Why this exists
I built the console I kept wishing I had.
Ilya Dolzhenko
Programmer and AI developer. Sound engineer for a small theatre company, on the evenings and weekends when there is a show on.
I write software for a living. On the evenings and weekends I run sound for a theatre company, and I do it for nothing, because I love it. We started as an amateur charity, some of the people on stage are professionals now, and we have a real crew: lighting engineers, sound engineers, the lot. I am the one on sound. It is the best part of my week.
The part I do not miss
For years I ran shows on Screen Monkey. I liked it, and I still do: it was simple, and simple is the right shape for a room like ours. But it was Windows software, and it froze. Mid show. Not often enough to give up on it, and often enough that I stopped trusting it.
I have restarted a computer between two cues while an actor held a pause. I have kept a second laptop open beside the first one, loaded and ready, so that when the first one went I could be back in the show in ten seconds. If you have run sound for anybody, you know that feeling: the scene is still going, the room has no idea anything is wrong, and your hands are moving very fast and very quietly.
Then there were the Windows sounds. A USB stick going in, a stick coming out, an update deciding that the middle of act two was a good moment to say something. Before every show I had a list in my head of things to switch off, and the list was the part I was most likely to forget.
And saving a show did not really save it. You got the layout, not the settings. The files had to sit in the right folder under exactly the right names or the whole thing came up empty. Handing a show to somebody else meant handing them a folder and a set of instructions and hoping.
So I built the one I had been wanting
I had been imagining this thing for years, in the way you imagine something while you are standing in a booth wishing it existed. Eventually I found the time, and I stopped complaining about the software and wrote it.
Every single thing in CueMonkey is something I wanted on a specific night, in a specific room, usually about forty minutes before an audience came in. That is the whole design brief.
What is different
The whole show is one file
Not a layout that points at folders. Every sound, every video, every image, every fade and every screen setting goes inside a single file. Put it on a memory stick, open it on another Mac, and it plays. Nobody has to find anything.
Your Mac goes quiet
Starting a show sets the Mac's alert volume to nothing, and puts it back when you are done. No notification, no error bleep, no message tone over a scene. It is the thing I used to forget, so now it is not a thing anybody has to remember.
You can cut a cue where you are standing
Trim the start and the end, add a fade in or a fade out, on audio or on video, in the app, in seconds. It never touches the file. That is the thing I wanted most and never had.
Projectors, without the fight
Full screen video with no player, no window, no chrome. Drag the picture to fit whatever is hung in the room, rotate it, flip it, and save the whole rig under the name of the venue so next time it is one click.
Backdrops, and more than one screen
The picture that sits there between cues has its own strip, separate from the running order, and you can put a different one on each screen. That was always awkward before, and it is what every set with two projectors needs.
One key runs the night
The whole running order fires from the space bar. B takes every screen to black and brings it back, which is what you want when something is on that should not be, and it does not stop the sound underneath.
It does not need the internet
Once, to make a free account and licence it. After that a booth with no signal is fine, which is most booths. The only other time is when you want a newer version.
Why I think that matters to you
I did not build this and walk away from it. I run shows on it. When something in it is wrong, it is wrong for me, on a Saturday, in front of an audience, and I fix it because I have to.
It sounds selfish written down, and it is the most honest thing I can tell you: I need this to be good. Because I need it to be good, it will keep getting better. That is why it is worth trusting with your show.
It is free while it is in preview, and it is on real stages. I read everything people send me and I do the updates myself. If something in it is wrong for your room, tell me, and there is a good chance it changes.
I hope it is useful to somebody in the same position I was in: a small company, a good show, and nobody whose job it is to make the technology behave.
Try it on your next show.
Free while it is in preview, and it opens like any other Mac app.