 If you use the stream deck for live streaming, then you may be interested in these five plugins or rather plug-in actions that I find useful when I'm live streaming and actually in preparation to go live as well. So let's come and start with the first one, which is actually the Twitter plug-in. Now this is one of the Elgato ones which is built in. So you may have seen it, you may not, but it is, as I say, one of the sort of initial stock ones that they'll usually have built in. And it is just here over on the left-hand side, it will say Twitter. And the two options you've got are Tweet or Change Name. So you can actually change your Twitter handle using this, or you can send out a tweet. So it's as simple as that. You just drag and drop it onto one of the buttons. And then the options you've got here are you can enter your text for whatever you want to tweet out. And then you can also add an attachment if you want to tweet an image or something like that with it as well. And then here you'll see the account selection as well. Now it will have an add account if you've not actually gone through and added an account. But you can also see the accounts that you've got added if you come into your settings, then accounts. This is where you would go through beforehand. If you hadn't set this up yet, you could go through beforehand and add in your Twitch account, your Twitter account, and also your YouTube account. And we'll come to YouTube in a moment because that is one of the other ones that I want to talk about as well. But basically, yes, you can just go through and add in something that you want to tweet. So what might you want to use this for? Well, if I come back out of this folder for a second. So what I have is this is my sort of screen that I have usually when I'm either live streaming or recording. I also use it with the loop deck as well. I'll leave a link in the description to a video. I did all about how I use those two together, but don't want to get sidetracked too much in that right now. So what I also have though is if this is the screen that I have when I'm live, this second screen is actually one that I have when I'm sort of getting ready to go live. So getting things set up and so on. And one of the things that I've got on here is these two actions. One is saying live and one of them is live in one hour. And basically what that is is if I click on that, you'll see that the tweet says live now on YouTube. Come and say hi. And so the the link that I've got in there. This is another little tip for you is I have the link as www.youtube.com. Take one tech slash live. And if you just use that sort of format, but obviously replace it with your channel name, it will always take people through to your latest live stream. So it means that I can keep that one in there. Don't need to go and update the link every time I'm going to do a live stream. It will always just take people through to my latest so it works well for this particular application of tweeting out those links. Now whilst we're on this screen, sometimes when I am not live streaming, then I'll have music or things that I'm listening to and have them coming out through the speakers on my computer, my external speakers. Other times I will have it coming through my headphones and obviously when I'm live streaming, I want it to come through my headphones. So the next little one that I want to show you is this one here. I've got this icon up here, which is basically for me to switch between my headphones and my speakers. And that is this little plugin here called Toggle Audio Devices. In fact, it's called Audio Switcher. So if you want to go and grab this one, you'd need to go into the store. And so to get to the store, you would just come up to this little icon just up here, click on this one. And then if I switch over to this screen here, you'll see that it will take you through to this stream deck splash screen, the discover screen, come down to plugins and then you would just search for Audio Switcher. If I can spell it right. There we go. That's why it's not turning up. So then you find here Audio Switcher and you click on the install button and that would then install it. Now all it is, is if I come back to this screen now and let me come into this little demo folder that I created. What you'll find is that in this Audio Devices, so it's for the actual name of the plugin in here, actually slightly different to the way it appears in the store. So it's called Audio Switcher, but it appears here as Audio Devices. And you've got two things here. So one is Toggle Audio Device or one is Set Audio Device. So the toggle works for me because I'm only ever switching between two things. It's either going to be my earphones or it's going to be my external speakers. So all you do is you just drag this on to any button. And then what you'll see as it pops up is you've basically got a primary and a secondary device. And so what you can do here is just click the little down arrow and you'll just find a list of every device that you've got attached to your computer. So just as you were, you know, selecting an input or output source, an output source, I should say, on anything else, all of those will show up. So I've got my external headphones, Mac mini speakers, Rocaster Pro 2 chat, secondary and main and so on. So you just basically select what you want for your main and what you want for your secondary. And then with the icon, you can select the icon to be in two states. So