Conductor
Run a setlist end to end. Transport, a mixer for each track’s buses, timecode out, and a Stream Deck on the front of it.
Advance between tracks is not seamless yet — see Gaps between tracks.
Overview
Conductor is the playback half of Prismatik, and the counterpart to Timeliner.
Timeliner is authoring — one song, zoomed in, marking cues. Conductor is running — the whole set, hands off, the transport controls a music player would recognise.
They share one audio engine and one mixer, so a set runs at the balance it was set up with.
When to Use
- Playing a set back with click and cues to in-ears
- Sending timecode to a console while the music runs
- Checking a set end to end before a show
- Running playback from a Stream Deck rather than the laptop
Step-by-Step
- Choose a setlist. Build one in the Setlist Manager, or let Track Import create one when you bring a set in. If the show has none, the tool offers a shortcut straight there.
- Check the mixer. Every track’s buses appear — music, click, cues, timecode — with mute, solo, level and pan. Pan and mute belong to the show; level is per track.
- Pick an output. On a device with more than two channels, each bus can be patched to its own output.
- Press play. It advances at the end of each track.
Transport
Everything a music player has:
| Control | Does |
|---|---|
| Play / pause | Starts and holds |
| Stop | Back to the top of the track |
| Next / previous | Moves through the set |
| Previous (again) | Restarts the track first if you are more than 3s in |
| Shuffle | Plays the set in a random order, keeping the current track first |
| Repeat | Cycles: off → repeat set → repeat track |
| Seek | Drag anywhere in the track |
| Track list | Click any track to jump to it |
Repeat-track holds a song when it ends on its own, but pressing next still moves on — otherwise the button would look broken.
Timecode
Timecode is generated per track from that track’s own offset and frame rate, and arrives as a bus like any other: visible in the mixer, muteable, and routable to its own output. It is hard-panned so it never bleeds into the music ear.
The TC switch on the transport is set-wide, because running a timecoded show is an all-or-nothing decision even though the offset comes from each track. It defaults on when any track in the set carries an offset.
The mixer
The same mixer Timeliner shows, on the same engine — not a second copy. Change something in either tool and it is the show’s setting, not the tool’s.
- Level is per track, because how loud the click needs to be genuinely varies
- Pan and mute belong to the show — “click hard right, cues hard left” is how a show is patched, not something to set fifteen times
- Solo is never saved. It is an audition, and a forgotten solo would silence everything on the next song you open
There is a master fader on the transport row as well as in the mixer, because reaching into a collapsed panel to turn a set down is the wrong number of clicks.
Remote control
Conductor is the tool a Stream Deck is actually for. Press Enable OSC, point Bitfocus Companion at the machine on UDP 8000, and paste addresses into buttons.
See Remote Control (OSC) for the full address list and Companion setup.
Known limitations
Gaps between tracks
Advance is not seamless. The next track is decoded when it is reached, and on a 130MB buffer that takes a moment — you will hear a beat of silence between songs.
Closing that means pre-loading the next track while the current one plays, at roughly double the memory in flight. It is a deliberate later step, once the rest is proven.
Monitoring
The Monitoring card is a placeholder. It is intended to hold show notes, protocol status, console messages and device heartbeats in panels you arrange — none of it is built.
Related Tools
- Timeliner — marking the cues a set plays back
- Setlist Manager — building the running order
- Track Import — bringing a whole set in, and building a setlist from it
Source
src/renderer/src/components/tools/Conductor.tsx