Tuna Soundboard: Setup, Sounds & Best Alternatives

If you have searched for a tuna soundboard to fire off memes, sound effects, and reaction clips on a hotkey, you have landed on the free standalone soundboard app from Voicemod. This guide is built around the soundboard use case specifically: what Tuna is, how to add and import sounds, how to set hotkeys, how to route audio into Discord and OBS through a virtual microphone, how community board sharing works, where the app hits its limits, and which alternatives are worth a look, including VoxBooster’s built-in soundboard.

TL;DR

Tuna by Voicemod is a free, standalone soundboard app for Windows and macOS that plays, organizes, and hotkeys audio clips.
It outputs through a virtual microphone, so triggered sounds reach Discord, Zoom, OBS, and any app that accepts a mic input.
You can import your own MP3/WAV files, browse community-shared boards, and assign keyboard hotkeys to each clip.
Hotkey collisions, licensing on community clips, and the split between the free soundboard and paid Voicemod features are the main things to watch.
If you also want a real-time voice changer, on-device AI voice cloning, transcription, and noise suppression in the same low-latency Windows app, VoxBooster bundles a soundboard with hotkeys and OBS support and no kernel driver.

What is the Tuna soundboard?

The Tuna soundboard is a free, standalone desktop app from Voicemod that lets you play, organize, and trigger audio clips with keyboard hotkeys. It outputs through a virtual microphone, so the sounds you fire reach Discord, OBS, and other apps as if they came from your mic. Tuna focuses on sound playback and community board sharing rather than live voice transformation.

That focus is the key thing to understand. Voicemod, the company’s flagship product, is a full real-time voice changer with live filters and effects. Tuna is the slimmer, soundboard-first sibling. If your goal is purely to play clips on hotkeys and swap community boards, Tuna gives you that without the heavier voice-changing pipeline.

Tuna vs Voicemod: which one do you actually need?

People often search for “tuna by voicemod” expecting one product and find two. Here is the practical split.

Voicemod is the all-in-one suite. It changes your voice in real time, applies effects, includes a built-in soundboard, and integrates with streaming tools. It is the right pick if you want to sound like a robot, a chipmunk, or a deep-voiced villain live, and play sounds on top of that.

Tuna strips that down to the soundboard. It is the right pick if you do not need live voice transformation and just want a clean, free app to organize clips, hotkey them, and share boards with a community. Lighter footprint, narrower scope.

The two share DNA. Both rely on Voicemod’s virtual microphone to inject audio into your calls and streams, which is why installing one and configuring the other often feels seamless. If you only ever want the soundboard, Tuna is the leaner entry point.

How to use the Tuna soundboard: step-by-step setup

Here is the full setup, from download to your first triggered sound in a Discord call.

Download and install Tuna. Grab the Tuna soundboard download from Voicemod’s official site for your platform, Windows or macOS. The installer also sets up the virtual microphone the app uses to route audio.
Launch the app and let the virtual mic register. On first run, Tuna installs or confirms a virtual audio device. This is the pipe that carries your triggered sounds into other applications. If Windows prompts you to allow the driver, accept it.
Pick or build a board. Tuna opens to a library of community boards plus your own. Choose a starter board to test playback, or create an empty board to build from scratch.
Play a sound to confirm output. Click any tile. You should hear it through your default playback device. If you do not, check your output device in the app’s audio settings.
Set your input device in the target app. In Discord, go to Settings, then Voice & Video, and set your Input Device to the Voicemod or Tuna virtual microphone. Now anything Tuna plays is heard by your voice channel.
Assign hotkeys. Hover a sound tile and open its hotkey option. Press the key combo you want. Repeat for your most-used clips so you can trigger them without alt-tabbing.
Test in a real call. Join a call or use Discord’s mic test. Trigger a hotkey and confirm the sound comes through cleanly at a reasonable volume.

That seven-step flow is the core of how to use the Tuna soundboard. Everything else, importing custom clips, sharing boards, and OBS routing, builds on this foundation.

Adding and importing your own sounds

The community boards are a fast start, but a personal board is where Tuna earns its place. To import your own clips:

Create a custom board from the app’s board menu so your imports stay separate from downloaded content.
Import local audio files. Tuna accepts common formats like MP3 and WAV. Drag files in or use the import option, and each becomes a tile you can rename and reorder.
Trim before you import when you can. Soundboard clips land hardest when they are tight. A four-second meme that cuts off at the punchline usually beats a fifteen-second clip with dead air. Trim in a free editor like Audacity before bringing the file in.
Normalize volume across clips. Imported files often have wildly different loudness. If one clip blows out ears while another is barely audible, normalize them so your whole board sits at a consistent level.

