Playing music

CuePoint plays your tracks. Not a preview and not a browser’s audio player — the same playback program the audiophile players use, playing the file on your disk at its own sample rate, gaplessly, and out of whichever audio device you choose.

Nothing plays until you ask it to, and until then the player takes no space at all. The bar along the bottom appears the first time you play something and stays for the rest of the session.

Playing a track

Double-click any row in your library. That track starts, and the view you were looking at becomes the queue — filtered, sorted, scoped to a playlist, in the order on screen. If you had narrowed the library to 40 Techno tracks between 122 and 126 BPM and sorted them by key, that is what is now queued, in that order.

Right-click a row for the rest:

Select several rows first and every one of those acts on the selection, in the order the table shows them. Right-clicking a row that is not part of your selection acts on that row alone — the same as everywhere else on your computer.

The player bar

Along the bottom: what is playing, how far through it is, and the controls.

• The title and artist open things. Click the title to show the track in the Library, or the artist to open their page in Discover. A track that is not in your library stays plain text.
• The key in the line under the title opens the Camelot wheel, lit for the track that is playing and captioned “Playing: …”.
• Every button names itself. Hover over a button, or Tab to it, and a note says what it does and its shortcut, for example “Next track (Ctrl+→)”.
• Play/pause, previous, next. Previous within the first few seconds goes back a track; after that it restarts the one playing, which is what you meant if you just missed the intro.
• The position bar can be dragged to seek.
• Shuffle reorders the queue without changing the view it came from.
• Repeat cycles off → all → one, and says which in words beside its icon (“All” or “One”). Repeat-one replays the current track when it ends; pressing next still moves on.
• The queue button shows how many tracks are queued, and hides the number when there are none.
• Volume is CuePoint’s own, separate from your system volume.

Shuffle and repeat are remembered between sessions. What was playing, and where you had got to, is not — CuePoint starts each session silent, on purpose.

The queue

Open the queue from the bar. It is a place to work rather than a list to look at: what has played stays above what is playing, so you can see where you have been and jump back.

The panel says the gestures under its title: “Drag to reorder · Alt+↑/↓ moves · Delete removes · Enter plays”.

• Enter plays the selected track.
• Alt+Up / Alt+Down move a track through the queue.
• Delete removes one.
• Dragging works too; a line shows where the track will land.
• Clear queue removes everything except the track that is playing, which keeps playing. It asks first, so a stray click does not throw away a queue you built, and it is hidden when the playing track is the only one left.
• The cross at the top closes the queue; the cross on a row removes just that track.

From the keyboard

Space is ignored while you are typing, while a button or a list row has focus, and while a dialog is open — so it never stops the music halfway through a search.

Your keyboard’s media keys (play/pause, next, previous) drive CuePoint while its window is in front. When you switch to something else they go back to whatever you switch to: CuePoint does not keep them while it is in the background.

Audio output

Settings → Playback.

Output device. Pick the interface you actually listen through. The list is read from your machine each time you open the panel, so an interface you just plugged in is there.

Under the picker, Settings says how many outputs it found, and that if the chosen one is unplugged CuePoint switches to System default.

Exclusive output (Windows and macOS): leave it off unless you use an audio interface. It takes the device for CuePoint alone and plays to it directly, bypassing the system mixer: no resampling, no volume applied by anything else, the file’s own format handed to the hardware. While it is on, other applications cannot use that device. Linux has no equivalent, so the control is switched off there.

If exclusive output is not available — because another application already has the device — CuePoint plays through the shared device instead and says so. If the interface you chose is unplugged, it falls back to your system default and says that. In both cases your choice is kept: plug the interface back in, restart CuePoint, and it is used again.

Waveforms

In the bar. Once the playing track’s waveform is ready, it fills the space between the two times: the part already played is dimmed, and a line marks where playback is. Click anywhere on it to jump there, or drag across it to find a place and let go to jump once, exactly as with the slider. The slider is still underneath, so the keyboard and screen readers seek as before, and the focus outline is drawn around the waveform. Until the waveform is ready, or for a file CuePoint could not read, the bar shows the plain slider, and hovering it says why (“Waveform not drawn yet”, “File missing”). The bar does not get taller.

A track you start playing that is still waiting for the analysis is analyzed next, ahead of the rest of the library, even while the analysis is paused.

Waveforms also appear in Track details, in a Library column and in Prepare’s transition strip. Waveforms covers all four, what the colors mean, how the analysis runs and how to pause it, and Settings → Waveforms.

When a track will not play

Files move, drives get unplugged, and CuePoint finds out when it tries to play one. A track that will not play is skipped, marked in the queue, and the next one starts. The row says why, for example “Couldn’t play: the file is missing or could not be opened”.

You get one message, not one per track: a disconnected drive with a thousand tracks queued says “1,000 tracks could not be played” once. If a single track is the problem it is named. If everything left in the queue fails, playback stops and says so rather than racing through the rest in silence.

Nothing about this is permanent. A track that failed is played normally the next time you ask for it — the drive may well be back.

What CuePoint does not do

• No crossfade. Tracks follow each other gaplessly, which is what a continuously mixed album or a recorded set needs. Beat-matched crossfading is a DJ deck’s job, not a library tool’s.
• No resume. Quitting loses the queue and the position, deliberately.
• No play counts. Playing a track in CuePoint changes nothing in your library or your Rekordbox collection.