In this tutorial I will show you how to play music with your Taranis X9D TX that can be activated with a switch. Also you can setup S1 or S2 to adjust the volume of speaker.

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Having some music in the background adds style and flow to your FPV flying. And it’s certainly a super convenient feature to have on your radio transmitter.

Index of Content

• Convert MP3 to WAV
• Put Song File on Taranis SD Card
• Setup Switch to Play Music
• Setup Taranistaranis Volume Control

Demonstration:

Covert Music (MP3) file to WAV

The Taranis X9D can only play “.wav” sound files. Your favourite music file is most likely to be a MP3 file, so the first thing you have to do is to get it converted to WAV.

As explained in our “play custom sound track in Taranis” tutorial, you can get a free tool called Audacity to convert MP3 to WAV.

• Open your music file in Audacity
• Go to “Tracks” in the menu, and select “Stereo Track to Mono” (Your Taranis only has 1 speaker and can only play with mono tracks)
• Set “Project Rate (Hz) to 32000 (located at bottom left of the window). This is very important, if this is not set correctly, your music will not play in the Taranis
• Finally, Go to “File”, and select “Export Audio“. In the file name, make it as short as possible and avoid symbols otherwise the file might not be picked up by Taranis. I just call my music “song1”, “song2” and so on

Put Song File on Taranis SD Card

Now, put the file in this directory in your Taranis’s SD card:

\SOUNDS\en\

To access the micro SD card in your Taranis, you can either take it out physically, use a SD card adapter and insert it in your computer. Or you can simply put Taranis in Bootloader mode and access the SD card with an USB cable as a mass storage. I prefer the second way and here is how.

To put Taranis X9D into bootloader mode, simply push the 2 trim buttons toward the center, and power it on. Now plug in the USB cable and your computer should recognize the Taranis as a mass storage drive.

When finished, eject the drive safely, unplug USB and restart the Taranis X9D transmitter.

Set Up Switch To Play Song

The goal here is to play the song when we flip a switch. You can use any free switch on the radio, in this case I am using “SE” switch.

Go to the “Special Functions” page in your Taranis, set up a new function for “SE-“.

Note: This will only work in the current model you are in.

Or you can do it in “Global Functions” this will apply to all your models if you wish to have play these songs in all the models without setting up the same thing over and over again. To access “Global Functions”, long press “Menu”, and Press Page to scroll to it.

There are 2 functions you can use to play a sound track:

• BgMusic – Plays a track repeatedly, can be interrupted by the switch
• Play Track – Plays a track once, and cannot be interrupted by the switch (it will only stop when it finishes playing)

So really, you want to use “BgMusic” for playing background music. Note that you can setup a 3-position switch to play 2 different songs if you want.

There is also another useful function called “BgMusic II“. It’s basically a pause button to the background music. When it’s triggered it pauses your music, and when unpaused it starts again where it stopped.

Set Up Volume Control

The volume control changes the volume of your Taranis speaker for all the sounds coming out of it, including background music, voice sound tracks etc.

There are 2 pots (potentiometers) on the Taranis that we don’t really use for flying mini quad (S1 and S2), and they make a really handy volume control.

Go to Special Functions page in your Taranis, and create new functions for volume.

Note: This will only work in the current model you are in.

Or you can do it in “Global Functions” this will apply to all your models if you wish to have volume control in all the models without setting up the same thing over and over again. To access “Global Functions”, long press “Menu”, and Press Page to scroll to it.

We can select “ON” as the function and it would enable this function all the time. Choose “Volume as the 2 parameter, then choose S1 or S2 as the control. Finally don’t forget to enable it (tick at the end).

Now you have a Taranis that plays music while you are flying, and volume can be controlled! :) Enjoy!