Firing cues from a console

Somebody else presses GO: the lighting desk, a footswitch, a tablet, the stage manager's cue light panel. Cuerunner listens, and a cue can carry its own trigger.

1. Let it listen

Settings → Network → OSC control is on by default and listens on port 53000. Settings → MIDI → Listen to MIDI opens the inputs you tick, or all of them if you tick none.

The OSC port is Cuerunner's alone. If QLab, another Cuerunner or a bridge already holds 53000, the row under OSC control says the port is in use and the log says it too: change the port, or close what holds it. Nothing is shared in silence, so a desk that is heard is heard by this show. On a machine with two networks, Network interface under the same block picks the one the show listens on and the one its OSC cues send from.

The Monitor tab in the dock shows what is listening and what has arrived, so you can point the desk at Cuerunner and watch the messages land before writing a single trigger.

The show monitor: the services that are listening, what each is doing, and the devices they know about. — The monitor: what is listening, and what it has heard.

2. Give a cue a trigger

The Triggers tab: an OSC address, a MIDI note, and a show control command, each with a Learn button. — The Triggers tab of a cue.

Select the cue, open Triggers, and add one:

OSC — an address, such as /eos/cue/12/fire. Arguments are ignored; the address is the trigger.
MIDI — a note, a controller or a program change on a channel. A note fires whatever its velocity.
Show control — an MSC command from a desk, matched on every field it sent.
Key — a key on this machine, typed or taken with Record: the sound-effects board under one finger. A key the app already uses is refused, with what it does.
Time of day — the half-hour call at 19:00, the house-open loop at 19:15. Choose what a time the show was closed for does: skip it and say so, or fire it late within a few minutes.

Learn is the shortcut: press it, then send the message from the desk, and the fields fill in with whatever arrived. A cue with a trigger shows a count on its Triggers tab, so a glance down the list tells you which cues answer to something other than a finger.

A trigger fires the cue exactly as GO would, including its pre-wait and its advance. A disarmed cue ignores its triggers, which makes disarming a safe way to take a cue out of a show that a console is driving.

Let a remote read the show

A tablet that runs the show can also show it. Turn on Feedback under OSC control and give it the tablet's address and port: the playhead, the running cues and their progress are pushed there, ten times a second by default. A remote can ask for itself instead — /cuerunner/feedback/subscribe — and a remote set up for QLab is answered the way QLab answers it, so its playhead and running-cue displays work unchanged. The addresses are in the reference.

3. Panic from the rig

Two messages panic the show whoever sends them, with no cue written for them: OSC /cuerunner/panic, and MIDI All Sound Off — controller 120 at value 0, on any channel of any port being listened to. A desk with a spare key, a footswitch, another program on the network: all of them can stop the sound.

It is handled where the engine is rather than in the window, so it works even if the interface is busy, and the run log records who asked.

Repeats

A footswitch that bounces, a desk that sends twice, a key held down: Settings → General → Repeat guard ignores a second GO arriving within the window you set. 300 ms by default; 0 turns it off.

Following timecode

When the show is driven by a clock — the band's playback rig, a video server, the lighting desk's own timeline — Cuerunner can follow it. Settings → Timecode → Source picks the wire it arrives on: MTC on a MIDI input, LTC on an audio input channel, or Art-Net from the lighting network. The transport bar then shows the clock, and whether it is Locked.

Give a cue a Timecode trigger on its Triggers tab: type the frame, or play the clock to the moment and press Take. The cue fires as the clock runs through that frame, exactly as GO would. A clock that skips a few frames still fires what it skipped; one that jumps further has been located, and fires nothing it jumped over.

Turn on Chase and the cue list goes where the clock goes. Locate the playback rig to the second chorus and the backing track starts at the second chorus; stop it and the cues it started hold, and pick up again where it starts. Offset moves the show against the clock, so a show written at 10:00:00:00 runs against a clock that starts at 01:00:00:00. Chase, the offset and the rate are saved with the show; which input the clock arrives on stays with the computer.

A dropout is not a stop: a clock that stops arriving is carried on at its own rate for the Freewheel time (a second) before it is called lost, and the loss is an alarm. The rate is read from the stream, and measured where the stream cannot say — 29.97 against 30, which share a code.

Going the other way, a Timecode cue runs a clock of its own from a start time, out of any mix of MTC, LTC and Art-Net. With jam sync it starts from the clock it is hearing and keeps to it, and carries on alone if that clock drops out — a clean clock regenerated for the rest of the building.

The control reference lists every message Cuerunner answers to and every field a trigger can match.