Show Companion

What it's for — Companion turns every iPad, phone, and spare laptop backstage into a live window on your show, with nothing to install. CueSync runs a small web server on the show machine; devices scan a QR code and get a live crew board with virtual cue lights, a DJ confidence monitor, or a system-health wall — over your venue WiFi, entirely offline from the internet. Transport is out of reach: no page served over the wire can move your show clock, load a track, or edit your show. The crew board lets the Stage Manager call cue lights by hand and lets anyone leave a note on a cue — a call is a signal between people, and a note waits in your review queue until you apply it. One surface — Deputy — can fire pads, and only the ones you explicitly publish; see below. Every other surface only shows you the show.

The surfaces

Surfaces your edition doesn't include aren't served, and the join QR opens the best surface your edition does include.

Getting devices on

1. Open Settings → Companion and switch on Enable companion server.
2. Under Network, pick the WiFi your devices are actually on — the list marks the sensible choice · recommended and flags any interface carrying PRO DJ LINK or your outputs with ⚠ avoid. Serve Companion on backstage/house WiFi, never the show-control VLAN.
3. Point the device camera at the QR code in the Join card. Done.

Every join link carries an access code — the server never runs open. By default a fresh code is generated each time you switch Companion on; if crew pin the page to their home screen (recommended for show iPads), set a fixed access code so their saved link survives restarts. Applying a change while Companion is running keeps the code it is already using (unless you have typed a different one), so a device that is still pointed at the right address keeps working.

A fixed code needs 6 or more characters, using letters, digits, hyphen and underscore only — anything else you type is dropped as you type it. A code shorter than that is not used: Companion serves behind a generated one instead and tells you, so read the code from the Join card rather than from what you typed.

Each surface installs as its own home-screen app — pin /live and you get CueSync Live, pin /monitor and you get CueSync Monitor. One device can hold several, and each icon reopens the surface it was added from.

The Join card also gives you:

• A link + QR per surface — hand the DJ the /live link, the FOH tech /monitor, the FOH tablet /deputy, each with its own Copy button and expandable QR.
• Station links — a link per department (LX, Followspot, SFX…) that opens the crew board already filtered to that station's cues. The followspot iPad sees only followspot cues.
• A connected-device roster — who is watching, from which address, on which surface, since when. If the followspot iPad is missing from the list, you know before places. The Deputy tablet is on it too, and the Deputy card says whether one is connected right now.

The crew board

Each station gets a card: current cue, next cue with a live countdown (1:20, then 45s, amber inside ten seconds), and a virtual cue light. The light follows the show (STANDBY as a cue arms, a green GO flash as it fires) — and the Stage Manager can call STANDBY/GO by hand for any station from their own device. A call is a human signal between people; the operator still presses GO on the console. Like a real cue-light box, a GO lights for about eight seconds and goes out by itself; a STANDBY stays lit until its GO is called or someone presses Clear. A call shows who made it (STANDBY · Sam) — tap 👤 beside the station chips to set or change your name; until you do, calls and notes go out as Anonymous, and a call never waits on a form.

The countdown turns into a green GO at the mark and clears shortly after. It is deliberately not a state display: if a cue is waiting on a hand — its timecode has passed but nobody has fired it — the countdown goes quiet and the amber STANDBY light is what tells you where you are. Green always means now.

A dead link looks dead. The countdown only counts on between updates for a few seconds. If the board stops hearing from the show machine, the clock stops counting after about three seconds instead of running on against the tablet's own clock, and after about twelve the whole board greys, its cue lights are hidden and the SIGNAL STALE alarm stays up until updates return. A frozen board never shows a green dot beside a countdown that is only the tablet guessing.

• ＋ Leave a note opens a note sheet (up to 500 characters) and sends it on the current cue to the operator's review queue — it lands in Settings → Companion as "Pending notes from the team" — each one names the station and cue it is about — and only the operator applies it to the show.
• ⬇ Download sheet saves that station's cue sheet (print to PDF from the phone); ⬇ CSV saves the same list for a spreadsheet. A cue the operator has cut from tonight's run is struck through and tagged CUT on the sheet (and gains a trailing Status column in the CSV), so the paper never promises a cue that will not fire. A cue the clock does not fire carries a mark in a Trigger column — STBY waits for the operator's GO, FOLLOW runs after the cue before it, AUTO runs together with the cue before it — and the sheet says that such a cue's time is where it sits in the running order, not when it fires; the column appears only when the show has such a cue. The station's name is repeated on every printed page, a long cue name wraps inside its column, and a cue number a spreadsheet would rewrite (1.10 becoming 1.1) is written as text in the CSV.
• ⛶ Board switches to a glanceable full-screen mode for a green-room monitor or director's PC (also reachable with ?view=board in the URL).

Broadcast — one banner on every device

The Broadcast card in Settings → Companion pushes a banner to every connected device at once — HOLD — stand by, Places, please, or anything you type. It appears instantly on the crew board, live view and system monitor (even while the show is stopped), and on the Deputy tablet within moments, stays up until you press Clear, and is strictly one-way: devices can read it, never send one.

The live view and system monitor

Live view is a booth confidence monitor: deck cards with artwork, live BPM and a beat indicator, master/on-air/stopped badges, the current phrase, energy trend, AutoPilot's state and its upcoming moments, and a mirror of your CuePads' run-state. Confidence mode blows the numbers up to across-the-booth size.

