um that's what uh super macro is it um so yeah with that one i use i that's something that i'd use keyboard maestro for so with the keyboard maestro on the mac i don't know if your mac or pc by the way um but uh certainly on the mac i use keyboard maestro and that can do all that you know it can move the mouse click on the mouse on different parts of the screen but you can also use um found image so uh in fact i'll come on to this a little bit later because with keyboard maestro you can basically have it look for a specific image on the screen and that's how i do my uh website automation using keyboard maestro and stream deck is it it's going to go and um you know find the login button for an example of this is whenever i finish a video i've got one button that i press it that i presses that i press uh one button that i presses and what that does is it um it opens up youtube studio and then it actually physically moves the mouse over and clicks on the button to upload video then it moves the mouse and it's doing all of this by actually looking for the image that it needs to click on and it goes through this full sequence to actually go through and upload the video and open up some other windows that i need to type in the description and all this kind of stuff and it does about i would say 20 different things but it's just i finished the video and it's like if the video is good to go i'll just press a button and it'll just do it all um so so yeah keyboard maestro is really good for uh for that um and in fact uh whilst we're talking about it keyboard maestro there is a plugin for keyboard maestro um but there's also a third party like made by keyboard maestro but that's more for controlling stream deck with keyboard maestro because that's something else you can do as part of the keyboard maestro macros you can have it trigger something that you've got built into stream deck but this one here this km link is the one that you want for actually just triggering your keyboard maestro macros and it's just a single little action here but basically just down below um it says select macro and you've just got a full list of all of your different macros that you can just scroll through and when you when you press that would help if i didn't cover what i was doing with a comment wouldn't it uh so just there select macro and so basically anything that you can control with anything that you can program as a macro with keyboard maestro uh you can basically just do with the press of a button um but we're getting on to um some slightly more advanced uh stuff um so uh let's have a look free function repair next time in i'm in australia i appreciate that i'll i'll hold you to that um so um let's keep going down now because those are just an example of some of the widgets i'm getting ahead of myself into some of the more advanced uh sort of productivity stuff here but uh that's how easy it is to just sort of drag and drop things on in in terms of adding stuff to the stream deck and hopefully you've been able to see that as i'm doing stuff you know over there um it's also appearing on the stream deck down here as well now at some point what's going to happen is you're going to fill up the stream deck so when you do you've got a few different options one of which is you'll notice down here it says page or there pages and we've just got one well i can click on the plus and i can create a new page adding the new page basically you can see it's now gone blank but we've got this little arrow to go back to the previous page and now you can see i'm doing this just with the stream deck as well so that is next page and then previous page so i've got two pages there you can add up to 10 pages so i could add a whole series of pages and if i just add on some random little actions to here so you can see that i am sort of scrolling through them uh it would help if i made some different actions so it didn't all look the same just drag those on like that so you can see that as i'm basically scrolling through these pages it is uh it's showing me those different sets of keys um so that is one way that you can organize and have you know expand beyond the the 32 or 15 or whatever number of keys it is you've got um but one other thing that uh we've got on here is um folders now i'm going to tell you about folders first because it is usually the way that people first think that they want to organize their stream deck because it's logical we're used to managing file systems and things like that with folders so in the stream deck we've got uh here this very top action is create folder and if i drop that on here uh we've now got the little folder sign we could call that whatever we want and when you press that button you go into this and this is kind of like a folder of of actions and you can add a whole load of more actions in here you can't have pages in folders so you are just limited to 32 or 15 keys whatever it is minus one because you have to have this one to get back out of the folder and the first thing i did when i got stream deck was i thought great i'm going to just organize my entire stream deck with folders and i'll create one page that's got a series of folders on uh for me to just dive in and get into all of these other different use cases that i've got um i would recommend that that is not the best way to do it now having gone through and done that and then scrapped it and started over again there is something else on stream deck called profiles and with profiles basically that is uh think about a profile as being like a specific use case that you've got for it so right now i'm just doing a demo but if i come into here this is my ecom live profile for recording videos and live streaming on um on on using ecam live so this is my uh sort of take one tech recording profile so this has got all the different actions that i use for recording and i mentioned one of the limitations of folders is um you can't have multiple pages well with a profile it's basically just a fresh set of uh you know a fresh stream deck to work with so here i've got my first page i've got another page so these are all stuff that i use when sort of preparing for a live stream i've got another page over here which is uh different templates that i use uh for uh for for buttons and you can see i've actually got five i'm pointing down here over on that side wherever it is i've actually got five pages for my ecam live profile just for take one tech so that is one specific use case the way that you create a profile is in here this little drop down you can see here i've got all of my different profiles that i use and there is one right at the bottom there that is just new profile so you can click that and it will create a completely blank one for you to start afresh with and let's just do that actually new profile it's going to start completely blank one page with that uh single button in the middle there um but that's a little bit tricky because now we're just in that profile how do we actually switch back and forth between these profiles well there is this button here called switch profile so just as in the folder when you went into the folder and then you had that little back button to get back up into the the profile that you're just in well here we can kind of simulate exactly that functionality in any case because we can use this switch profile and then we could just say right what profile do we want to go to well down here is where we've got obviously the settings for all the actions so we could give this a title the device i'll talk about this in a moment because you can actually use one stream deck to switch profiles on another stream deck which is has a number of uses i'll talk about that a little bit later but for the time being the device is just on the current device so let me switch back to um what shall i switch to uh where was that demonstration one that was actually this profile one so now if i press that button it's actually going to take me back to that profile that we were just in so whereas before we'd created a folder and we could go in and out of that folder and well let's say i uh just get rid of that folder maybe just delete it and instead i use switch profile instead and then let's go to that profile three so now i've basically just completely replicated at what we had with folders but i'm doing it with profiles instead so i'm going into that profile that we've just created but now we have multiple pages and then i'm coming back out of it why else is this useful well the thing is because we can use this switch profile to switch to any profile from anywhere it means that this uh folder or this collection of icons we can also access from anywhere as well so there are cases where i want to be able to get into a particular grouping of actions and then get back out again but i don't want to have to go through you know you know a whole uh system a whole route if you like of um uh forgetting what the term is now you know what i mean i don't have to go in and out of a specific uh profile to get into a folder so i could access profile 3 from anywhere so just as here i can get into it from here and let's just add something onto the screen so we can see it's the same one just as i can get into it from here what i could also do is maybe i might want to just access that from here as well so if i just go to switch profile and then i can just easily come in here and access it from here as well because what i found was there would be certain things where i might have like a collection of actions that i had grouped together in a folder and then i would maybe copy and paste the folder into another area or into another folder um so that i could access it from there as well then i'd go and make changes to the first grouping in the first folder but those changes wouldn't be reflected in the second one i don't know if i'm explaining this very well but basically with profiles you get all of the benefits of folders but with some added benefits and without the limitations so i'd recommend when you are setting your stream deck from the start think about it in terms of profiles and use cases i do still occasionally use folders um but very sparingly it's like if i've literally just got a group of actions that i just want to test out something or i'll just want to keep them and they're just only ever going to be used for that particular thing so for example like in ecam there might be some stuff that i don't really use that often it doesn't warrant having its own screen and i might just want to dip into it at times to get to those actions so but generally i'd use profiles all the time over over folders so what i would recommend then is having a home screen effectively which is where you're going to link to all of your profiles so if i go to my home screen from here um this is my sort of home screen uh this is where i get into a series of other profiles along here this is where i get into a series of profiles that are specific for apps i've got a few things that i just have on the the home screen in any case i've got a few zoom controls just because i'm in that so much uh that it's just handy to always have those on the home screen a few little emojis that i use i'm either happy laughing grateful or in agreement those are my four core states um and any other emojis i can access from here as well um and so so yeah this is kind of my home screen um but then each of these is basically linking to another profile so i've got my profile here for omnifocus so when i go into that this is when i'm doing stuff in omnifocus and managing