Play modes, behaviour & concurrency

How a pad responds when you fire it — and how defaults flow from Set to Bank to Cue.

Building · Updated 2026-06-30

Every pad in CueCart carries a small set of playback rules that decide exactly what happens when you fire it: does it restart or hold, play once or loop, sit alongside other cues or interrupt them. Get these right once and your whole show behaves the way your hands expect.

There are three rules to know — Play Mode, Behaviour and Concurrency — plus Exclusive Groups for tighter control. Best of all, you rarely set them pad by pad: sensible defaults flow down from your Set, so most cues just inherit and you only override the exceptions.

Play Mode — what the trigger does

Play Mode is about your finger (or your key, or your pad). It decides how a cue responds to a press and a release.

Restart — press to play. Press again while it's already playing and it jumps straight back to the top. The release is ignored, so this is the classic instant-fire cart: hit it, hit it again, off it goes from the start.
Piano — hold to play, release to stop. Like a key on a keyboard: the cue sounds only while you're holding the trigger down. Perfect for stabs, drones and effects you want to ride by hand.
Toggle — press to play, press again to stop. The first press starts the cue; the next press stops it. Handy for beds and loops you start and stop with two separate taps.

Behaviour — what the audio does at the end

Behaviour decides what happens when the clip reaches its end.

Normal — plays once and stops. The standard one-shot for jingles, stings and effects.
Looped — repeats from the top until you stop it. Ideal for beds, ambiences and music loops that should keep running under a segment.

Play Mode and Behaviour are independent, so they combine freely — a Toggle + Looped bed starts on one tap, loops, and stops on the next; a Piano + Normal stab sounds only while held.

Concurrency — does it play alongside others

Concurrency decides whether firing this cue leaves your other cues alone or clears the deck first.

Multi Pad — the cue plays alongside whatever else is going. This is the looser mode: stack a bed, a sting and an effect and they all sound together.
One at a Time — firing the cue stops the other cues first, then plays. This is the tighter broadcast mode: each new cue interrupts what was playing, so you never accidentally pile beds on top of each other.

One at a Time is the default for new Sets — it matches the way a broadcast cartwall is usually run. Switch a cue (or a whole Bank, or the whole Set) to Multi Pad wherever you want layers to build up instead.

Exclusive Groups — interrupt within a set

Exclusive Groups give you One-at-a-Time behaviour for a chosen handful of cues rather than everything.

A cue's group is None or one of eight groups (Group 1–Group 8), picked from a dropdown. None means the cue isn't part of any exclusive set.
Give two or more cues the same group and they become mutually exclusive: firing one stops the others in that group, while cues in other groups (or in None) keep playing.

A typical use is a row of competing music beds: put them all in group 1, and starting any one of them cuts the previous bed cleanly, while your jingles and effects in other groups carry on untouched.

How defaults flow: Set → Bank → Cue

You almost never set Play Mode, Behaviour and Concurrency on every pad. Instead they inherit down a chain, and you override only where you want something different:

Set-wide defaults sit at the top. Open Set Settings → Cue Pads and choose the Play Mode, Behaviour and Concurrency every cue starts from. This is your show-wide baseline.
A Bank can override those defaults for its own page of pads. Open Bank Settings → Cue Pads and a Bank can, for example, make its whole Beds page Looped while the rest of the Set stays Normal.
An individual Cue can override again in Cue Editor → Cue Pad. This is the final word for that single pad.

At each level, every setting is either inherited (use whatever the level above decided) or overridden (use this level's own value). The most specific override wins: a Cue override beats a Bank override, which beats the Set default. Anything you leave on inherit simply follows the level above, so changing a Set default ripples through every cue that hasn't broken away.

This is why most shows need very little per-pad fiddling. Set your defaults once for the Set, override a Bank or two where a page wants different behaviour, and reach for the Cue Editor only for the genuine one-offs.

Where to next

The Cue Editor — set Play Mode, Behaviour, Concurrency and Exclusive Group on a single pad.
Sets — where the show-wide defaults live.
Banks — override the defaults for a page of pads.