Questions, answered properly

No — not to run, and not to stay licensed. The application makes no network calls whatsoever. Your license is checked on your own machine, so a venue with no wifi changes nothing.

A foot pedal works, and so does almost anything else that pairs with your computer and sends key presses. Queue Up is trainable rather than fussy: open Settings ▸ Remote control, press any button, and the app shows you exactly what that button sent. Click Learn beside the action you want, press the button again, and it is assigned — about ten seconds per button, remembered for ever. Bluetooth media remotes are the pick of them, because play/pause, next, previous and stop reach the app even when its window is behind something else. Presentation clickers and page turners send the arrow keys, which is what moves the cursor down a running order. Bluetooth page-turner foot pedals are the hands-free answer when you are holding a puppet, a deck, a rope or a guitar. A numeric keypad fires the pads with no setup at all. Camera shutter fobs are small enough to palm, though many of them send volume keys, which no application on either platform can capture. Game controllers and USB foot switches work if they present as a keyboard. The test is the same for all of them: press a button and see whether a code appears under Last key received. If it does, it will work — you do not need a particular model and there is no compatibility list to check.

Yes — both live on the transport bar rather than in a dialog, so neither needs you to stop anything or open a menu. Drag the size slider and the playlist rows scale from 12 to 160 pixels while the music keeps playing, which is what you want when the venue puts you further from the screen than you expected. There is a bold setting in Appearance as well, which thickens the track names and the pad labels without touching the buttons and menus around them. The app has its own volume, separate from the system’s, with a Mute button beside it: set the computer once to suit the desk, then trim from here. Volume can also be driven from the keyboard, or bound to any two buttons on your remote.

Ducking is music automatically dropping in volume while something else plays over the top of it, then coming back up on its own — like somebody turning the music down while you speak and turning it back up when you have finished, which is exactly the movement a sound engineer makes on a desk. You need it any time a sound has to land clearly over music that must keep running: a wake cue over a hypnosis bed, a sting over party music, an announcement over background music. The alternative is stopping the music, and a sudden silence pulls every head in the room toward the sound system. Set a pad to overlay and it ducks the playlist for exactly as long as it sounds; 25% is the default and it is adjustable or can be turned off.

Yes. The pad wall pops out into a window of its own, which you can put on a second monitor, a touchscreen beside the computer, or across the desk where an operator can reach it while you keep the running order in front of you. It either follows the main window as you move it or sits wherever you place it. Importantly, the detached window only draws pads and reports presses — every buffer and the whole audio graph stay in the main window, so there is exactly one thing making sound however many windows are open.

Yes, and it is one of the things people end up liking most. Right-click a track (or press F2) and type whatever you actually call it — “ACT 1 WALK-ON”, “SLEEP CUE”, “after Tom’s bit”. It changes only the label shown in the app; the file on disk is never touched, so nothing else that uses that file is affected. The names are saved with the show, so they are there every night, and because the playlist text scales up to 160 pixels you can read them from wherever you stand. You can rename while music is playing, too — the editor does not interrupt playback.

Yes, and it is laid out for paper rather than being a screenshot of the screen: black on white whatever theme you use, every track included regardless of how many rows are on screen, and no row split across a page break. Each page carries the playlist name, the track count, the total running time and the date; each track shows its length and which pad holds it; and a second table lists every pad, including ones holding a file the running order never uses. Useful for handing to a sound engineer, leaving with a stand-in operator, putting in a festival tech pack — and as a dated record of what you actually ran, which a year later is the only reliable way to remember.

Yes — a starter show installs with it, so you can press Play the minute it is installed. Two ambient beds, a walk-on fanfare and exit music, plus pads for applause, a rimshot, a drum roll, a sting, a whoosh, a bell, a two-minute call, a countdown and a blackout boom. They are working cues rather than production music, and every one was generated mathematically rather than recorded, so there is no license to observe and nothing to attribute. Open… ▸ Starter show loads it. Replace it with your own audio whenever you like.

Yes. Use Settings ▸ Portable shows ▸ Collect this show into a folder: the playlist and every file it plays are copied into one folder with the paths stored relative to it. Put that folder on a USB stick, a shared drive or another machine and it opens with nothing missing, on either platform. Ordinary saved playlists also record a relative path automatically whenever the audio sits alongside them.

Just the name. It is one program and one download. Without a license it is called Queue Up. That is the trial — the whole thing, working, for 30 days. Nothing is grayed out and nothing is missing. Type in a license and the copy you already have becomes Queue Up Pro. The name changes, the trial clock goes away, and the icon gets a PRO badge. You do not download anything again. The badge is genuinely useful if you run more than one machine: you can see which one is licensed without opening it.

No. Queue Up runs entirely from the keyboard and always has — Space plays and stops, the arrow keys move the cursor down the running order, Esc stops, and the number keys fire the pads. Nothing is held back for people who own hardware, so a whole show can be driven from the computer in front of you with nothing bought, paired or charged. The keys are yours to change, too: every action can be taught whatever key you would rather it answered to, on the same screen that learns a remote, and an action can hold several keys at once so your own sit alongside the presets rather than replacing them. A remote buys you one thing — distance from the machine — which matters if you work away from it and matters not at all if you do not. Try it on the keyboard first, then decide.