my task management system then i can control all of that from here i mentioned the zoom one so i've got that on it it's dedicated uh profile as well and then you'll notice that all of them have got this little home button at the top this orange home button so all that is is just a link to a profile and the profile i've just called home and that is this this is this uh this um home profile oops there's one to the wrong one there this is this uh this home profile um you can manage profiles so i've shown you how to add in a profile by clicking this little drop down but just cunningly off the screen let me move that up a little bit you can see that there is also no it's still just off the screen you can see that there is also this edit profile now if you click on edit profile it's going to take you into the same place as the settings so the settings is up here and if i click on that it's going to take you into this profiles section and here you've got a list of all your profiles you can reorder them in terms of you know the order that they appear in that list you can also add new profiles from here as well you can also right click and duplicate sorry i'm just quickly looking at keely keeley says i'm being able to find a stream action for opening a folder yeah it's just the open command keely if i go back into this one let me just i'll just quickly demo demo this oh open the stream net folder no no there isn't sorry sorry sorry um no there is um um there is only a um uh there is only just the the actual button that's the limitation of folders that's why i just use profiles because profiles you can actually have opening a profile as part of a multi-action um whereas folders are just intended to be just yeah just those kind of standalone things so no unfortunately there is there is no one and that's i just i just recommend using a profile so i have that when i go into for example just coming back to my i'm jumping about a little bit here but this should make sense so here like for example when i go into my uh live streamer backstage setup so this is when i'm recording my podcast you can see that this is actually a multi-action and so clicking on this what it does is it switches my ecom live profile to my live stream of backstage uh profile where i record everything for the the podcast uh but it's also got two profile switches for stream deck one of which is switching my stream deck xl this device here on my desk uh to my um live streamer backstage profile but it also switches my stream deck pedal which is down on the floor um to the three actions that i want for that as well um so yeah there's no no similar thing though uh for uh for folders in in stream deck um so yeah that's just another reason why uh i find that profiles profiles work better for that uh but coming back into the settings there's a couple of things to note with uh with this which may or may not catch you out so these are all the different uh profiles that i've got now you can have this open you can have a profile open when you open a specific application um so if i'd got one in here for excel which i have i could actually just go into here and uh select the application and find excel and add excel in so that every time i open excel it switches over the profile on the stream deck to the buttons for excel which might sound really useful um but for me because i do a lot of screen demos and also because i spend a lot of time on zoom where maybe i'm trying to show somebody something in an application i don't want the stream deck deciding what it's going to have on the screen for me so i don't want it to automatically switch over to my excel just because i happen to have made excel the front most application so that might be a bit unique to me you might find that really useful from a productivity point of view to have stream deck just automatically be in the set of actions for the particular application you're using so if so just know that you can do that um one little point that might catch you out is make sure that um if you uh if you have got um if you have got profiles that you want to be using just and switching between them freely make sure that none of them have got this make this my default profile checked because what will happen is when you open another application that doesn't have a profile assigned to it um it will just go back to whatever that was and this was something that caught me out for ages that i had one particular app a one particular profile that had this checked and then i'd be going and doing something usually in a live stream or a demo or in zoom or something and i'd open up a specific application that didn't have anything assigned to it and it would switch to these uh this other profile so uh just make sure that uh yeah this default profile if you've got more than one that doesn't have an application assigned to it you likely want this unchecked on all of them so i hope that i hope that makes uh makes sense um you can also from in here if you click the little drop down something that i definitely recommend doing is go to this backup all and you can create a backup so once you've spent some time getting things set out as you want them then definitely go through and create a backup and ideally have that as a recurring little task on your task manager to go in and sort of back it up intermittently to make sure that you have got a backup and then restore from backup obviously if you have any issue i've never had anything happen with my stream deck in 18 months that has required me to back up or restore from a backup but it's nice to know that it is there some people have had issues okay occasionally so as with all things it's always good to have a a backup you can also export a profile so when i make my my icon packs for stream deck i've created the profile and then i export the profile um and then that's what people download when they download the icon packs and then they can import those just by coming to here click on import and then you just import the file and it will bring in all of the actions and it will also bring in any icons as well that people have assigned to it in the in import in the export process so that's a great way to share uh set up so if you've maybe set some up for somebody else or indeed if you're going to create digital downloads of your you know setups as i've done with my icon packs then that is how you would do that the one caveat with that is to make sure that if somebody's importing your um uh uh your profile that they also have to have the required plugins it's not going to go and grab the plugin so for example the one that i've created for zoom um then if somebody hasn't been in and downloaded the zoom plug-in for stream deck then just importing my profile won't do that part for them they'd have to go through and do that themselves uh but apart from that that is how you you know how you import and export another great way to share between computers so if you've got multiple computers with stream decks you can do that that way as well to export the profile whilst we are in the preferences we've kind of looked at accounts and profiles uh we should probably also look at the other tab in here which is this general tab this is where you're going to see the software version check for updates you can always do that there will be intermittent updates come and then it'll tell you whether you've got the latest version or not at the time of recording we're on 3.5.3.1. so you can come in here and check for updates one thing i'll mention though is if we come further down here you'll notice that it says firmware version as well now here there is always a button here it always says check for updates you can always check for updates with firmware there is no button to say check for updates but what happens is when there is an update available you'll see a button that appears here to say update available you know download it or whatever the thing that catches people out though is it it'll often come as part of a software update and so every time you go and uh update the software so if you check for updates and it says there's one available and you go through and update the software what it doesn't do is automatically update your firmware as well but what you'll generally find or often find is you'll update the software and then if you go back into this um page here um you may find that there's a firmware update suddenly just appeared like as soon as you've reopened the app so what i'd recommend is anytime you get an update just come back into this one more time after the update has happened and just see if there's a firmware update as well because usually there's some sort of firmware that goes along with the software updates but as i say they don't do that all in one go as part of the the software update process um and that would go for by the way all the different devices you've got so you might have the software is gonna be um the software that you're seeing on the computer this one that we've been looking at um but this firmware is for the the actual device uh which is probably why they don't go and update it all at the same time as the software because here you can come through the different devices uh and then you'll see if there is any firmware available for them um so also whilst we are in this section this is as i say where you can change the device between uh we've got stream deck mobile stream.pedal stream deck xl those are the ones that i've got connected you can give them different names as well to make it more easy you know if you've got two xls uh want to be able to differentiate between them you can also change the device orientation now what this is going to do is basically just rotate the icons on the screen so if i click device orientation and change that to 90 what you'll see is that all of the icons on my screen have now flipped around 90 degrees if i just flick them back you'll be able to see that a little bit easier so if i flick them back now you'll see all the all the icons down there just basically rotate so they all stay in exactly the same positions on the uh the screen they're not going to move around anywhere but you're just literally rotating them around so if you want to have the stream deck maybe on its side you know next to your uh next to your computer or something like that next to your keyboard rather um then that's what that's for and you can rotate them basically uh 90 180 or 270. you can also set the device to go to sleep um so i've got mine set to never but i have got a key to put it to sleep i'll show you that in a moment but you can have it if you just want it to sleep after a particular time of inactivity you can do that in here as well there is also a screen saver function and that's basically it says screen saver it's essentially just an image that you're going to have on the screen you can create animated gifs and use those to create you know a fancy moving screen save effect uh i just haven't bothered and you can also change the brightness of the device here as well you can see as i'm doing that it's moving the brightness up and down here and then yeah there we've got the the firmware as i mentioned so that is in the uh preferences that's about all we need to uh to look at in the uh the preferences i've talked about uh switching profiles one thing i haven't talked about is actually the the icons and how to change icons so let's have a little look at that if i take any one of these actions you can see down here we've got a sort of representation of the icon and in fact let me come to this one because this was