Music for dance, cheer and competition floors

The start is the whole job

A competitor takes their position, the floor goes quiet, they nod, and the music starts. Not a moment before — a track that begins while they are still walking on costs them the routine, and in some disciplines the marks. Everything about how this behaves comes back to that: moving through the list makes no sound at all, and the only thing that starts audio is a press. So you find them, park on them, watch the floor, and go.

Two hundred entries, and you have eight seconds to find one

The practical problem at a competition is not playback, it is retrieval. Rename every row to the thing the desk actually calls out — 114 · U12 SOLO · KAUR — and the filename the studio emailed you stops mattering. Type into the show-rows box to narrow what is on screen, or work in heat order and simply move down. Because the order is what you saved rather than a folder’s alphabetical accident, the list on screen is the list being called.

A false start means going again, immediately

Something goes wrong in the first four bars and they ask to restart. Stop, and the cursor stays exactly where it is — on them — so the next press starts their track again from the top. That is the default and it is deliberate: an ordinary player would have moved on, and you would be hunting for the entry you just played while a twelve-year-old stands on the floor waiting. If you want it to fall away rather than cut, Stop fades over anything up to fifteen seconds; press it twice and it cuts.

The order changes all morning

Scratches, late arrivals, a group moved because a costume is not ready. Drag rows to reorder, or highlight a whole age group and move it together; the cursor and whatever is playing follow the tracks themselves rather than their positions, so redrawing the order between heats cannot repoint the music at the wrong competitor. A last-minute entry is dragged in from a memory stick without importing anything into a library.

A phone is the wrong tool, and everyone knows it by lunchtime

Phones and streaming apps fail here in specific ways: a call arrives mid-routine, a notification ducks the music, the track is not downloaded and the hall has no signal, or autoplay starts the next competitor’s song at an empty floor. This is a desktop application that makes no network calls at all — nothing can arrive, nothing needs signal, and nothing advances by itself. It runs the same in a rec center with no cell service as in a theater with fiber.

It is a long day, and the day has sections

Eight hours, several hundred routines, one machine. Save each section as its own file — heats, finals, presentations, the warm-up bed that runs before doors — and star them, so switching between them is a click from the Open menu rather than a hunt through a folder. Starred shows stay in that menu permanently even when they age out of the recent list, which is what makes them useful for the four or five files you open every event rather than once. Turn the row size up and the list is legible from a standing position at a trestle table, which is where you will actually be for most of the day.

Age groups and heats want banks, not more scrolling

If a discipline uses stings — a whistle, a thirty-second warning, a fanfare for the presentations — put them on the pad wall rather than in the running order, because they are fired at unpredictable moments and belong to the session rather than to any one competitor. The wall holds several banks, and the same physical key means the same slot in every one, so the U10 session and the seniors can have different sounds under identical fingers. Assign the positions to a numeric keypad and the pads are driven from a five-pound piece of plastic beside the computer, which is far easier to hit accurately than a laptop keyboard on a wobbly table.

The gap while judges confer is not a gap you control

Between routines, and especially between sections, there is dead time that lasts however long it lasts — a scoring query, a floor sweep, an injury. Because nothing advances by itself, the machine simply waits, indefinitely, without doing anything. If the silence needs covering, put filler music on a pad and hold the room, or load the between-sessions bed as its own item with a long fade so it can be brought down under an announcement rather than cut. The important part is that waiting is free: there is no timer running down toward something firing on its own.

Music arrives in every format, from everybody

Studios email MP3s, a parent brings an M4A from a phone, an older coach has a WAV from a CD rip, and one entry is a FLAC. All of those play — MP3, M4A, AAC, WAV, OGG, OPUS and FLAC — so nothing needs converting on the morning. Two honest exceptions worth knowing before the day rather than during it: a track bought from a store with copy protection on it will not play at all, because the application does not touch copy protection of any kind; and an unusual codec hidden inside a .wav container, the sort a very old recorder produces, may not decode. Both fail on the desk at ten past eight in the morning, which is exactly when you want to find out, so it is worth dragging every file in and pressing each one once before doors.

Levels are your job, and the application does not pretend otherwise

Competition music arrives at wildly different volumes: one studio has mastered theirs loud, the next has a phone recording of a rehearsal. There is a master volume you can move between routines, and it is not automatic — nothing here normalises, compresses or matches levels for you, and claiming it did would be a lie you would discover at volume in a sports hall. The practical answer used by most people running these days is to set a sensible master level, listen to anything obviously quiet in the twenty minutes before doors, and keep a hand near the slider. Knowing that in advance is more useful than a feature that half works.

Print it, and keep the backup boring

Print the running order with every routine, its length and the running total; that sheet goes to the announcer and to the scoring table, and it is generated from the show file so it cannot drift from what is actually loaded. For the backup, avoid anything clever: collect the whole event into one folder — every file, with paths recorded relative to that folder — and copy it to a memory stick and a second laptop. It opens on either a Mac or a Windows machine and one license covers both, so a spare machine is a copy of a folder rather than a second purchase and an afternoon of setup.

Nothing on the machine is allowed to interrupt

This is worth stating separately from the phone argument, because it is the same principle applied to the computer you have chosen instead. The application makes no network calls whatsoever — not for its license, not for updates, not for anything — so there is no check that can fail in a rec center with no signal and no update that can decide to install itself during the finals. There is no account to be logged out of, nothing that expires, and nothing that phones home. A license that stopped working mid-event would be a floor full of competitors and no music, so there is no mechanism by which it could.

If a competitor asks to start again, how fast is that?

One press. Stopping leaves the highlight on the same routine, so play restarts it from the beginning without you searching for it.

Will the next competitor’s music start on its own?

No. Nothing auto-advances. The floor can be empty for four minutes and the machine will simply wait.

The hall has no wifi and my phone has no signal. Does that matter?

Not at all — it never uses a connection, including for its license. The files are on the machine and that is the whole system.

Can I find one routine among two hundred quickly?

Rename rows to whatever the desk calls out rather than the filename, keep them in running order, and narrow what is on screen with the show-rows field.

What formats will the music arrive in, and will they all play?

MP3, M4A, AAC, WAV, OGG, OPUS and FLAC all play with nothing to convert. Two things will not: a file with store copy protection on it, and an unusual codec hidden inside a .wav container. Press every file once before doors and you will know.

Does it even out the volume between competitors?

No, and it does not pretend to. There is a master volume to move between routines; there is no normalization or level matching. Listen to anything obviously quiet before doors and keep a hand near the slider.

Can I put a whistle or a warning tone somewhere I can hit instantly?

Put it on the pad wall and give it a key. A cheap numeric keypad beside the computer is easier to hit accurately than a laptop keyboard, and the same key means the same slot in every bank.

How should I back up an event?

Collect the whole thing into one folder — every file, paths recorded relative to it — and copy that to a stick and a second laptop. It opens on Mac or Windows and one license covers both.