Your first cue list
Add a track, put cues on its timeline and make them fire when a CDJ plays that track.
A cue list belongs to a track. When any deck plays that track, a CDJ included, its cues fire at their positions and follow the deck's pitch, jumps and loops.
1. Get the track in#
Drag the audio file from the Finder onto the Track List (Catalog). It becomes a track named after the file, with the file on its audio layer. It is analysed for waveform, beat grid and song structure. WAV, AIFF, MP3, M4A/AAC, FLAC and CAF work.
Tracks are matched to decks by title. The track's name is how ShowKontrol recognises it on a CDJ, so it should match the title rekordbox shows.
2. Open the Cue Editor#
Double-click the track. The Cue Editor opens with its lanes: cue layers on top, audio and video lanes below.
Press Space to play. A track without audio plays on a silent clock, so you can build and test cues before the audio is in.
3. Place cues#
- Press C (or ADD) to place a cue at the needle. It is one grid cell long: one beat with Grid Lines = Beats, else one frame. The needle jumps to its end, so pressing C C C lays cues end to end.
- Zoomed in, double-click an empty cell of a cue lane to make a cue exactly that long.
- Drag a cue mark (the triangle under the ruler) to move it in time.
4. Make the cue do something#
Double-click a cue to open its action graph, a small Patch that runs only while the cue is active. Wire nodes to the Cue block: an OSC or console output, an OSD text, a Click, a Script.
A script inside a cue runs only while the cue is active. To reset something when the cue ends, add a Trigger on cue.active State Off.
5. Run it#
Load the track on a CDJ. As it plays, the cues fire on time. The Cue List screen shows what fires next, with countdowns.
Getting the timing right#
Tune the ProDJ Link Source's Latency Compensation by ear in 10 ms steps while a track plays. Cue audio, video, the Click and the cues all use that one value.