Tracks & Media

A track is one piece of your show, usually one song or one item. Everything else in CuePoints hangs off tracks: your cues live on them, your recordings become them, and your timecode counts through them.

What's In A Track

Each track holds up to three media slots: primary, secondary and tertiary. Each slot takes either audio or video.

Most people only use the primary slot. You'd use the others when the same item has more than one thing playing, say a click track alongside the music, or a video feed alongside the audio.

Making Tracks

The fastest way: drag a pile of media files onto the track list. Each file becomes one track, filling its primary slot.

CuePoints then asks one question: does this media have striped timecode? That means timecode recorded onto the audio as a sound (LTC). If you don't know, the answer is almost certainly no, leave No LTC selected.

To add media to the other slots, drag a file onto the secondary or tertiary slot.

Hovering over a waveform gives you options to replace, delete or locate that media.

Track Settings

• Track Name: filled in from the media file. Change it to whatever your show calls it.

• Offset: the timecode this track starts at. If the media has no timecode of its own, CuePoints generates LTC from this number.

• Framerate: how timecode counts on this track. This has to match everyone else on the show. The starting value comes from Settings > Tracks.

• Pre-roll: extra generated timecode before the track starts, so machines downstream have time to lock on before the show does anything.

Change the offset, frame rate or pre-roll and the outgoing timecode is rebuilt straight away: you don't have to reload the track.

Editing Tracks

Select a track and press Edit (or Cmd+E).

Edit All Tracks steps through every track in the project one after another; the quick way to check a whole show's offsets and frame rates in one pass.

The Track List

The track list shows every track in the project. Drag to reorder them; the numbers renumber themselves.

How the numbers are written is up to you, see Display track numbering in Settings > Tracks. You can turn them off entirely.

Track Colours

Colour a track to show its state, done, needs work, don't touch. Right-click a track and choose Set Track Colour, or use the Track menu.

Right-click also gets you quick actions: duplicate the track, change its frame rate, replace its media.

Loading Speed

Tracks open instantly. The waveform appears straight away and the detailed version fills in behind it while you work. On a long track you'll see it sharpen up a moment after you open it, that's normal, and you can carry on the whole time.

Media Line-Up

When a track's media slots are different lengths, or need to start at different times, line-up aligns them.

• Drag a waveform sideways to slide it into place.

• Or type an exact offset if you know the number.

• Adjust the volume balance between the media types so one doesn't drown the other.

Secondary and tertiary media play their sound out of your audio outputs too, at their proper offsets.

Showing And Hiding Media

Any media type can be hidden during playback. Right-click the media viewer, or use the Track menu. Hiding is about what's on screen; it doesn't remove anything from the track.

Media Popout Window

Opens one media slot in its own resizable window. Useful when you want to send a specific feed somewhere, for example capturing it over NDI into a visualiser.

Open it from the Window menu.

Replacing Media

Replace media… swaps the file in any of the three slots, for when the file on disk has changed but everything else about the track is right.

You can also promote or demote media between slots, and CuePoints will re-align your cues to timecode when the media is replaced, so your cue list doesn't slide out of place.

When Media Goes Missing

If a file has moved, been renamed, or lives on a drive that isn't plugged in, the Missing Media window appears when you open the project.

You can search for the file now, or open the project anyway and sort it out later with Tools > Locate Missing Media.

The locator tells you exactly what it found rather than just succeeding or failing:

• files that are in the cloud but not downloaded yet,

• files whose contents don't match what the project expects, and

• results it isn't sure about, which it asks you to confirm.

Right-click any row to reveal the file it found, or the place the original used to be.

Once relinked, the file shows as found in the track itself: you don't have to trust the locator's word for it.

"Not downloaded" Is Not "Missing"

On a shared project you'll sometimes see media marked as not downloaded yet. This is different from missing, and it is not a problem.

It means the file is on its way from your shared folder and hasn't arrived. Do nothing. CuePoints picks it up by itself the moment it lands.

Media marked as needing relinking is the one that actually wants you.

Media Cache

CuePoints keeps a cache of media so it doesn't have to do the same work twice. You can set a size limit on it, and clear it by hand if you need the disk space back.