System monitor is the FOH health wall: every output connection with its health and latency; what's live right now; PRO DJ LINK devices on the network; timecode source and freewheel state; and the notification history. An output going offline shows up the moment it happens.

If something looks wrong

• A blank page that only says "unauthorized", or a banner reading "ACCESS CODE REJECTED" — the device has no access code, or an old one (the address was opened without the code, or you changed the code since it joined). Re-scan the QR from the Join card — the code rides in the link — or add ?code= and the code to the address.
• "SIGNAL STALE" banner — the device hasn't received data for a while. It reconnects itself; if the banner sticks, check the show machine and the WiFi. On the crew board the whole board greys and its cue lights are hidden while the banner is up. A healthy but idle system never shows this, so silence always means trouble.
• QR shows but devices can't reach it — you're serving on the wrong interface. Pick the network the devices are on under Network (the panel warns you when you're on loopback, which only works on the show machine itself).
• iPad goes dark mid-show — a web page can only hold a screen awake over a secure (https) connection, and Companion is served from the show machine's network address, so on any device that opens it by that network address — a phone, an iPad, a monitor laptop, or the show machine's own browser through the Join card's Open buttons — the page cannot keep the screen on. Each surface says so with a line you can tap: tapping asks the page to try to keep the screen on (it remembers, and tries again next visit), but whether that works depends on the device and the page cannot tell, so the line also names what is certain. For a dedicated cue-light iPad, set Auto-Lock to Never (Settings → Display & Brightness) or use Guided Access — and check it by leaving the iPad alone for longer than its Auto-Lock.
• A mistyped address — an address that is not one of the four surfaces answers not found; it no longer opens the crew board in its place.
• Port already in use — another app (or a stale CueSync) holds the port. Change it under Network → Port, then press Start now; the panel tells you when the server couldn't start and why.
• "Not running" under a switch that is on — Companion was stopped (its network address went away, or the licence no longer permits it) and never restarts by itself. The line under the switch says why; press Start now when it is safe to bring it back.

A monitoring computer on the same network can also auto-discover the server via Bonjour/mDNS (service type _cuesync-companion._tcp) — the access code is never broadcast, only the address.

The deputy surface — the one that fires

A typical tablet remote is blanket access to your show with a password on it. Deputy is a list you wrote.

In Settings → Companion → Deputy, tick the pads a deputy may fire. The tablet at /deputy shows those pads, as big buttons, and can name nothing else — not a cue, not an action, not a bank, not a pad you did not tick. Untick one, or press Revoke all, and the next press is refused; the tablet does not have to cooperate, notice, or reload.

Four things worth knowing before you hand someone the link:

• It starts empty. A deputy surface you have not configured can fire nothing at all. There is no default set and no "all pads" option.
• A published pad still goes through the desk. Read-Only mode, a pad you have disabled and a pad that is no longer in the show refuse it — and the tablet is told which (locked, switched off, no longer in the show), not left guessing.
• A panic hold refuses a deputy — and only a deputy. While Blackout or Freeze is engaged, a deputy press is refused unless everything it would do is a Blackout: a Blackout pad that fires once, with no follow action and no choke group. A Flash, Phrase Latch, Repeat or choke-group Blackout pad is refused, because the tablet has no release. So a deputy can take the rig darker and cannot bring it back; the tablet says the show is on hold and to wait for you. Your own presses — grid, keyboard, MIDI, Stream Deck — are never held.
• What you publish is a snapshot — the name and what the pad does. A pad renamed on the desk keeps the name it was published under until you publish again, so a deputy is never shown a button whose name changed under them. Change what a published pad does — its action, mode or timing — and the tablet stops firing it until you publish again; the deputy is told the pad changed, not handed a button that now does something else. That includes a pad that fires other pads — a group, a macro or a follow: re-programming any pad it fires counts as changing it. (A pad that fires a cue fires that cue as it is at that moment; editing the cue does not stop the pad.) The Deputy card counts the published pads that have changed and offers Publish the changed pad again, which renews just those. Ticking or unticking any pad publishes the whole list again, so it takes every ticked pad as it is at that moment.

A message you Broadcast reaches the deputy tablet too, so a hold you call is on the screen of the person about to press. If a deputy presses a pad you have just revoked, their page says so in those words and refreshes itself. If a press gets no answer — the Wi-Fi dropped between the tablet and the show machine — the page does not say it failed, because the press may have arrived and only the reply been lost: it says the pad may or may not have fired, holds that button for a few seconds, and sends the deputy to check the desk rather than press again — and it says the same if the desk itself reports a fault while handling the press, since nobody can then tell whether the pad fired. A press is held for the pad, not for the button on screen, so one press is one fire even when the tablet redraws its grid because you changed the published list. The tablet also says when it has stopped hearing from CueSync (RECONNECTING, then SIGNAL STALE) instead of leaving its last "live" on the screen, and an answer clears itself after a few seconds. Nothing is optimistic: a button turns green only after the show machine confirms the pad fired. A pad with launch quantize answers armed instead — it fires on its next beat, bar or phrase — and pressing it again leaves it armed rather than cancelling it.

Scale and safety

The server supports up to 24 simultaneous live-stream devices to protect the show machine, and a Companion fault is isolated from cue execution. The one exception is the Deputy surface, which reaches cue execution by design, and only through the list you published — a request that doesn't name a pad you ticked is refused outright. All of it lives and dies with the Enable toggle: switch it off and every device is dropped instantly.