How it works
Recordings and captures
A recording is what one pad did, saved as a file on your device, which PadBench plays back later as though the pad were read again. It shows someone without the pad what yours does, or lets you look at a run again. Nothing is sent: the file stays where you save it.
Recording a pad
Record is in the pad's Debug tab, with the debugging details (see Input sources). It records the pad as its source reads it, from its state at that moment on, and a notice on the stage shows how long it has run, with Stop and save. The file is named after its source and the time it began, such as padbench-webhid-20261005-143000.jsonl.
A recording also ends by itself when the pad goes, or at its limit of 32 MB, a few minutes of the fastest pad, and the notice then offers Save or Discard. One pad is recorded at a time.
Playing one back
Open recording is with the debugging details too (see Input sources): in the pad's Debug tab, beside their mark in the status bar, which stays even before a controller connects, and under More on a phone. It opens a recording from your device, such as one a friend saved from a check of every control. Its pad plays at the pace it was recorded, and shows every panel a pad read through the same source would, marked as from a recording, so each figure is measured as it was when the pad was read. Where the recording holds the map that named a pad's numbered controls, its controls are named by it here too. Close recording takes it away, and opening another closes the first.
What a recording can't do
A recording holds only what the pad sent, so nothing can be sent back: no vibration, lights or trigger effects, and no source to choose. It is never joined to a pad connected now, which shows beside it as a pad of its own. A file that isn't a recording, or that a newer PadBench made, isn't played, and a damaged one plays up to the damage, stops there and says when.
Guided captures
A pad read report by report, through WebHID or the Windows app, has Raw reports in its Controller tab: the latest report of each id, byte by byte, with the bytes that just changed marked, so pressing a button shows where it lives.
Below them, Start a guided capture asks you to hold one control at a time, notices each by itself, records a second of it and moves on once you let go. Record now takes it by hand where it doesn't notice, and Skip passes over what your pad lacks. At the end the capture is saved as a file on your device: attached to an issue, with the pad's name and how it was connected, it lets PadBench be tested against your pad. For a pad whose controls are only numbered, it also names them in this browser.