CUE CALLER.

What it does.

Three things go in. One show comes out.

It was built for followspot calling, but it reads whatever you put in the Notes column: spot pickups, scenic moves, pyro standbys, mic handoffs, anything that happens on a timecode stamp. If the show jumps, rewinds, or the console restarts, it re-finds its place instantly. No stale GOs, no double calls.

The screen.

Everything is built to be read from across a dark FOH riser.

Keys

F fullscreen · S settings · Esc closes any drawer. That's all of them.

Getting in.

Build your cue sheet.

One spreadsheet drives the whole show. Start from the template; the parser does the rest.

Hit Template in the header for the styled .xlsx (a plain .csv link sits underneath). The sheet has labeled sections; the app reads them all. You can also write your own sheet from scratch: the only thing the parser truly needs is a header row with Timecode, Label, Notes. Everything else is optional and just makes the tool smarter.

Or skip files entirely: load straight from a Google Sheet link and re-pull updates with one button mid-rehearsal. That flow is in Load & save.

Six columns, one call.

Timecode and Notes do the heavy lifting. The other four sharpen the call.

Songs & set lists.

The cue table is a song library. The set list is tonight's running order.

Song banners

Inside the cue table, a row starting with ▼ is a song banner: ▼  Neon Skyline  ·  offset 01:00:00:00. Every cue below it belongs to that song until the next banner. Banners give you the gold separators in the cue list, the CURRENT SONG readout in the header, and the names the set list matches against.

Each song lives on its own timecode island (its offset), so songs can sit in the sheet in any order. Cues fire by timecode no matter how the document is arranged, and the cue list still displays in document order.

The [ SET LIST ] section

One song name per row, in tonight's order. The set list panel numbers them, lights up the one you're in, dims the ones you've played, and shows each song's first stamp and cue count. Names match loosely (case and punctuation don't matter), and an entry with no matching banner shows no matching song in sheet instead of breaking, so a typo is loud during prep instead of quiet during the show.

No SET LIST section? The panel falls back to the order songs appear in the sheet.

The *star* envelope.

Some things deserve a heads-up, not a standby and a GO.

Wrap a cue's NOTES cell in asterisks (or underscores) and it becomes a plain note:

A plain note is still automatic. It is spoken once, exactly at its timecode, and it gets no standby, no GO, and no fade-out. On screen it renders in italic gold with a [ NOTE ] eyebrow so it never reads as a pickup.

Use it for confetti and pyro warnings, scenic moves, guest walk-ons, anything the room should hear about without arming an operator.

The voice.

Every cue gets a standby at the lead time and a GO on the stamp. The engine guarantees the GO always wins.

Priority · who talks over whom

Calls queue instead of clipping each other. Three tiers: GO outranks fade-outs outranks standbys. A higher tier interrupts a lower one mid-sentence and fires exactly on its stamp; the interrupted call replays right after, in priority order. A standby whose cue has already fired is dropped instead of played late. Jump the timecode and the whole queue clears. The result: a GO has never once landed late because something else was talking.

GO pre · reaction-time compensation

Operators need a beat to react. GO pre fires the spoken GO early by up to 3 seconds so the pickup lands on the stamp instead of the word. Start at 0, watch your ops for a song, and dial in what the crew actually needs.

The knobs

Feeding it timecode.

Three sources. Arm one from the header; the clock follows whoever delivered signal last.

Load & save.

Three ways in. One cloud store so the same show follows you to any machine.

Departments & lanes.

One show file, a department per lane — spots, lighting, audio, video, lasers, pyro, automation, scenic, management, notes. Each seat picks its lane and hears only its own calls.

When a show has more than one department, a Department dropdown appears at the top of the screen. Pick a lane and the machine swaps the cue list and re-points the voice caller at that lane — so the spot op hears spot calls and the pyro tech hears pyro calls off the same file. A Now tracking banner confirms each switch.

The offline file.

Bake the loaded show into a single .html that runs from a USB stick.

With a show loaded, hit ⇩ Offline File in the header. You get one file, named after the show, with every cue, the meeting, and all your settings baked in. Copy it to the show laptop, double-click, done. No internet, no VIP login, no Google. LTC, MTC, and the voice all work from the local file; Chrome asks for mic / MIDI permission once.

Offline voices, the good ones

The calls use your computer's speech engine. Voices tagged · cloud in the picker need internet; everything else runs with the network unplugged. The stock offline voices are robotic; the premium ones are not, and they're free:

Display settings.

Press S. Everything persists per machine, and saved sessions carry it all.

Show-day checklist.

Quick reference.