For sourcing original or royalty-free audio, Freesound hosts a large library of Creative Commons sound effects you can download and import cleanly. That is the safer route for streamers than ripping copyrighted memes, which we cover in the limits section below.

Setting hotkeys that do not collide

Hotkeys are the whole point of a soundboard. A clip you have to click is just a media player. A clip on a hotkey is a punchline you can land mid-sentence.

The one real pitfall is collision. If you bind a sound to a key your game or Discord already uses, you will either trigger the wrong thing or fire a sound by accident. To avoid that:

Use the F-row or numpad. Keys like F6 through F9 and the numeric keypad sit outside most default game and push-to-talk bindings.
Group related sounds on adjacent keys. Put your reaction clips on one row and your longer bits on another so muscle memory keeps them straight.
Avoid single letters and common modifiers. WASD, the number row, and plain Ctrl or Shift combos overlap with too many in-game actions.
Document your bindings. Once you pass a dozen clips, a quick note of which key plays what saves you from hunting mid-call.

These same principles apply to any soundboard, including VoxBooster’s, so the habits you build here carry over if you switch tools later.

One of Tuna’s signature features is its community layer. Inside the app you can browse boards other users have published, themed around games, memes, shows, or specific creators, and add them to your own collection with a click.

This is genuinely useful for two reasons. First, it removes the sourcing grind. Instead of hunting individual clips across the web, you grab a curated pack someone already assembled. Second, it surfaces trending audio fast, so the meme everyone is referencing this week often shows up as a ready-made board.

The flip side is consistency. Community boards vary in audio quality and volume leveling, and the licensing status of the clips inside them is rarely documented. A board labeled with a popular show’s name is almost certainly using copyrighted audio, which matters the moment you point a stream at it. Treat community boards as a fast way to fill private voice chats, and curate a separate, license-clean board for anything that goes on a public broadcast.

Routing Tuna into Discord and OBS via the virtual mic

The mechanism that makes any of this work is the virtual microphone. Tuna does not magically inject sound into apps. It plays audio out through a virtual audio device, and the receiving app treats that device as a normal microphone.

For Discord and other voice apps: set the app’s input device to the Voicemod or Tuna virtual microphone. From then on, your real mic and your triggered sounds both flow through that single virtual input. Discord’s own support documentation is a good reference if your audio routing acts up.

For OBS: you have two options. You can add the virtual microphone as an Audio Input Capture source so triggered sounds land on their own track, which is cleaner for mixing. Or you can rely on desktop audio capture if you are already pulling system sound. The dedicated input-capture route is preferable because it lets you control soundboard volume independently from game and voice audio.

One quirk worth knowing: because everything funnels through a single virtual mic, monitoring matters. Make sure you can hear your own triggered sounds at the same level your audience does, or you will misjudge how loud a clip lands.

Where Tuna hits its limits

Tuna is a solid free soundboard, but it is scoped narrowly on purpose, and that scope is exactly where some users outgrow it.

It is a soundboard, not a voice changer. If you want to transform your live voice, you are back to installing full Voicemod, which means a second app and its own free-versus-paid split.
The free-versus-paid line lives in the wider ecosystem. The soundboard is free, but some adjacent Voicemod voice features sit behind a paid tier, which can blur expectations if you assume everything in the family is free.
Licensing is on you. Community clips come with no rights cleared. For monetized streaming, that is a real exposure.
No transcription or noise suppression. If your workflow also needs clean mic audio or captions, a soundboard alone does not cover it.

None of these are dealbreakers for casual Discord use. They simply mark the point where an all-in-one Windows app starts to make more sense than a soundboard plus a separate voice changer plus a separate noise tool.

Best Tuna soundboard alternatives

If Tuna does not fit, or you want a soundboard bundled with more capability, here are the main options, including a tuna soundboard alternative that folds everything into one app.

