Ares

Ares (Aural RPG Experience System) is a program to play music and sounds which fit to the current situation during (pen & paper) roleplaying games.

With Ares, you can select music and / or sounds which fit to general situations (fight, travel, dungeon crawl, ...) or for special events (thunderclap, appearance of a mighty enemy, ...) before the game and then play them during the game at the push of a button. More examples for the possibilities:

• Collect music for some atmospheres (mysterious, suspenseful, impressive, relaxing) and switch between them by pressing a button
• Let a door creak when it is opened
• Listen to a background of birdsong overland, to the murmuring of the crowd on a bazaar, to the cheering of the spectators in an arena, to the dripping of water in a cave
• Start a sudden thunderstorm with a thunderclap which is followed by a downpour
• Let wolves howl in irregular intervals
• Let a spacecraft pass with the typical Star Wars sound
• ... there are almost no limits to the creativity!

Ares deepens the imersion into the role-playing world and creates a whole new playing experience. Whoever has used it once, won't wish to ever miss it again!

You can run Ares either on one PC or distributed on two: one of them plays the music (e.g. a HTPC in the living room, or even a Raspberry Pi) and one is used to to select the music and sounds (e.g. a netbook or tablet). For games over the internet, it can also stream through icecast. The program already has many Features, and they are getting more over the time.

You can get a first impression of the program with the screenshot gallery. Or, alternatively, you can just download it and give it a try.


Ares is open source (GPL) and is stable by now (don't be surprised if there are no new versions for some time). Editor and Player need .NET and the Editor currently also needs Windows; the Controller needs Java.

If you've got some questions about Ares, take a look at this page first.