it does default to these ones here. So this one here. And then if I click that, so when you switch states, it's going to sort of swap these around. And it's as simple as that really. And then when you press the button, it's going to toggle between them. If you want to actually just have a range of different ones. So maybe you've got lots of different things. Then here you can just have a the, you know, multiple instances of this set audio device and then choose which one you want to assign to each of them so that then you have multiple different buttons. But as I say, the simplicity of just a single toggle for me worked well. And the way that that is for me then, if I come back into this screen is just here. So I've got this one and it either shows my headphones or it switches and shows my speaker. So that is the second one that I wanted to talk about. The third one is I mentioned the YouTube login. I should say in settings. Well, that is so that we can use the YouTube plugin as well. So let's have a little look at what that does. If I just close Twitter, close this one, and then we have a look at YouTube. There's a couple of things it can do in here. So first of all, you can have the number of viewers displayed on the screen. So if I was live streaming now, it would actually show me how many viewers were on the live stream. But this one is the one that I find useful, this chat message. And what this enables you to do is actually write out a message in advance. And then when you press the button during your live stream, then it's going to actually place that message into the chat. So if there's things that you want to talk about like you want to post links or things like that, then you could just sort of create these in advance. And then as you're on the live stream, you can press those as you go through. Certainly if you don't have moderators that are posting those sort of things for you, then that can be useful. I also use this when I've got sort of ad hoc links that I want to post. And in fact, what I did was, as well as having this screen, which is for my live stream, and this one is for my preparation. I've also got this one, which is a load of sort of template buttons, if you like. And I had this one, which is basically a comment template. And all I did was I created a little background and so I can call these whatever I want. So if this is comment one, for example, I would call it something more meaningful. But you can see that I can now see exactly what that is in that box. And then I just literally copy and paste that into my main page. So you'll notice on my main page, I've got these comment templates down here. So I might have three or four of those, depending on what I'm talking about on the live stream and what I might want to just be able to post. So very useful to be able to do that, to be able to just, as I say, post these as you are going through your live stream. So once again, with YouTube, you would set that up in these settings, but you'll notice here as well, if you haven't gone in and logged in, then it will ask you though for the account that you want to use this with. And so you would just come and click on add new, and that would be the way that you would change it from your existing one, or if you hadn't got one added in, that would be the way that you could add it in to begin with. Incidentally, you can only have one YouTube account linked at any given time. And the linking process is the standard thing of giving something access to your YouTube account. You'll click that button. It will open up the YouTube. You'll log in with your YouTube ID, and then I've just approved the access for Stream Deck to have access to that. Incidentally, if you are interested in the icon packs that you can see here, or the icons that I've got here, I do have a range of icon packs that are available on my store. So if you go to takeonetech.io.store, as well as my Ecamm Live Masterclass and Zoom Masterclass, if you scroll down a little bit, you'll also find the icon packs that I've got available. I do tend to make all of my icons. I'll leave a link to the video that I made about how to actually make these as well, because I actually do them all in Keynote. I find it's very easy to make quick icons in there. So I'll leave a link to that video in the description as well. So the next one, though, is let's just go back to the page of my Stream Deck where I'm preparing for a live stream, because you'll notice up here, maybe you haven't noticed, but you will notice up here that I've got a clock, and it's basically hours, minutes, and seconds. The reason for this is I do have a clock right above my desk, but it doesn't have seconds on it, actually, and I like to have the sort of countdown to see how long it is before the stream starts. Although, I've got to say, I've been getting a little bit lax at starting on time because I got too busy chatting in the back chat with the Discord and the backstage pass members of the channel. But anyway, I have got this here, nevertheless, and this is using a nice little clock plug-in, which is called Clockworks by Krabbs, K-R-A-B-S. And it appears in the sidebar here as Krabbs-Clockworks, but the name of it is Clockworks. So that's what you would search for in the store there. So if I just come back over to the demo area or demo screen that I've created, then this has got really quite a lot of different ways that you can display date and time on your device. So this is the plug-in. These are