this one that was the switch so it's going to toggle something on and off and you can see that we've got two separate icons the way that you add an icon to something is if you've got it on your computer already so you've maybe you've created your own icons i'll talk about how to do that a little bit later as well if you've created your icons or you've bought an icon pack um then it's as simple as if i just go and open up i should have done this in advance if i just open up some of my my icon packs uh let's get this one up here so uh here you can see this is a selection of icons that i created for uh ecam live this is what i use for my live stream and uh i like to have pictograms basically so i don't tend to use the text function that you've got on the screen itself i'd rather just have something that uh where the image itself tells me uh what the button is i find that's a lot just easier more intuitive for me but all you do is let's say i wanted to use this icon here this isn't necessarily the right one for what we're talking about but it shows you the principle you just literally drag it and drop it on there and then when you've got a button that has two states like this you would then just go and select the other state and then you could drag and drop an icon on there and you'll see that that's changed on this this uh this button and then we've got the on and off state basically shown as those are two things so it's very easy if you've got these images on your computer already or you've bought them from somewhere to just drag and drop them like that there is another way that you can do this though so first of all if you click this little top little in fact let me come to a different one here you can see there's a little arrow just up at the top there and if i click on that you've got three options either set from file that's basically just going to open up the file you know the finder so that you can then go and just grab the file rather than dragging and dropping you've also got a create new icon on this side as well now that one i wouldn't really recommend that opens up a website and the website it opens up is super elgato's um icon creator page which is a bit of a bit of a i'm not a fan of it it's not a great interface it does have a series of icons here so you might want to just check it out because you might find that there is just the icon that you need they do tend to be uh aimed more at live streamers in terms which would make sense really uh we've got lots of ones here for like playing media there's some twitch icons and things like that but if you're starting to do a whole um you know create a whole set of icons for some specific use case one thing i like is for them all to look consistent so they didn't look messy on the device uh which is why i like to create my own and yet you can uh you can sort of drag and drop these so here you can set a background color uh you can change the color from uh somewhere over here just pick a color so we can give it a background color and then i can add in any one of these icons oops i'm adding on too many uh there's a way to take these off from somewhere as well uh it's just a little bit uh cluej for one of a better word to be able to create them in here but i'll just say it's definitely worth having a look at but i just find uh it's not the best uh interface and i'll show you a better way to create free icons instead um but i digress that is the um the option that you've got here uh to either load set from file or create new icon so they create new icon i'm not so not so much for but you've also got this stream deck icon library and this was something that was added in a fairly recent update in 5.2 i think so if we come back to the stream deck store and once again you access the stream deck store from this little button just up at the top corner and as well as the plugins that we've looked at you've also got icons and with icons there are a series of um some by elgato some are third party where they've created their own icon packs and you can download them and some of these are really good and in fact one that i will definitely recommend is sideshow fx so let me go over to their website because i've got a couple of icon packs on my website but sideshow fx have got a huge number of uh really great icon packs for um a lot of the creative apps so adobe create adobe creative suite final cut pro things like that as well let me come over and just show you their website um and basically they're available for sale on the sideshow fx website and you can find them for they've got all of these uh things down here so like blender as i say all the creative suite davinci resolve and by the way the icons for if you've got an icon pack for stream deck it'll work on loop deck as well generally i mean the actual images will uh sometimes they have built-in profiles sometimes not but sideshow fx in fact let me just drop this in the chat because it's definitely worth checking out um for some really sort of uh great professional app uh icons there you go uh premiere pro uh davinci resolve and when i say icon packs they're icon packs let's go and click on this one for example premiere pro what you'll see is uh 19.99 um new for uh where is it 19.99 how many how many do you got they go 680 icons so it's got basically it can control all of the functions that you're probably going to want to do in in premiere pro and it's 20 for 680 icons well the reason i mention this is because before you go and buy their full icon pack what you might want to do is come over to the uh the store at the um stream deck store because you'll see that we've got sideshow fx and here they have actually got the premiere pro icon pack the only thing is instead of 680 icons it's only got 70. so they're using this as basically a way for you to get a sample of the icon pack um but what you might find is if you're not actually you know using all of the functions you may find that this icon pack that you can get from here has actually got all the things that you're likely to need for it and that's the case with me i don't really do editing um and the few things that i do occasionally need to do i use premiere pro just because i'm an adobe suite user so there's a couple of things i've done my podcast for example i'm chopping little bits and adding little bits in to that and for the video podcast so i've just been doing that in premiere pro and they've got just a few little icons that i need in here so definitely check out the uh the icon packs in the store and all you do with this is if you are going down here you see one that you like let's have a little look at davinci resolve don't really actually use that but nevertheless sideshow fx just click on install it's going to pop up with this little message again click on install there and then it's going to go through and add that so yeah definitely come through and have a look they're adding more and more in here all the time for different applications so there's one for illustrator there um final cut pro lots as i say lots by sideshow fx cinema 4d and once you've done it it's going to say installing and then if i come back out of here so now when i want to add in one of those icons if i click on the little arrow here uh open stream deck icon library what that's going to do is pop up this one and this is where you're going to have all the icons that you've downloaded from the store basically so all of the the built-in ones but also the ones that you've downloaded from the store i've just realized if i got to trip mode on uh oh no it wasn't tough uh but anyway there you go so there is the uh the premiere pro ones and you can basically just i've got some in here for illustrator as well again sideshow fx they are really nice little icons i've got their photoshop one and their final cut one and then there's some other ones there's that davinci resolve one so that's the one that i've just installed and you can see it's just appeared in here so let's just pick one of these at random so click on that it's very slow today that's strange hmm that's strange um so what's supposed to happen is you just click on these and it just sort of adds them in oh it's done it already it was doing it in the background that's why so if i just click on one of these other ones you can see it's actually changing it there i was expecting this to close down so there you go so that's how you can just choose one of these uh one of these icons um from those packs that you've downloaded um so uh so that is that is a way that you can get icons the way that i make all of my icons is actually using a keynote i'll just very briefly show you this because it's super simple really so it won't take me a second to just demonstrate i'm going to open a keynote and i'll just create a completely new document you can do this with powerpoint as well as i say i've got the adobe creative street yeah okay creative suite not creative street i could just do these all in illustrator but actually i just find it so simple and easy to create them in keynote that i figure why not and there's another thing about keynote which is kind of useful if i just come over here so here i've got her keynote open it's probably a little bit small on the screen uh it's just a completely blank slide uh just delete that um now the size of the slides as i say this would be the same in powerpoint as well but come over to the document uh you'll find that you've got two options here so the slide size is either going to be widescreen 16x9 or standard 4x3 but actually you've got this here custom slide size so all you're going to do in here is just make it a square basically and now the resolution of the the keys on stream deck i think it's 32 pixels by 32 pixels um however just make it any size and it will scale it down so uh make it i don't know a thousand by a thousand like that so now you've got a square slide what you could also do is uh we looked at how you could make like different colored backgrounds on that slide on the um the icon generator from uh elgato well what we could do is we could actually come over here and just change the the background in the slide master so if i just click out of here this is a bit small actually just come to here i've got this all squished up into a small little space just bear with me a second and what i want to do is make that a bit smaller format there we go right so if i come into this one edit slide layout what you might want to do is where it says you know what presentation software is like it creates all these different templates of slides that you can go and add in all of your stuff so this is editing the slide master now what you might want to do is just delete all of these uh and i'll just put that as blank delete all of these like that and we'll just leave a blank one but then perhaps the background color we want of this one is maybe blue uh you might want to then uh create another one so duplicate that but i'll make the background color of this one as uh i don't know red something like that so now we've got a series of different sort of background colors so just use three for example you can make those obviously whatever color you want click on done so that is our slide master done um and now um if we go and want to create a icon then what we can do is there are a huge number of sort of pictograms already built in to keynote and the same with powerpoint as well so you may find that if you just come into here and click on shape as well as just general shapes you've also got all of these other different ones in here so if i come down this list