Three keys and one bar. This is what they do and what to check before the house opens.
Space, or the button. Fires the cue on the right of the bar, then moves on to the next armed one. A disarmed cue is skipped. After the last cue nothing is selected and GO fires nothing: the bar says so, and the show starts again when you select the cue to start it from.
Esc, or the button. Stops everything that is running: sound, waits, sequences, scripts. Opening another show, or starting a new one, stops the one that was playing the same way.
Shift + Esc, or the Playback menu. Everything stops with a short fade instead of a hard cut, and anything stuck is released.
Panic has no button on the transport on purpose: it is the one press you do not want a sleeve to find at the wrong moment. It is on the keyboard, in the menu, and it can be fired from the rig — see firing cues from a console.
The bar under the toolbar is the show at a glance. On the left is what is playing: its number, name, the note you wrote on it, elapsed time against what is left, and a progress line. On the right, larger, is what GO will fire next, with its own note. With several cues running it names the one that has been going longest and counts the rest.
The cue list says the same thing in more detail: a playing row counts its Duration cell down, a cue in its pre-wait says so, and a vamping cue says it is vamping.
PAUSE (P, or the button beside STOP) holds the whole show where it stands: every sound goes quiet over a few milliseconds and keeps its place in its file, a MIDI file lets go of its notes where it stands, and every wait, pre-wait, fade and handover waits with it. The button reads RESUME while it is held, and the show goes on from exactly where it stood. GO waits for the resume rather than firing over a held show; STOP and PANIC end the hold along with everything else. To hold one sound while the rest plays on — a track paused for a line of dialogue — use its pause on the Active tab.
At the transport's right edge is what leaves the engine: a meter for the output's first two channels, read after the master — its border turns red once the output reaches full scale, and a press clears it — and the master fader, from silence to +6 dB, double-click for 0 dB. The master is this computer's, not the show's: the level a room wants belongs to the room, and an engine that restarts mid-show is given it again.
Show mode (F5, or the View menu) puts the show in large type for running it: a card per cue, what is done set back, what GO fires next in amber, what is running counting down — and nothing on it that edits the show, so a hand that meant to press GO cannot drag or delete a cue. The transport keys work as always, and F5 again brings the editor back.
The cart (F6, or the View menu) turns the list into a wall of buttons — one tile per cue at the top of the list, a group as one tile — and a press plays that cue wherever the show is standing: the doorbell, the phone, the crash, in whatever order the scene asks for them. The first ten answer the number keys 1–9 and 0. A running tile counts down and has its own stop. This computer remembers whether you left it in the cart.
A show can hold several cue lists, a tab each above the list: the main sequence, a cart of effects, the pre-show loop. + adds one; a double click renames it; a right-click colours it, shows it as a cart, disarms it, moves it among the tabs or deletes it with its cues, after asking. Each list keeps its own place: GO, Space and STOP act on the list in front, and a list you come back to is standing where you left it. Cues running in another list play on, the tab shows a green dot while they do, and the Active tab names the list beside each one. Drag rows onto a tab, or right-click them and choose Move to, to move them to another list — a group goes whole. A disarmed list fires nothing, by GO, trigger or the clock. In List settings each list follows timecode or ignores it, and sits its own number of frames later on the clock than the show. Every one of these is one Ctrl+Z.
A list shown as a cart opens as tiles, and F6 turns it to rows for editing and back. Right-click a tile and press a key to give it a key of its own: that key plays it wherever the show is standing, with the main list in front. Backspace takes the key away.
The Active tab in the dock lists everything that is running, oldest first, with the time it has left and a stop of its own on each row. An audio cue's bar there is a handle: drag along it and let go, and that cue plays on from there — the rehearsal "back to the second verse", made on the cue that is playing rather than on the one that is selected.
The Log tab in the dock is the session's history: every cue fired, every message sent, and every failure with its reason. It holds the last 500 lines and is not saved with the show. A line that repeats is said once with a count.
Every line is also written, stamped, to cuerunner.log in the app's logs
folder — beside the failures the app's own process reports, which reach the file even
when the window has gone — so last night's show can be read this morning. The file
rolls to cuerunner.1.log at 5 MB. Open Logs Folder in the
File menu, or Folder on the Log tab, opens it.
An audio event whose type the app does not recognise is named in the log with its count and does nothing else — it never reaches the show. An event of a known type carrying a field the app cannot look up still plays; the log names the field beside it. An engine built against a different set of events is a line you can see rather than a show that quietly does the wrong thing.
If the sound device goes away mid-show — an interface unplugged, a driver that stops calling, another program taking exclusive access — the engine stops playing rather than pouring the show into a device that is no longer there. Every cue it was playing is released at that moment and records audio device lost under Last run, and what happened is on screen in the engine's own words: the monitor's alarm strip, the alarm chip in the transport bar, and the log. The show is not over — the cues it was playing were released, and Settings → Audio is where the engine's own readout says what it made of the device.
When the interface is back — plugged in again, the other program gone, the driver calling again — Reconnect device in Settings → Audio reopens it. The panel sends the settings the show already holds, so nothing has to be changed to make the engine try the device again. A device that is already playing is left alone; when one is reopened, the reading above the control follows there and then — the device is listed, the failure text is gone — and the next GO plays through it. The alarm the loss raised is not the reconnect's to take down: it stands in the alarm strip until it is dismissed there. A reconnect the engine will not honour says so in the engine's own words, and the device that was playing is put back rather than quietly swapped for a lesser one.
A cue that failed also says so in its own inspector, under Last run: when it ran, how long it took, and what went wrong. If a cue "does nothing", that is the first place to look, then the log. Troubleshooting lists the usual causes.
Cuerunner looks for a newer version twenty seconds after it starts and once a day after that, and only looks: when there is one, a bar under the toolbar says so, with its release notes. Nothing is downloaded until you press Download, and nothing is installed until you press Restart now or quit the app.
A download whose bytes do not match the checksum its release published, or whose
signature is not the publisher's, is refused with a sentence and deleted; nothing is
installed. A machine with no network says nothing at all. A copy installed from the
.deb is told when there is a newer version and sent to the download page,
because a package manager's install cannot replace itself.
For show week, set Show hours in Settings → Updates: no update checks between the two times, by this computer's clock. Show Mode with a show open is locked out too, unless you turn that off. The first launch after an update shows what changed, once. Every field is in the settings reference.
