Engineered for the live show
A live show is unforgiving — a dropped cue, a frozen console, a stranded fixture. CueSync is built to keep moving when something fails, and to tell you when it does. Here are the operator-facing guarantees behind every show, described honestly.
Auto-Reconnect on Every Connection
Every protocol output is wrapped in a reconnection layer that recovers from network blips without operator intervention. If your console hiccups mid-show, CueSync keeps trying — and resumes the moment it can.
- Exponential backoff starting at 1 second, capped at 30 seconds — fast first attempts, no thrashing on a long outage.
- Per-connection state, not global — one flaky lighting console doesn't pause your video output.
- Reconnect status is visible in the operator UI; you always know which integration is live and which is recovering.
- Message queue clearing on disconnect prevents a stale-command flood the moment a console comes back online.
Circuit Breaker on Failing Outputs
When a connection fails repeatedly, the circuit breaker opens and stops sending until the connection recovers. No silent retry storm, no operator confusion about whether commands are landing.
- Opens after a small burst of failures inside a short window — fast-fail, not slow-fail.
- Recovery uses an exponential cool-down before probing the connection again.
- Breaker state and the countdown to next probe are surfaced in the UI so you can plan around it.
- Manual override is one click — for the moments when you're certain the rig is back.
No Silent Failures
Every action that fails surfaces to the operator as a visible notification. A live show should never have a command quietly disappear — if something didn't land, you'll know.
- Protocol send failures emit operator-visible toasts, not just background log lines.
- Multi-device broadcasts report per-device success or failure individually.
- Beat-path execution errors are tagged with the cue and target so you can fix the right thing.
- Connection drops are announced; they don't only show up as a status indicator turning gray.
Beat-Event Budget Under 5 ms
The cue-evaluation path is engineered to stay under 5 milliseconds per beat event from end to end inside CueSync. Regression-tested on every build so a future change can't quietly slow down your show.
- Cue-evaluation hot path measured continuously, not estimated — the budget is real, not aspirational.
- End-to-end latency to your fixtures depends on your protocol chain and venue network; CueSync's portion of that chain is the bounded part.
- OSC send budget held under 2 ms; UI frame budget held under 16 ms for 60-fps animation during beats.
- Performance regressions fail the build, not the show.
Hardware-Output Rate Limiting
Surfaces that fan out hardware writes — like LED feedback on a MIDI grid controller — are coalesced at a defined ceiling so a fast UI state change can't drown a fixture in updates.
- 30 Hz ceiling on LED grid feedback prevents flicker compounding when cues toggle rapidly.
- Idempotency guards skip redundant updates — the same state never writes twice.
- Coalesced writes preserve the latest state across a window so nothing visible is dropped.
- Rate limiting is automatic — operators don't have to tune anything to get it.
Held-Trigger Safety Timeouts
Modes that stay active while you hold a pad — flash, latch — recover gracefully when the window loses focus mid-press. A held cue never strands a fixture stuck "on" because you Cmd-Tabbed to another app.
- Per-pad release-loss timeout catches the case where the OS swallows the release event.
- Timeout fires the matching deactivate action so downstream fixtures return to their resting state.
- Operator gets a notification when a release was lost — you can see what happened, not guess.
- Cancelled cleanly on a normal release, so the safety net never interferes with normal play.
Venue Profile Resilience
Venue profiles auto-recognize your rig by device fingerprint, robust to network changes between visits. A show file never fails to load just because the network shifted.
- Fingerprint matches on protocol + port + device name — DHCP changes between visits don't defeat recognition.
- 5-second debounce on discovery prevents cold-boot flicker from triggering a false suggestion.
- Suggestions are suppressed for the rest of the session once you activate, so you're never re-prompted mid-show.
- If a show file references a venue profile that isn't on this machine, the load continues with a warning — never a hard failure 30 seconds before doors.
Pre-Show Review
Theatre and Production editions ship a pre-show review that walks the show before the curtain — per-track readiness with ready / tested / drafted counts and a headline ready percentage, so you know exactly what still needs attention.
- Connection health checks every configured output before the show starts.
- Cue references are validated — orphaned references to deleted looks or moved cues are surfaced as warnings.
- Misconfigured Show Control identity filters become operator-visible warnings rather than silent drops at runtime.
- Mission Control HUD keeps all of this on one screen during rehearsal and the show itself.