all these different pictograms you may find something so for example the one that i use for my home icon if i type in home then it's just got a picture of a house the color of that is uh happens to be the exact color of the background which is not useful let me just change that a second so i'll make it make it red or yellow these are terrible colors that i'm choosing here aren't they but you get the idea so there we've got a picture of a house maybe we want to create another one which is um i don't know for a video call or something like that so what you can do here though is if you click on add slide now it's got these templates which are these sort of backgrounds that we just created so you might want to have that as a something on a red background click on shape and then uh let's type in phone old school phone so we've now just created a little phone icon so you can see that it's really easy once you've got this to just go through and create all of these different uh um icons because you're just literally going through and adding in a new slide adding a new slide and adding the pictograms obviously you can just drag and drop images so maybe you've got some little transparent background image that you want to use for these uh maybe the logo for something for an application that you want to use or a website you want to use so you could just drag and drop that in there as well and if i just actually open up uh my sort of template with all my icons in this one over here so these are all the all the icons that i've created and i'm just creating them in here uh just in this way and the good thing about this is once you've created a series of slides or series of icons if you just export those as images so just do file export to and then uh images and again it would be the same same sort of process with powerpoint you just select the uh the slides that you want to export and in this case i've got 540 but you could you know if you just made some new ones you could just export just those as png and then click next and it just exports them all as individual files so once you've created them you export in one go and it just creates a whole set of files for you um you know one for each icon that you've created one little tip that i'll give here as well is i find that it's good to have a sort of consistent look and feel to them so these for example are ones that i use for my overlays in ecam uh so this is my little way of signifying that it's kind of one layer over the top of another so this would be all of my ecam overlays and you can see that they've got a same sort of consistent look and feel to them these ones are for things related to recording live streaming uh adding a timestamp um things like that and you'll notice that all the sort of sizes of them are consistent and that's one thing from a design point of view just to make sure that you've got a sort of consistent look and feel to them well one way that you can sort of cheat to do that if i come up to one of these ones is if i come and get this for a second i'll just create a new one and then i'll paste this in so what i've got here is if you search for ios icon template um what apple did when they changed from i forget which version of ios it was but they went from a point of where they had lots of uh skeuomorphism in their icon design for the iphone where the notepad for example looked like a leather-bound notepad and everything kind of looked like the physical device that it was meant to represent and at some point they had a complete redesign of the whole ios system where they wanted to unify the look of all of the icons and so they created this icon template and if you look at all the mac uh sorry all the ios icons that apple create they kind of fall within this template and so you know making sure you don't have anything outside of the bounding box uh from here this very outside one if you've got any circular elements then it generally fills this large circle uh so smaller circular elements fill this middle one and they use it as basically just a way to lay out um icons and use it as a design template really and so i use this when i'm creating my icons as well so that i get a consistent look and feel to them uh so that they do all uh well they do all have that sort of consistent look to them so for example here you can see the uh just to call back to what keeler was saying about the the youtube icon pack this is all the youtube icons and you can see that uh basically this fits within that central box uh this outside circle fits within the outside circle that we saw in the template and it's just got um as i say this consistent look these do not fall outside of that very outside boundary and the actual size of them is represent is similar to that central uh box that was in the template so yeah searching for the ios icon design template is a great way to do it you can find a sort of transparent version of it usually um so this is just a uh in fact i don't think that it's transparent but you can get a i don't know it is transferring anything but you can get a transparent version of it that just sits over the in the background so i just have that in my uh slides when i go to create a new one uh and then uh use that as the the guideline uh or the guide to um to create them and as i say that is all of the icon packs that are on my website i've just created them in keynote so it is really easy to uh to make these and to you know get a consistent look across all of your icons these are just the ones as i say that i use for ecomm for uh for my um uh for when i'm recording and live streaming and things like that uh so definitely uh worth having a look at that like i say you can do that with um uh with powerpoint as well and i just find it's a lot quicker i think you can do with canva as well so if you are a canva user same kind of thing applies it's just a case of creating a square um a square template that you're going to use or a square slide that you are going to going to use um so let me just have a little look about um where are we up to i think i've covered off so that is how to add the um uh the icons i think i've covered off most of the things on here i will just then come on to the sort of productivity uses we've sort of dipped in and out of this um but uh really it comes down to uh yeah looking at any automation app that you use on your mac so like keyboard maestro i won't go down into the keyboard maestro rabbit hole but um basically keyboard maestro having said that i won't go down into the rabbit hole uh keyboard maestro is a um um automation app for the uh for the mac and there are similar ones here for um uh for pc as well but this is uh the one that i know how to use on a mac so keyboard maestro basically is for creating macros and so the way that works is uh you've got different groupings of macros so you can organize all of your macros but then if we go in and create a new one basically the way it works is um you've got a series of triggers so you can have actions that are triggered by you kind of macros that are triggered by keyboard shortcuts but you can also have them triggered by a whole load of other things like for example when i'm at the coffee shop wi-fi turn off my uh you know sensitive network connections or things like that that you don't want transmitting data over an open wi-fi uh you can have it for uh triggered by time so at a certain time of the day i want it to run a backup or transfer files from one drive to another uh to do like drive maintenance and things like that so there's all kinds of different action different triggers that you can have for your macros uh you know it could be just when you open a specific app do something so when i open uh ecamm have it sh turn off certain things that are going to show up my bandwidth for example that might be another use case or when you connect a certain device do things so there's lots of different triggers but in actual fact if you're going to create a a macro for keyboard maestro that you're only going to be triggering from stream deck we can actually just leave this completely blank um so this is the kind of like the triggering part um but then down here is where you can add the action that you want to perform with this macro and i say action but it's actually actions you can have a whole complex series of actions and really this is the area where some people look at keyboard maestro and get um a little bit daunted by all that it can do because if i click on new action um these are all the different uh actions that you can perform with it and it's a really a massive long list and in fact it's even more than it looks there because um there's little sub things that you can do within them so for example you can have it uh if i do a mouse for example that was one we were talking about earlier so move or click are the mouse so i could have it when when i press a button it's going to move the mouse to a specific location and then it's going to click the mouse but i could also have it just actually double-click the mouse or triple-click i could have it just only move the mouse to that point sometimes you want to move the mouse over something to highlight something on the screen um but you could also then if i maybe say click but then maybe i want to actually drag it as well so maybe you want to literally click on something and drag it to somewhere else on the screen so you can drag it and then in terms of where you want to click you can either click on a specific um point on the screen or you can click relative to a specific window or you can click on a specific image so down at the bottom here you've got found images center so now what i could do is let's say i wanted to click on let's say that this was the login sign for your particular whatever it was gmail or whatever we were talking about earlier on uh let's say that i want to i want to actually when i activate this i want it to go and click over on like this image obviously i wouldn't do this because it's in keyboard maestro but you get the idea what i could do is i could take a screenshot of that image one second so take a little screenshot of that image just there so i've now grabbed a screenshot of it and then what i could do is i could drag this image now and drop it in there so you can see that it's got a picture of that little image in it so now when i activate this it's going to actually find that image on the screen and it's going to move the mouse over to it so if i click on run it's probably going to confuse itself now because we've got two of the same image on the screen but basically when you run the macro it's going to find the image and click on it and that's actually how i automate the upload of my videos because it opens up a website first of all and we can do that so if you want to go to a url so open a url so i could drag that in first so that might be i'm going to go to uh i'm going to go to uh i don't know whatever it is gmail or in my case i go to youtube studio then i'm going to go to a found image which is the open a uh oh sorry upload a video then you have to go through and uh drag the video onto the the the area so you can create a really complex set of a complex chain of actions and just as i mentioned with um stream deck how it's useful to um uh hello melvin just notice you popped in great to see you here um yeah just as i mentioned about stream deck the the way to go about it is rather than necessarily try and plan absolutely everything out for the beginning obviously if you're if you're doing a show on ecam or something and you want to have specific