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Running your show

Firing cues live, the transport, master and cue levels, and keyboard shortcuts.

Running · Updated 2026-10-06

This is where CueCart earns its keep — the moment the show is on and you need your audio to land exactly when you call it. Everything you set up in the Cue Settings comes together here, so you can fire cues by hand or by key, watch what's playing, and stop everything in an instant when you need to.

Three ways to fire a cue

Every cue can be triggered three ways, and you're free to mix them however suits your show:

  • Click the pad — tap it with the mouse to fire, the most direct way to play.
  • Press its key — give a cue a hotkey label in the Cue Settings, and that key fires the matching cue on the bank you're currently viewing. If two banks each have a cue keyed Q, the one on the active bank fires — switch banks (see F1–F12 below) to reach the other. Great for cues you hit often without looking.
  • Send a MIDI note — assign a note to a cue and fire it from a pad controller or MIDI keyboard. See MIDI & keyboard control for setup.

All three routes do the same thing under the hood, so a click, a key and a MIDI note fire a cue identically.

Now Playing

The Now Playing strip sits in the toolbar and shows you, at a glance, what's playing on the cartwall. It names the active cue and tracks its time as it plays:

  • Elapsed — how far into the cue you are.
  • Total — the cue's full length.
  • Remaining — how long is left before it ends.

Keep an eye on the remaining time to ride a music bed out cleanly, or to know exactly when a sting will finish so your next move lands on the button.

Master and Phone

The dedicated Mixer contains MASTER, CUE PAD and PHONE:

  • Master sets your main output level — the audio going to the room, the stream or the desk. This is your overall house level.
  • Cue Pad balances the cartwall audio against the deck mix.
  • Phone provides a separate headphone trim for auditioning and pre-listening. Master also scales headphone and matrix output; setting Master to zero silences headphones too.

Use Phone to trim your listening level while Master stays at the intended show level. For setting up which physical outputs Master and Phone feed, see Audio setup.

Stop and Panic

Two transport controls keep you in command of the room, and both are mapped to keys you can hit by feel:

  • Stop cue pads (Space) stops every playing cue pad at once. The DJ Deck keeps playing — so Stop brings the pads down between segments without cutting a music bed running on the deck.
  • Panic (Esc) is an instant hard stop of everything — every cue pad and both decks — the emergency kill when the whole room has to go quiet immediately, no fades, no questions.

Both also sit as always-visible icons in the toolbar, so they're never more than a click away when you'd rather not reach for the keyboard.

Keyboard shortcuts

These keystrokes work from anywhere in the main window:

  • F1–F12 — switch to bank 1 through 12 instantly (when that bank exists).
  • Space — stop all playing cue pads (both decks keep playing).
  • Esc — Panic, an instant hard stop of everything, Cue Pads and both decks alike.
  • Ctrl + S — save the current Set.
  • Ctrl + Shift + S — Save As (save a copy under a new name).

To start or open a Set, use the File menu on the navigation rail. Ctrl+N starts a new Set and Ctrl+O opens one.

On top of these, every per-cue key you label in the Cue Settings fires that cue on the active bank. So your live keyboard is whatever you make it — global transport and bank keys plus your own custom cue keys.

For a fuller setup — positional QWERTY layouts, assigned cue keys, and firing cues from a MIDI controller — see MIDI & keyboard control.

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