Cue Pads

Load audio onto pads and read a pad at a glance.

Your Show · Updated 2026-10-06

A cue pad is the heart of CueCart: a single pad that plays one audio clip. You fill a grid of them, then fire each one the instant you tap it or press its key. This page covers getting audio onto a pad, reading what a pad is telling you, and the quick actions you'll reach for live.

Assigning audio to a pad

There are a few quick ways to load a clip onto a pad:

• Drag and drop an audio file from Windows Explorer straight onto the pad to import it.
• Ctrl-drag from the library — find a track in the Media Library and Ctrl-drag it onto the pad you want.
• Hover an empty pad and click the +, then pick a file. Empty pads reveal a + on hover so you can see at a glance where there's room.

You can also Ctrl-drag a cue onto the DJ Deck, move a cue to a new slot, and more — see Drag & drop for the full set.

Assigned pads show names, colours, durations and playback choices at a glance.

CueCart prepares assigned clips for playback. Wait for preparation to finish before using newly assigned audio live.

What a pad shows you

A filled pad is designed to be read in a glance, from across a studio. It shows:

• Its colour, so you can group and spot cues fast.
• Its name and the clip's duration.
• A clear lit-up state while it's playing.
• Its assigned key, when you've mapped one — so you don't have to memorise the grid.
• Small status chips for its play mode, behaviour and concurrency, so you can confirm how a pad will behave before you fire it.

An empty slot reveals the + on hover, ready for you to drop or assign a clip.

Quick actions

• Alt+click a filled pad to open Cue Settings for colour, name, key, gain, routing and the Playback tools.
• Right-click a playing pad to stop it by default. Ctrl+F12 toggles the right-click stop guard. Right-clicking an empty pad does nothing.
• Left-click an empty pad's + to assign a file.

Use Alt+click for Cue Settings; right-click is the per-cue stop action.

To clear a pad you no longer need, Ctrl+Alt+click it — CueCart asks you to confirm first, so an accidental key mash never drops your work.

Playback choices

Cue Settings brings Hot Cues, Stems, Loop, Beat Grid and Fades together under Playback. A Cue Sequence can launch successive saved Hot Cue steps on repeated presses, with supported playback mode and concurrency combinations. These choices are separate from the track's shared Hot Cue markers and Beat Grid. See Cue Settings for saving and activation steps.

Supported audio formats

CueCart plays the formats you'll meet in broadcast and live work:

• WAV
• AIFF
• FLAC
• MP3
• Ogg Vorbis
• AAC (.m4a, .aac, .m4b)

Drop any of these onto a pad and let it finish preparing. (Video containers such as .mp4 aren't supported — CueCart is audio-only.)

Where to next

• The Cue Settings — colour, name, key, fades, routing and the waveform trimmer.
• Banks — arrange your pads across named pages.
• Triggering & going live — keys, clicks and the panic stop.