Tool	Type	Soundboard + hotkeys	Live voice changer	OBS support	On-device AI voice cloning	Cost model
Tuna by Voicemod	Standalone soundboard	Yes	No	Via virtual mic	No	Free
Voicemod	Voice changer suite	Yes	Yes	Yes	Limited	Free + paid tier
EXP Soundboard	Lightweight soundboard	Yes	No	Manual routing	No	Free
VoxBooster	All-in-one Windows app	Yes	Yes	Yes (dedicated output)	Yes (local model)	3-day full trial, lifetime license

A quick read of the table:

Tuna wins on simplicity and price if you only want a soundboard.
Voicemod adds live voice changing but reintroduces the free-versus-paid complexity.
EXP Soundboard is an even leaner free option, but routing into Discord and OBS is more manual.
VoxBooster is the pick when you want the soundboard plus a real-time voice changer, on-device AI voice cloning with a local model, Whisper-based transcription, and noise suppression in one low-latency app, with hotkeys, a dedicated OBS-friendly output, and no kernel driver to install.

The differentiator for an all-in-one is that you stop juggling tools. Instead of Tuna for sounds, full Voicemod for voice, and a separate noise plugin, one app handles the whole mic chain. You can read more on that approach in our best voice changer guide and soundboard sound ideas.

A quick note on how soundboards differ from voice changers

It is worth separating two ideas that searches often blur. A soundboard plays pre-recorded clips. A voice changer transforms the sound of your own voice as you speak. Tuna does the first. Voicemod and VoxBooster do both.

Where modern apps get interesting is on-device AI voice cloning using a local model, which lets you speak in a custom voice in real time without uploading your audio to a server. That is a different capability from a soundboard entirely, but the two pair naturally in one tool: clone your voice for the conversation, and fire sound clips on hotkeys for the punchlines. For background on the broader category, the Wikipedia entry on voice changers gives a neutral overview of how these tools evolved.

FAQ

Is the Tuna soundboard free to use? Yes. Tuna is a free standalone soundboard app from Voicemod, available on Windows and macOS. You can browse community boards, play sounds, and assign hotkeys without paying. Some advanced Voicemod voice-changer features sit behind a separate paid Voicemod tier, but the soundboard itself is free.

How do I get Tuna sounds into Discord? Tuna outputs through a virtual microphone. Install the app, then open Discord and set your input device to the Tuna or Voicemod virtual microphone under Voice & Video settings. When you trigger a sound in Tuna, it plays through that virtual mic so everyone in your voice channel hears it.

Can I add my own sounds to Tuna? Yes. Tuna lets you import local audio files such as MP3 and WAV into a custom board, then assign each clip a keyboard hotkey. You can also browse and add sounds from community-shared boards inside the app, building a personal mix of imported clips and downloaded community content.

How do I set hotkeys in the Tuna soundboard? Open the board, hover over a sound tile, and look for the hotkey or keybind option. Click it, then press the key combination you want to assign. Pick keys outside your common game and chat bindings, such as the F-row or numpad, so triggers do not collide with other shortcuts mid-session.

What is the difference between Tuna and Voicemod? Voicemod is the full real-time voice-changer suite. Tuna is the standalone, soundboard-focused app from the same company. Tuna concentrates on playing, sharing, and hotkeying sound clips, while Voicemod adds live voice filters, voice effects, and deeper streaming integrations on top of soundboard features.

Does a soundboard work in OBS for streaming? Yes, if it routes audio through a virtual microphone or an audio capture source. With Tuna, you add the virtual mic as an audio input in OBS, or capture desktop audio. VoxBooster works the same way and adds a dedicated OBS-friendly output so your stream and recording both pick up triggered sounds.

Are Tuna soundboard sounds safe to use on stream? Community clips vary in licensing. Memes and viral audio are often copyrighted, and automated systems on Twitch or YouTube can flag them regardless of context. For monetized streams, prefer royalty-free libraries such as Freesound, or clips you have rights to, and keep copyrighted memes for private voice chats.

The bottom line

The Tuna soundboard is a clean, free way to play and hotkey audio clips, share community boards, and route sound into Discord and OBS through a virtual microphone. For pure soundboard duty, it does the job well. The friction shows up when you also want a live voice changer, on-device AI voice cloning, transcription, or noise suppression, at which point you are stacking several tools.

If you would rather have one low-latency Windows app that bundles a soundboard with hotkeys and a dedicated OBS output, a real-time voice changer, on-device AI voice cloning with a local model, and noise suppression, with no kernel driver to install, take VoxBooster for a spin. The 3-day full trial unlocks everything, and a lifetime license means you pay once. Build your board, set your hotkeys, and keep your whole mic chain in a single place.