all the different actions. And you've basically got either large, medium, or small numbering. And then you've also got the time and date. So that's what all these different things are. So it all starts to make sense. You've got a large clock, a 12-hour, digit 1 and 2. So these would be the hours and then the 1st and 2nd digits. So you can actually give those, like, basically, a slot of their own as I drag them on. So at the moment it is 3 p.m. where I am. So there's nothing in that one. There's 3 there. And then if I go on to 24-hour, I could have 24-hour clock. I'll just drag that underneath. So 24-hour clock, we're at 15. Then let's look at the minutes. So we've got the minutes here, digit 1, digit 2. So it's just basically building up a clock. And then you can also add in the seconds as individual tiles, if you will, buttons, should I say, for the clock. So there it is, 3, 21, 58. I prefer it to have it a little bit more condensed. So rather than having each button, each number on its own button, what you can actually do is come down a little bit further and you can see we've got these 2-digit options. So here we've got the 24-hour and the 24-hour minutes and the 24-hour seconds. So that's the one that I was using before. So let me just get rid of these a second. What you can also do, though, is you can see that they've got these separators. So if you actually want to make this look a little bit more clock-like, you can just drag this across. I can kind of figure it out without those personally. But they've also got date as well. So if you do want to display the date and time on here, then they've got the month number, month name. So we could stick the month name on. They've also got the day name as well. So let's put the day there. And then they've got the day number. So Thursday, the 11th of August and then the year. And you can do either first 2-digits and last 2-digits like this, or you can actually do the year as just one single tile. Once you've actually got these on, though, then you can actually go through and change some things on it. So you'll notice down here, if I just make this a little bit smaller, you can give it a title, but then you can change the font on the text. You can also change whether it's bold. You can give it a drop shadow. You can change the color of the text. That will pull up the little color picker. So we could make that a different color like that. And then you can also come through and add an image in the background if you want, or you can just give it a flat background color as well. So that's how you can sort of modify that. So what I did was, because I'm like this, I did go ahead and create a little background to it. So I've got this nice little clock looking thing up here with these borders on it. So that's just helped me when I'm doing a live stream to before it's starting, just to make sure that I am actually starting on time, or at least that is the theory behind it. Now, the next one that I've got is, I suppose, related to a video that I did recently, which was all about my stream deck pedal and how I use my stream deck pedal with lots of different profiles on it, and then I use my main stream deck here to actually switch between them. And so I've got this little button here, which is the one that I use for switching profiles. I click on that. It takes me through to this other profile, and I can choose which profile I want to have on my pedal. So that's great, but sometimes I just want to check which profile I'm in because there's no visible way to see that, obviously on the pedals themselves. There's no icons displayed on the pedals. Well, there is actually a function which appears in the stream deck plugin. So this is not a new plugin. You'll all have this one, obviously, because it is just the stream deck plugin, but it's this one, and it's called Action Bar. If you have got a stream deck pedal and you've started using that with the stream deck, the regular stream deck, then this one will now appear, and it's called, as I say, Action Bar. And all it does is, if I just move this one out of the way a little bit, when you click on the Action Bar pedal, sorry, the Action Bar action, what it does is it pops up this little graphical representation on the screen of the stream deck pedal, and it shows you what is on each pedal. So it's really handy, and this is a toggle, basically. So it's really handy just to be able to press that and toggle on and off this. So when I'm getting set up for my live stream, just before I go live, I want to make sure that I haven't got some completely different random profile selected on my pedals, and I'm going to be doing all sorts of things I didn't mean to. And so I just come here, I just press this button, and then I can see what those pedals are. It's also good if you are trying out different profiles or different actions on your pedals. You've just got some new setup that you're using, and so you want to have this one permanently on the screen. It's just kind of free-floating. It does stay on top of everything as well, and it's pretty small. So you could just have it sort of tucked away in the corner of the screen, just so that if you wanted that little reminder of what is on the pedal, then you'd be able to just easily jump into it. Now, as I say, this was something that I covered in a video. There's multiple profiles all about how I use these multiple profiles with the Stream Deck pedal, and I'll leave a link to that video over on the right-hand side.