House sound for a room that runs a different show every night

The problem is turnover, not playback

A venue does not have a show. It has fifty a month, each with its own files, arriving on a memory stick an hour before doors. What breaks is never the playing of audio — it is Tuesday night opening Saturday night’s running order because both are called final, or an act’s music being deleted to make room, or nobody being able to find last month’s. Every show is its own file here, saved where you put it, and the ones that come round again get starred so they are one click from the Open menu rather than four folders deep.

House music is a show too

The bed before doors, between acts and at chuck-out is the part that runs longest and gets the least thought. Load it as its own playlist with continuous on and it plays through unattended; put the walk-ons on the pad wall over the top and they duck the bed and let it come back, so the room never falls silent between the compere finishing and the act arriving. Nothing auto-advances on the playlist side, which is the point when the act overruns.

Whoever is on tonight has to be able to run it

There is no login, no account and no password to pass around a rotating bar staff. The machine opens on the show you tell it to open on — set the startup to a starred playlist and it is already loaded before anyone touches it. Rename tracks into whatever the person on the desk actually needs to read: ACT 2 WALK ON, not the filename the act gave you. Turn the row size up and it is legible from a stool at the back of the booth.

One purchase, every room and every machine

This is the reason the licensing has tiers at all. A Venue license covers three machines — the booth, the spare, the laptop that lives in the second room. A Site license covers every machine in one organization, which is what a chain, a festival or a theater group with four spaces actually needs. It is bought once, not per seat and not per month, and there is no server to keep talking to: a license that expired would be a room with no sound in it, so nothing expires.

It cannot be interrupted by the building

The machine makes no network calls of any kind — not for licensing, not for updates, not for anything. A venue’s wifi going down, or the guest network needing a login again, cannot reach it. Neither can a notification, because there is nothing to notify.

We have two rooms and a spare laptop. What do we need?

A Venue license covers three machines. A Site license covers every machine in one organization and is what to buy if that number is going to move around — a festival, a chain, or a building with more spaces than you can count on one hand.

Can the person on the bar run it without being shown?

That is what the startup setting is for: the machine comes up with tonight’s running order already loaded, and the tracks are named whatever you typed rather than whatever the act called the file. One key plays the next thing.

What happens when an act hands us a memory stick at eight o’clock?

Drag the files in, rename them into cues, save the running order next to them. Nothing has to be imported into a library first, and nothing is moved or copied without you asking.