scenes then yeah you need to plan that out but when it comes to productivity and uh all of the things that you can use that for uh just to sort of build this up over time as you realize this stuff you do over and over again and that's the same with uh keyboard maestro is look for the things that you're doing these repetitive tasks that you're doing over and over again that rather than you go through all these steps you could just press a button and it would just do it all for you and then break down that into logical steps of what it is you're doing and then that's how you would go through and program it in in here but as i say it can be a bit daunting to look at everything that it can do so rather than look at the whole scope of everything it can do it's rather a case of just thinking like knowing that it can probably do whatever it is that you want to do and then just look for those things that you need to uh to automate and then figure out how to do it as opposed to going in and trying to take it all in because there's really quite a lot in there to take in but in any case that is basically what keyboard maestro is it is allowing you to create a chain of actions building them into macros and then trigger them from um either these uh triggers like keyboard shortcuts or from uh you know other events that happen uh but as i say the real beauty of this is we can actually just trigger it with the stream deck and the way that you do that is we just use this plugin that is called km link as i say there is a one if you search in the uh the store um then if i come over to the store and i'll go to uh discover um sorry two plugins um then there is here if i search for keyboard maestro there is a keyboard maestro plugin so there you go there is that one keyboard maestro and it's by stairway software who make keyboard maestro um so um what that is for is triggering a macro and keyboard maestro but also going the other way and triggering stuff in stream deck i find though that this km link is actually a much more streamlined way to do it so i've got both but i tend to use km link and the way km link works is if i come over to the plugins and then i'll come to custom and then here you've just got this km link drag this onto here and all you're going to do is just select the macro from the drop-down list at the bottom um like this and then you can just select that was the one that i just created so if i was to press that now it would go and basically do whatever we told it to do go move the mouse over to that uh that particular point on the screen so that's where the stream deck really just becomes as i mentioned in the uh the description and in the the trailer it's kind of like the ultimate productivity tool because it gives you access to all of these things that you can do with keyboard maestro and whilst keyboard maestro obviously we could do all of this before with keystrokes but one of the uh sticking points with keyboard maestro is actually building up that muscle memory and and remembering what the keyboard shortcut is and whilst yes you know you can go through a process to try and commit these things to memory if um if you're having difficulty you know remembering all these keyboard shortcuts you've made there is no real way to go and remember them except maybe go and you know write them down or open keyboard maestro the beauty of stream deck is um you've got a button with an icon on it that's hopefully you know you've created it so it's descriptive of what it does or at least it actually says it so rather than having to try and remember the keyboard shortcut or go and hunt for it written down somewhere you can literally just look at the stream deck and see it and it's so i've found that it's been um it's really opened the uh opened keyboard maestro up more to be a lot more accessible to be able to just trigger things with the the touch of a button i should mention though if you are not using keyboard maestro but you're using shortcuts so mac os shortcuts uh which has been on mac since monterey if i uh come over here one second where is it this one um there is also a plug-in for shortcuts and that is called ah there you go cunningly it's called shortcuts it's made by um i forget the name of the the chat now it's not made by apple it's a third party but it's really good and it's exactly the same process you just drag and drop this single action on and then you just go and pick out your um uh your actual shortcuts i've got videos on both of these by the way on my my channel so uh here you just go and pick out a particular uh shortcut from your list of shortcuts so um so yeah it's really really easy to use and again you can just use that to trigger all of the the things that you've got on your your uh all the shortcuts you've got i should say on your computer uh now there is another side to this just bear with me one second though i'll just quickly check in uh melvin what are you asking is there a window mover shortcut or app to allow you to press a stream deck button to open a series of windows that you need there certainly is now i use um i use an application called moom m o m and what that allows you to do is first of all you can do window management with that where you can you know click and it will just move a window to a particular point on the screen but what you can also do is you can create snapshots so specific layouts that you've got of your screen and then when you press a a keyboard shortcut it will actually arrange all of those uh windows into one place uh i've got a video about that on the channel as well but um it's a little bit hard to uh to kind of demo it actually uh because it relies on me having all the right windows open so if i show you for example what i've got open on my my computer right now uh not that one i'll tell you what it's because i've got ecom live on the wrong window let me move ecam over here a second there you go so this is my my desktop as it is at the moment it's a 4k 43 inch display so i've got stuff all spread out all over the place um but moon basically just sits in uh if i come into here uh ah do you know what moon does won't let me show it whilst i'm in live demo mode that is frustrating uh okay so basically what you do with moom though is it actually sits in the um the little green dots on your um you know you've got the red the yellow the maximize minimize uh well it's kind of like an extension of that but for some reason in live demo mode in ecamp it doesn't pop up which is annoying but what you can do is you can save a snapshot so i could say right well i want my windows all laid out like that on the screen and i save that as a snapshot and then i can use a keyboard shortcut to basically put everything back in that position um so in terms of your question then is there a move a window mover shortcut or app to allow you to press a stream deck button and open a series of windows that you need uh there are a couple of approaches here if you uh don't use the stream deck what you could do is in the um uh if you don't use keyboard maestro are very pardon in stream deck what you could do is create a multi-action so let's have a look at how to do it uh you could create a multi-action to open all of those applications let's go through and do this um so you would come in here just right click on any uh any empty space create multi-action and then you double click in it to uh go into there and then what you'd do is you would use the system and the open command and you could open you know whatever applications you needed to open so let me just say you're going to open four different applications um so there you just go and choose here choose the specific application i won't go through through and add them all in but let's just take one for an example so here's my list of apps let's say i'm going to open uh whatever it is take one random calculator um so you're going to go through and open all those apps and then all you'd simply do is you'd use the hotkey and then let's say you had assigned a hotkey because you can do this in moom you would assign a hotkey for that particular layout as whatever it was i don't know something like that so then it's going to open all those apps and then it's going to press the hotkey for moom to make it arrange them all into those places that is exactly what i do um with with the different things that i do on my mac i have hotkeys assigned to or buttons assigned to all of these uh these different things one thing that i do though is i actually do the uh the opening part in keyboard maestro i do all of this kind of stuff in keyboard moisture i find it's more more efficient and it's just it's just the way that i do things so i would just rather than open the apps in stream deck itself i would tend to have it all wrapped up in a single macro and keyboard maestro and do it that way but this is how you do it with multi-actions one thing to bear in mind if you're doing something like this is obviously when you open an app there may be some time required to actually open the app so it's always best to actually add in a delay and you can come in here to where is it uh stream deck and then you'll notice that we've got this one called delay so what you want to do is just drag this and drop it between opening all the apps and then triggering that shortcut to move them all because the um uh yeah i say you just need to give the apps time to to open up properly and open up all their windows now when you add in a delay you'll see down here it says delay in uh and the delays in milliseconds so that being 1000 being one second um so let's say you want to just give it i don't know depending on how how quickly your apps open up you might have to just play around with this to just get it exactly right but um better to be on the side of caution if you don't mind waiting three seconds maybe make that three thousand milliseconds and then what's going to happen is when you press the button it's going to open those four apps all in all in a row and then it's going to um uh trigger the moom shortcut for um for doing that let me just quickly uh grab the link for uh moom since we're talking about it there are a couple of other apps that do this um but moom i have found to be uh the best because of the snapshot feature um there's there seems to be some overlapping uh between some of these features on different applications so there's one called magnet as well which is to move apps into different locations but it doesn't have the same snapshot feature but i've just dropped the link to moom in the in the chat um so whilst we're talking about delay though um what you'll notice is when you come on to any of these actions um as well as having the title and the app or you know whatever is the details about it there's you'll see that there's this little timer here and it says customize delays uh this one could be potentially a source of confusion if you're trying to add a delay between uh actions because uh you might well think that oh well this is this is delay so let me add that in um so let me just explain what this is this was something that was added in the the last version i think the last software update for stream deck um and it says custom action delays and we've actually got two um previously there was always a built-in delay between actions so for example if you open one app it was always going to wait 200 milliseconds i think it was between going on to the next one so it's not actually going to trigger all of these things exactly at once there's always a sort of little built-in delay into it this delay that we've