No. Any Mac or Windows computer you already have will do — the laptop you travel with, or the desktop that lives in the booth. Install it and that machine is your sound department, driven from its own keyboard with keys you can set to suit yourself. Plug into whatever the venue gives you, or run it through the computer’s own speakers for a small room. A remote is the one thing worth adding later, and only if you need to be away from the machine; it can be an inexpensive one.

Because macOS and Windows both consume volume keys at the driver level and never hand them to an application. No software can capture them. Bind the app’s own volume up and down to two other buttons instead — that works perfectly.

Yes. The trial is fully featured for 30 days — pads, fades, banks, printing, everything. Nobody should buy live-show software without testing it against their own remote, their own audio interface and their own files.

The current release is 1.8.38, from September 8, 2026. To check what you have, open Queue Up and look at Settings ▸ License — the version is printed at the top of that panel. If the two match, you are up to date and there is nothing to download. The number also appears on the download page, so you can compare before downloading anything rather than after. All three builds — macOS, Windows x64 and Windows ARM — carry the same version and are released together, so there is never a case where one platform is a release behind another.

There are three builds: macOS (one universal file for Apple Silicon and Intel), Windows for Intel and AMD processors, and Windows for ARM. Your license key works on every one of them. Buy once, install on the Mac and on the PC that goes to the gig, move to a new machine next year — the same key, no upgrade fee, no separate Windows edition. If you are not sure which your machine needs, the download page detects it and puts yours first; taking the wrong one costs nothing but the download.

It refers to the processor, not the software — all three builds are the same version of Queue Up, released together, with every feature. Windows x64 (Intel and AMD) is the older of the two Windows architectures and still by far the more common, so “legacy” there means most people rather than out of date. It is also the safe choice when you are unsure, because it runs on ARM machines through emulation; the ARM build does not run on Intel machines.

The software is finished and in use in real shows; what is still in progress is the paperwork around it — code-signing certificates for both platforms, so macOS and Windows stop warning about an unrecognised developer. Until those are in place you get one extra click on first launch, and a lower price for putting up with it. Buying now covers every version that follows, including the signed ones.

A Single license covers one machine, plus a spare that you own — the machine you work from and the backup beside it. Venue covers three, for a room with a resident machine and visiting operators. Site covers every machine in one organization.

Nothing. The version you bought keeps working forever — this is not a subscription, and it will never stop mid-show because a payment failed. There is nothing to renew and nothing that expires: what ends is only your entitlement to versions released after that point. If you want those later, you buy them, at a price well below a new license, whenever you feel like it. The one thing worth knowing: a release is supported on the operating systems it shipped for, so if you later update macOS or Windows to something newer than your copy, compatibility comes in a later release rather than as a patch to the one you have. Buy the newer versions when you want them — or stay where you are, and stay working.

If your twelve months are running, that is exactly what they are for: the fix arrives as an ordinary new version. If they have passed, your copy keeps working on the system it worked on before — that is guaranteed — but it was never built for the newer one, and there is no patch to a version already issued. The build that supports the new system is a later release, and buying the newer versions gets it, at any time you like. The advice that costs nothing: do not update your operating system in the middle of a run of shows. A show machine is equipment, not a phone.

It plays MP3, M4A and AAC, WAV (16-bit, 24-bit and 32-bit float), FLAC, OGG Vorbis and Opus — anything your operating system’s own decoders can open. It will not play: files with copy protection on them (Apple Music, Spotify, Audible), unusual codecs inside a WAV container such as IMA ADPCM, video files, MIDI, playlists from other software (.m3u, .pls), or web streams — it opens files on your own machine because it makes no network connections at all. The same list is inside the app, at Settings ▸ Files & formats, so you can check before a show rather than during one. If something will not load, converting it to a plain MP3 or WAV always fixes it.

It does not check, and it does not circumvent. Queue Up contains nothing capable of removing copy protection and never will; a protected file simply fails to decode, exactly as it would in any other player. That means what you load is your responsibility — having the right to use each file, and the right to play it to an audience. Playing recorded music in public normally needs a license from a collecting society, which is usually the venue’s and occasionally yours. This software grants you no rights in any recording, and says so in Settings and in the license agreement.

It plays through whatever your operating system is using as its output device, so any interface that macOS can see will work. There is no separate output routing inside the app.

That is what Continuous playlists are for. Mark the pre-show and interval playlists Continuous and they play straight through, while your cue list still stops after every track. The setting belongs to the playlist, so switching between them switches the behavior with it.

It is flagged, in the list and on the pad, and keeps its place. Nothing silently disappears — finding a hole in the wall mid-show is exactly what that behavior exists to prevent.

No — and nor will anything else that is not their own app. Those files are protected, and Queue Up has no way to open them: it hands a file to the operating system’s decoders, and a protected one simply will not decode. Use audio you own outright — purchased downloads, your own recordings, CDs you have ripped yourself, or production music libraries. That is what everybody running a show does anyway, because a streaming app is the last thing you want between you and a walk-on.

Quite possibly, and that is between you, your venue and your country — it has nothing to do with buying this software. Playing recorded music to an audience normally needs a license from a collecting society, which in most venues is already held by the venue. Queue Up plays your files; it grants you no rights in them. Checking what applies where you are working is your responsibility, and the license agreement says so plainly.

Fourteen days, no questions asked, even after downloading. Email us and the money goes back. That is on top of the free trial, which is the real answer to whether it suits you.

One person, for their own shows, because the alternative was a music app and a lot of hope. Support emails are answered by the person who wrote the code.