CueSync Studio

What it's for — Studio is where the show gets designed before anyone is in the room. It is a cloud workspace, not part of the desktop app: lighting, video, laser, sound, choreography and stage management open the same waveform in a browser, place cues against it, argue about them in writing, and sign them off. When the design settles, the whole show exports into CueSync on the show machine, where one operator binds it to your rig and runs it.

The division of labour is deliberate. Studio holds intent — where a cue lands, what it should feel like, who owns it. The desktop holds execution — which console, which protocol, which fixture. Studio never touches the live beat path, and nothing you do in a browser can fire a cue.

Getting access

Studio is a paid add-on, billed separately from your CueSync edition and available on every edition. Add it from Pricing or from Billing in your account dashboard, then open cuesync.live/studio in a browser and sign in with the same CueSync account.

Two things about team access are worth knowing before you buy:

• People you invite do not each need a subscription. Invite a lighting designer to your show and they can open it, place cues, comment and export — covered by yours, with no seat count and no extra charge.
• Founding a show requires your own subscription. Coverage is one hop and read-only in that sense: a collaborator can work in your show but cannot start shows of their own until they add Studio themselves.

If you were invited and Studio shows you nothing, check that you opened the invitation link from the email — the invite is what creates your membership.

Building the show

A Studio project is a setlist: an ordered list of audio tracks, each one a song, act or segment with its own waveform and its own cues. Upload a folder, a multi-file selection, or pull tracks from your account library — the library de-duplicates by content, so the same master reused across five shows is stored once.

Each track gets a real waveform in the browser, drawn natively with an overview minimap, a time ruler, a beat grid and drop-frame-correct SMPTE. Cues are placed on it and can be nudged frame by frame or snapped to the grid.

Every cue is anchored to its position in the track, in milliseconds. Timecode, bar:beat and pixels are all views of that one number — which is why a cue placed against the waveform in a browser lands on exactly the same frame in the desktop, with no conversion drift.

Alongside position, a cue carries:

• Discipline — lighting, video, laser, sound, choreographer, artist, stage management, stagehand or automation. Disciplines are how the show stays legible: each becomes its own lane, and every report and filter keys off it.
• Number and name — your existing cue numbering, including forms like 12.5A.
• Intent — what the cue should do: "warm wash up, 3-count". This is the field the design lives in.
• Notes — operator-facing detail.
• Tolerance and offset, in frames.
• Status — draft, in review or approved. Editing a cue's position or intent moves it back out of approval, so sign-off cannot silently go stale.

Acts and scenes nest over the top as sections, with their own start and end positions.

Working as a team

• Roles — owner, admin, member and viewer, crossed with discipline tags in a permission matrix. A followspot operator can be given the show without being given the ability to rewrite lighting.
• Comments — threaded, on the cue, with @mentions that email the person named.
• Per-discipline workspaces — a markdown plan per department, plus PDF and image attachments for plots, plans and rider pages.
• Presence — who else is in the show right now, live.
• Version history — named snapshots, restored atomically. Take one before a re-cut.
• Activity feed — what changed, by whom, when.
• Templates — duplicate a finished show as the starting point for the next one.

Changes propagate live to everyone in the project. If two people edit the same cue, the second one is told the cue was edited elsewhere rather than being allowed to overwrite it silently.

Reports

The cue sheet is the master document: every cue in order, filterable by discipline, printable, and exportable as CSV. The reports hub adds per-document print pages, and cue lists export as USITT ASCII for consoles and paperwork that expect it.

Getting the show into CueSync

Two routes. Both produce the same show.

Open directly in the desktop — with CueSync running and signed in on the same machine, use Open in CueSync desktop (in the Studio header, or from the ⌘K palette). The desktop fetches the show over your license and imports it. This is the fast path.

Export the file — press Export to download a .cuesync file, then File → Open it in CueSync. Use this when the design machine and the show machine are different, or when the show machine is offline. The export dialog first shows a sign-off summary by discipline; it is advisory and never blocks the export.

Importing replaces the show currently open in the desktop. If a show is live, or you have unsaved changes, CueSync asks first rather than pulling the floor out mid-show.

What transfers, and what does not

Transfers: show metadata, the track structure, acts and scenes, and every cue — position, number, name, notes, tolerance and offset frames, enabled and standby flags — segregated into one lane per discipline. Cue intent is folded into the desktop's notes field as an [INTENT] block, so the design reasoning arrives with the cue.

Does not transfer:

• Protocol actions. Studio holds no bindings — it does not know your rig. Every imported cue arrives with an empty action list, and the desktop's flight check flags them as needing binding. This is the intended handover point: the operator decides which console, universe and fixture each cue speaks to.
• Audio. The export carries no audio bytes. It carries the filename it was prepped against, and CueSync tells you which file to attach ("Prepped against act1.wav"). Attach the master in the Show Editor to get the waveform and timecode playback back.

On DJ Edition, which has no Show Editor, an imported Studio show is flattened into the DJ cue stack automatically so the cues are reachable where that edition actually runs them. Theatre and Production editions open the track structure as designed.

After importing: bind actions to each cue, attach the audio, then Save.

Limits

Project storage is shown as a meter in Settings inside each project, so the ceiling is visible long before you reach it. If a project fills up, delete unused tracks or move a segment into its own project — storage is counted per project, not per account.

If something looks wrong

• An invited collaborator sees "not found" — they have not opened the invitation yet. The link in the invitation email is what grants membership; until then Studio is invisible to them by design.
• "Open in CueSync desktop" does nothing — CueSync must be running and signed in on that machine. If it is not signed in, it will tell you so; if it is not installed, the browser has nothing to hand the link to. Export the file instead.
• The waveform will not load — the browser could not read the audio from cloud storage. Reload the page; if it persists on one network only, a proxy or content filter is blocking the storage host.
• Uploads fail immediately — check the file against the limits above. A file over its cap is rejected before the upload starts.
• Imported cues do nothing in the desktop — expected until you bind them. Imported cues carry no protocol actions; the flight check lists every cue still waiting for one.
• No waveform after import — the audio is not attached. Add the master audio file named in the import message in the Show Editor.