added in this one where we've physically added an action in that's called delay there you can make the delay whatever you want so from you know one millisecond all the way up to you know an hour if you want uh or or more uh so as long as you enter the timing in milliseconds you can make this really whatever you want you could make it a day i guess and it would just sit there counting down for you um but this this built-in delay then here um as i say this was just a stock 200 milliseconds whether you liked it or not there was always a 200 millisecond delay in in in between this chain of actions and some people said right well actually we want to try and reduce that and um an example would be like if i've got a a like a stinger overlay on a transition in on a live stream where you know i want to switch scenes but then i've got this thing that comes over the top of the scene as well at the same time um then i would maybe want those things all to happen at the same time um and so what they added in is this custom action delays and this first one here is basically simulating you can see it's got a picture of a button going down and coming up maybe you can't see it for some reason my little my little zoom thing is not quite oh there is so this this first one is basically simulating what is the amount of time between you pressing the button and releasing it again so if you think about when you are pressing a key on on a keyboard um sometimes if you were to just try and do it too quickly it wouldn't even register that you'd pressed it and this is the reason why they had this 200 millisecond delay in in originally because they wanted to make it foolproof basically so that it would always trigger um but if you've got something where it could actually be triggered really quickly then you can actually move this slider down from 100 milliseconds all the way down to one so you know effectively just uh one thousandth of a second um they've also then got a delay built in between one thing happening and another because if you i suppose it's a bit like if you try and press two keys on a typewriter do people still you do that at the same time then they'll kind of like get jammed so this was trying to work in some that's a bit of a bad analogy isn't it for a tech channel but um this was a the second one here is the time between the first and the second action or between two concurrent actions so leaving a little bit of a space between them and again uh this was always 100 milliseconds before so the combination of the both of these is 200 milliseconds so if you find that you've got something where you think really i need these actions to be much tighter together then you could consider tweaking these but just be careful because if you make these too low you might find that um it causes issues and the thing doesn't trigger right so i'm only explaining all of this because if you saw this delay you might think that that's the way that you're supposed to control the delay between two actions whereas in actual fact the real way to add delay is to use this delay feature and this is really only if you are doing something where you're finding that there this this you know 0.2 of a second is just too long for you to wait in the actions this is where you've got the fine control over it and as i say it's the first one is the time of the actual press of the imaginary press of whatever button it is and the second one here is the time between that imaginary press and then you going on to the next one so that is just to explain what that is there um so uh hello there uh iceboy nash godfrey uh great to see you uh and you're welcome uh so let me have a little look so your local tire center i want to press one button on the stream decker at stream decker stream deck to automate sending an email to a specific specific address um uh you certainly can book time anytime yeah so um i can add a little link into that so uh yeah i do do uh consultations obviously and there it is take one tech dot io consultation uh but let me just try and answer the question though shella because you want to press one button on the stream deck to automate sending an email to a specific address um that's an interesting one actually because uh let's try that because what we can do is if i create a multi-action we'll give this a go uh create new multi-action so the first thing we want to do in this sense is we want to create a new email i'm going to assume you're using mail.app you could do this if you're using gmail if we're using gmail then the first step would be to obviously open gmail so in that case you would go to a website and you could add in gmail but what i'm going to do is i'm going to open uh mail.app so there we'd go for choose and we go to mail.app so if i search for mail somewhere in here okay now i say open this open command actually if you have got um uh if you've got um the the application is already open what this does is it actually brings the app to the front so it's kind of open or actually activate as well he says nearly knocking over his water um so we're activating mail then what we'd do is command n would create a new email so what we could do then is you might want to add a delay in as well because as we've mentioned if mail wasn't open maybe you want to add a couple of seconds in there to three seconds just to give it time to open then we're going to use hotkey so the hotkey would be command n to create a new mail and then you are wanting to basically when you create a new mailing let me just check this up a second oh sorry thank you very much i'm just getting some very helpful thing turn off the comment that helps uh so what i want to do here is uh thanks rich um if i create a new email yeah so when you create a new email it's going to go into the the to field to begin with so when you've created a new email then what we're going to do is we want to add in then [Music] now do you oh yeah then you would type in text because that's the one that's going to trigger typing in a string of text so then you would put in uh in this case you want to send to a specific a specific address so then you would type in whatever the email address was like that and then that would then paste that would effectively type that into that field then what you would do is you would then want to go and tab into the presumably the i don't know if you'd want to even add in a subject so if you wanted to add in a subject then you'd need to tab twice so we'll add in a hotkey and the hotkey we'll put is tab uh can we do it in here might have to search for the drop down so there we've got the tab then you would want to actually tab again because i think tab goes to cc and then tab would go to the subject so then you would do that again hotkey and then just click the drop down and go tab and then that would take you to the the subject line then uh so if you've got a stock subject that you're going to put in every time you would then do another text one so if you want a specific subject and then you would do hotkey to tab again and that would take you into the body and then you could then maybe if it's always to the same person if this is what this is for then you would do text and you go hi chris and then return return like that and then so that basically that sequence now if i were to press that what that should do is if i just press that button where did i put that now which one of those was it uh it was uh not that one was it that one this is why you should always name your shortcuts that was the one there so this was the uh the male one uh let's try this let's see if this is going to work i probably have not put enough of a delay in but it's done it so that has just opened up that email it's typed in email too it jumped over typed the subject in and then started the email so uh so that is how you could you could do that with uh with that i i've got lots of things for these for similar for um uh that i'll do with keyboard maestro for specifically for um uh for email stuff as well so that would be the the way that you would you would do that um so [Music] so yeah that's uh that one is open an email then press stream deck button for gmail yeah so you could there's you could do it in gmail uh gmail as uh as well and it just be with all these things it's just a case of breaking it down in terms of uh what is the sequence of events that you actually take in order to go through and do whatever it is that you are you're doing so you're just going to go through and just sort of uh and then so presumably if you are um so this one an auto send i don't if you want to just open up a an email for you to then type something so then we've done that part um if you wanted to then actually send it as well then it would just be a case of adding on to the end you know if you wanted just a stock email that you sent and you press a button and it's going to send a specific email to a specific person every time then in that case um all you would do is what is the uh the send for an email so it's going to be what is it there is what's the keyboard shortcut for send email send uh shift command d would then send it so if you wanted to actually have a full thing that's going to send a specific uh mail then you could do it that way as well so yeah from an automation point of view it's a really a really powerful um powerful automation tool there's one other thing that i haven't uh covered on today though which is something else that's in the store so let's just have a look at that because there is also um music and sound effects so if you are using this for streaming on youtube or wherever it happens to be uh or you're making uh making videos then you do have the right to use this their music library now it's not going to be as great as something like epidemic so i suppose this would be good leading for me to say that for all of the uh the extensive music that you hear on my channels which is uh not that much really is it but nevertheless i do use epidemic sound so epidemic sound you basically pay a monthly fee and you get access to a massive catalog of music and sound effects you can hear some music in the background now though can't you and that has all come from epidemics so head over to take one tech dot io slash epidemic um and uh yeah it's just a really good library of high quality music and what it means is that you are not gonna have to worry about getting any uh copyright claims or things like that on your content be it on youtube twitch tick tock twitter in your podcast wherever it happens to be they've got a great uh selection of uh music at epidemic um but probably countering that very little uh plug there um there is music available on stream deck i'd say that it's not as as varied and as uh extensive however if you're only looking for one piece of music or one particular sound effect it's definitely worth checking out the stream deck store i know some people get a bit um uh what's the word um precious about these things saying oh there's better music on epidemic and for sure there is however if the one bit of music you need happens to be on the stream deck store then it would be it would be foolish not to have a look there first so over on the uh stream deck store uh come down to uh music on the left hand side and we've got sound effects and there is just a series of tracks i've got to say the only ones i've actually used from here because i do use epidemic the only ones that i've actually downloaded are ones that i've given when i've done a previous demo of this very feature so i've obviously downloaded the first two at some point in the past to demo this so let's let's have a look at this one you can go through and there is search it does say actually there's over 10 000 available i think that's more than when i first looked at it so there's got to be something good in there haven't there so if i just come and just choose one at random this one happy and inspiring now i need to turn this up so that you can actually hear it don't i uh just bear with me one second here we go i'll just adjust the volume for you so if that sounds like your cup of tea then you can go through and obviously search for something else but if that does then you just click on the download and then it's going to download it as you would expect click on download there you can see it's downloading there is exactly the same with sound effects as well and now if i come out of here um and in stream deck one of the plugins is called uh soundboard here and there it's gonna say play audio so you click on play audio and then from here you select the file now you could just play any of your own audio if you've got your own tracks or things like that that you've downloaded then you can just do that from there as well but otherwise click on choose and what it's going to do is it's going to just open up the place on your computer where it stores these these files so there it is uh what was that one we just caught had it was called happy and inspiring so there it is now one thing you'll notice is the file type of these is a dot stream deck audio so it is kind of they've made it proprietary you can't easily just drag these out and create an mp3 of it so although technically you have the right to use these on your youtube videos you do kind of have to without any without going through some issue hassle uh you have to trigger them from stream deck so i'll click on this one uh but now we've now got that uh on that particular button so if i press the button uh there we go you are hearing that now so uh that is now triggered from that particular button on the stream deck and i can stop it and as i say you've got the right to use it on your uh on your your all your your channels um but if you were gonna try and add this in in an edit then obviously it's a little bit tricky there is a way that you can do it um but it's a little bit long-winded and i'm not sure that technically it's uh it's it's within their terms of service or not but obviously you've got to have a stream deck and be using a stream deck to use all of this this music but there is a way that you can that you can kind of extract these um so that is just another little feature that you have of stream deck and like i say although the uh range of music the quality of music might not be quite there with epidemic if you've found the one bit that you need it's certainly worth worth looking it out so let's have a little look um so use this instead of keyboard maestro uh so that would be that you're talking about the the little automation thing that i did there um yeah you can do i just tend to use keyboard maestro because i use it for everything so it's kind of like my go-to place to put everything and then i know it's all there and then i tend to just trigger things from the uh from the stream deck rather than build them all out in there uh you also get a bit more flexibility on to in terms of uh all that stuff i was talking about with delay and all that kind of thing you can do that from there as well incidentally with uh keyboard maestro uh not to make this too much about keyboard maestro one of the things you can do with keyboard maestro though is you can actually um have it click or activate a menu command in an application that isn't the front most application and if you remember when i was talking about the um the shortcut key that you've got in stream deck which was over here let me just come to a fresh page where it's a little bit less cluttered we've got the keyboard shortcut which was in system and this was hotkey so this is where you can basically trigger a hotkey and so if you think about something that might be in the menu uh in the mac then they've obviously generally you know it'll tell you what the uh the keyboard shortcut is associated with that um and anything you can do with hotkeys usually that you can find it in the menu tree as well um so the issue with using hotkeys is they rely on the application that you're trying to control being the active application because they unless it's a glo you can set global shortcuts but generally uh if you open an app and you're using the the built-in shortcuts then they are just going to be controlling you know the app when it is at the the front um with keyboard maestro though what you can do is you can uh use let me see if i can just quickly pull this one up if i go back over to keyboard maestro and let me just delete these actions from here we'll just do this and then if i do this one menu select or show menu item now this what this allows you to do is basically trigger anything from any menu of any application that's open even if it is not the front most application so here you can see it says at the moment it says in front application but what i could do is i could just come over to let's say discord and then what you do is you would look for the the menu title you can actually go into the menu tree though just by clicking on this which is off the screen let me move this over so you can see it so i've selected discord and now it's giving me the whole menu tree of discord if i go into discord there so now we've got uh all these different things so undo redo view reload window so all those and there's actually a huge amount of things that can access in there so it's maybe a bad example e-cam live would be another example though although they've got a really great plug-in or chrome so you can come and just basically access this is just the full menu tree of those applications so what that means is you can create a keyboard maestro uh macro that just purely goes and triggers a menu item in an application and the point here is even if it isn't the front most application so an example of where i've used that in my stream deck would be if i go into my youtube icon set so i'll come over here so what i did was i often find that i'm watching youtube videos uh because i'm watching tutorials i'm studying at the the university of youtube and i'm watching the youtube in the background whilst i'm actually doing what they're talking about in the video or it might be that i'm just watching something in the background while i'm working on something else but i want to be able to have full control over youtube even if it isn't the active application because there are controls for youtube in the browser you know for forward backwards and pause speed up all that kind of stuff but you do have to have that as the active application and so what i wanted was a set of controls so that i can be doing something on the computer while still controlling full control over the youtube player in the browser uh and so all of these controls that i created here um are basically keyboard maestro controls and they trigger a particular macro in keyboard maestro so you hear it's configuring uh here it is triggering if i can get my words out here it is triggering the macro called youtube toggle full screen so in keyboard maestro i've then got set up a macro for it to toggle the full screen in in youtube and so when i press that button and i'm watching a youtube video it uh obviously toggles it full screen uh we've also got play pause skip we've got it to go to a specific point uh we've got it to skip through timestamps so when you're watching stuff with timestamps uh in uh in youtube then i've got these buttons to basically go to the next or the previous time stamp and so on speed up slow down all of that kind of thing going to the theater view or whatever they call it um and indeed that's one of the the icon packs that is available in my store as well and with that particular icon pack because it is all built around uh keyboard maestro i also include the keyboard maestro macros and also the the icon pack and the stream deck profile so basically if you've got keyboard maestro download km link on the uh the stream deck and then you just import the profile and import the stream deck macros sorry the keyboard maestro macros and then you can just control the uh uh youtube from your stream deck uh so that is one of the uh the advantages i forget how i get onto this now that is one of the advantages though of using uh keyboard maestro yes it's disappointed use this instead of keyboard maestro that's why i um that's why i tend to use keyboard maestro just because for me it's easier to go and create all of those things in in there um so uh and and as i say the same would go for the uh shortcuts as well um being able to trigger things if you use shortcuts you can do it there but there is a huge amount that you can do just using the um uh just using the the the stream deck itself uh one other little thing because i find that i'm often going in and out of a stream deck you can actually just open up the stream deck application to just by using having a stream deck button which is open and open stream deck and i don't know why i didn't think of that so before because stream decks just open up open all the time in the menu bar but if you use that open command i'll show you what i'm talking about um come into this profile here go into this next page there we go right so what i mean is if i come into stream. come into the system where is it open and then when i choose open i choose a stream deck the stream deck app so i'm just going to search for stream deck app in applications and where's it gone now stream deck dot app it should be here there it is so i've just opened i'm just opening the stream deck app and what that does is if you find that you're constantly going in and out of stream deck like as in into this app um you can actually set a button to open itself up so if i close this down now and then i press that button on the stream deck it's going to open that up again so i found that that was useful uh i didn't realize that for like 10 months of me going in and constantly opening it and i'd open it from the menu bar but you can open it from from there um one other thing that i'll talk about though is i talked about switching profiles um and how you know that's i find that's the best way to organize all the different use cases i have but if you are using the um the stream deck pedal um then this is actually a great way to switch between the different profiles that you've got for the pedal so just in case uh you missed it earlier in case you weren't aware as well as the regular stream deck device there is also a stream deck pedal and that looks like this and basically it's you've got three different uh there you go three different buttons there's a big central one and one on either side uh it's sort of spring-loaded it actually comes with different springs so that you can swap them around and give it a different tension but this is what i've been using to magnify my screen and switch different scenes and things like that as well so that is the stream deck pedal so what you can do is you can create different profiles for the pedal but how do you go about switching those around and how do you know what you've got on each pedal well um just as we have been controlling the the regular stream deck here if i come to this stream deck excel just at the top and switch to the pedal you can see that here you've basically just got three buttons and in exactly the same way as we've been doing before you can just literally just drag and drop any action onto any any button that you want so this is how you can program that but you've obviously only got three buttons then it's really useful to be able to switch between them so at the moment i want to have these actions but sometimes i might want to switch out and do something else with them well what i've done is uh just as we have with the regular stream deck i've also got myself a series of profiles just for the pedals that's what all of these are as well and the thing that i want to show you is just as you can switch profiles on a regular uh stream deck you can also control the profiles on any other uh stream deck from another as well so if i go into stream deck here and i'll go to switch profile um you'll notice that the default says uh this device so you're just going to be switching profile and if i click on here it'll bring up all of the list of profiles that i've got on this actual stream deck itself but what i can do is i can come down here and actually switch on the pedal instead and so there it's going to give me a list of all the different profiles that i've got on the on the the pedal and so by pressing a button on my regular stream deck i can switch the profile on the pedals that are under my feet and what i actually did was i then created a sort of little screen so let me come out here go into this page here i've got these two buttons um the first one here or this one over here is for me to change my uh my pedal profile so if i click on that one that's basically taking me through to a profile on my stream deck that's got switches to switch to any of the other profiles that i'm using on the the pedal um so that's what that is doing so now i can basically just switch these out if i'm doing my amazon show then i press this one and what it's going to do is change the the profile that's on my my pedal and i'll show you that in action in a moment but the other one that's quite useful to have in here if i just get back to that is i've got this one which is a little button that when you press it it actually shows you a graphical representation here floating on screen and in fact let me just move that out of the way it does just float anywhere on the screen it shows you your pedal and shows you what actions you've got on each pedal so that's useful if you are switching between different uh profiles it's useful to have there as a little guide just so that you can see like oh which profile am i in because obviously there's no indicator on it as to what you're in and that is actually from just if i come back to here go into this demo one for a second i'm jumping all around and that is if you come into your stream deck actions it's this one here called action bar uh and when you click on action bar that basically just toggles here it is this little free floating one when i press this button it basically just toggles that on and off so having that as a as a little free floating thing so you can see which one you're on is uh really useful um and also by the way if i close this down this is something that i literally only found out this week as well i should learn to click the buttons more but if you click on just this little icon from this floating one it will also open up that stream deck thing as well so you can also just click that from from here and it will open it up but there you can see it's now showing me what buttons i've got assigned to my pedals so if i now go back into um that switcher page so this is the the the switcher that i set up as i press these buttons on my stream deck you'll notice that it's actually switching through the actions that i've got on my uh on my uh my pedal buttons as well and you can see that because it's kind of jumping around there we go let me go back to that one there we go got there in the end so um yeah really handy to have that little uh that this little switcher there and then to be able to just control the the pedals from there is really useful uh really useful as well let me just check in um so tim hello first of all hey tim great to see you um so could you do something like that for youtube in windows with auto hotkey uh you certainly could yeah so i'm talking about uh mac because obviously i use the mac rather than windows and keyboard maestro allows you to send the commands to the application even if it's not the front most application but of course uh you could just use a regular hotkey and have it that um uh yeah on windows if you're watching in your browser that youtube still has all of these shortcuts for play pause and skip and all that kind of stuff so it's just a case of getting the keyboard shortcuts for youtube he says quickly searching for it youtube keyboard shortcuts and then programming those in and the article is here so if i just drop this in i'll just drop in the support article from google but this is all the keyboard shortcuts for um uh for for youtube and so yeah it just be a case of adding these all in i'm not sure what the equivalent for keyboard maestro is on the mac um f on the pc i'm sure there's another similar kind of automation app that will uh because the the little trick that i was trying to do there was actually pass the command to youtube even if it wasn't the front most app so i might be watching it but i might be working on whatever it is i'm i'm learning or doing or working on um but in any case yes those i've dropped a link to the keyboard shortcuts uh for youtube so you can find uh find all of those um let me just see you can also make alt-reaction with the uh the timer to change back to the original profile yeah certainly can do that um oh and you know what i've that's just made me think actually um so this thing about um in doing it in windows and wanting to basically trigger uh trigger the control youtube whilst you're doing something else one thing you could do is you could actually do a multi-action uh where the first action is to um open or activate your browser again then you put the keyboard shortcut then you have like command tab or whatever the control tab i don't know what the windows equivalent is whatever it is to just tab back to the original application so you could then in that way have a um have the have the command be passed to youtube if you're watching in the background whilst you're still working on something in it so it'd basically just do a really quick switch to the browser enter the command and then it would switch back to whatever application you're working in so that would actually be another another way to do that exact same thing um uh yeah the stream deck pedal so i've got i had a different pedal um before the stream pedal came out which was a um a really generic third-party uh um uh thing i think it was about twenty dollars or thirty dollars something like that it's exactly the same usb switch basically um and then i used uh keyboard maestro to use to program all the shortcuts uh so i had a three pedal in fact i've still still use that one at the same time that's my left foot my right foot is the stream that pedal um but the stream deck pedals just made it so easy to drag and drop stuff on it's like you don't have to go through and program anything so uh yeah there's a it sounds ludicrous when you first tell people that you've got a pedal in your control and stuff with your feet as well as your hands but once you try it you can't live without it so so yeah the overhead camera that i've got that is um showing the stream deck is actually i don't know if you can see that it is just my uh an iphone 5 xs and i'm using an application called camo by reincubate i should really have a i've got an affiliate link for this somewhere but it's anyway it's called camo buy reincubate and it allows you to use your phone as a webcam so it's just that uh that i've got pointing down i've got a sort of wider shot of it as well i've really zoomed in to just show just the stream deck but um yeah it's just uh just an iphone uh just an iphone five five five xs whatever it was it came out basically the same internals as a seven so uh for the amount of time i use top-down shots it works okay for that um but uh yeah that is that is what i'm using for uh for that um so with that said if anyone's got any other questions or stuff they're trying to do with stream deck i'm happy to uh happy to answer any other questions i've pretty much covered off the sort of overall process and flow of what i was going to cover it is a really a sort of a bottomless pit when it comes to you know doing the automation kind of things and the using stream deck for productivity but if there's anything i've missed or anything that anyone has got any further questions on uh do feel free to uh feel free to ask in the chat or if you're watching on the replay in the comments or uh in the discord as well probably probably a great eye great time uh to mention the discord once again uh because we do have a discord community head over to take one tech dot io family to join the discord and uh yeah that is the the place where we sort of continue the conversation i love uh getting all the comments on youtube um it's a little bit difficult to um uh manage in terms of have actual conversations uh i get alerts you know or see when people comment but it's the continuation of a conversation that just doesn't really happen in in there as well um and live streams i love doing the live stream and have like the the conversation and stuff in here as well uh but it's not quite the same as a proper organized uh threaded conversation so uh whoops daisy it doesn't cost anything to join the discord it's uh free so take one tech dot io family uh you can head over there and then we've got all sorts of uh conversations in there on all the kind of stuff that i cover on this channel with some dedicated uh you know threads for stream deck stuff and all that kind of thing and if you are interested in uh channel memberships then you can also check those out uh those are paid memberships for the channel as a way to show support but also get a little extra level of access so one of the things that uh we do at the uh the backstage pass level is that uh whilst i'm live streaming i'm also streaming into the discord server as well into a private little area and then we continue the conversation afterwards uh but that's the sort of highest tier there are some other levels in there as well or there is also uh the good old buy me a coffee so you can also get memberships through there as well or that is a way to uh give a one-off donation or show support for the channel that is at buy me a coffee dot com slash take one tech i'm pressing all the buttons today look at this this is the trouble sometimes with too many buttons uh that was the one i was trying to put up there we go butterfingers buy me a coffee link but if there are no further questions then i shall wrap up but for those watching on the replay i will leave a link to some other uh stream deck stuff and thank you everyone for watching and for all of the great questions as i say if you've got any other questions do feel free to reach out and for those watching on the replay i will leave a link to some other great videos and a just final thank you to all of the great people who have supported the channel whose names you can see up here right now thank you very much everyone have a wonderful day

Channel: Take One Tech... with Alec

Views: 57,551

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Id: JCxigOXltEM

Length: 157min 3sec (9423 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 27 2022