Waveforms

A waveform shows a track’s shape before you hear it: where the breakdown is, how long the intro runs, where the drop lands. CuePoint draws one for every track whose file it can find, from the audio itself, and shows it in four places: the player bar, Track details, a Library column and Prepare’s transition strip.

Each is the whole track at once, with a line where playback is. There is no zoomed, scrolling view.

Where you see them

The player bar. The playing track’s waveform fills the space between the two times, and it is how you seek: click anywhere on it to jump there, or drag across it and let go to jump once. The part already played is dimmed. The keyboard and screen readers seek exactly as they did with the slider, which is still there underneath. Until the waveform is ready, the bar shows the plain slider, and hovering it says why. See Playing music.

Track details. The selected track’s waveform sits under its title, with its hot cues (each with its letter), memory cues, loops and beat grid. When that track is the one playing, the playhead is drawn and a click seeks; otherwise the waveform is only a picture, and clicking it does not start playback (double-click the row for that). A track without a waveform says why in words: “Waveform not drawn yet”, “Analysis paused”, “File missing”, “This file’s audio could not be read.” and so on. A file that cannot be read says which kind of trouble it is (its audio, no audio at all, or taking too long); a reason CuePoint does not recognize reads “This file could not be read.”

The Library. Columns… offers a Waveform column, hidden until you choose it. Each row draws its track at the column’s width; drag the column wider for more detail. A row without one shows a single muted word (“Waiting”, “Paused”, “Missing”, “Unreadable”, “Unchecked”), with the reason on hover.

Prepare. View ▾ → Show transition strip draws the selected entry’s waveform beside the next one’s, so you can see how one track ends and the next begins. See Prepare.

Loudness

The pass that draws a track’s waveform also measures how loud the track is, as a single number for the whole track, the way mastering engineers and streaming services measure it. CuePoint shows it in three places:

Track details, on one line under the waveform: “Loudness −8.4 LUFS · Peak −0.3 dBFS”.
The Library: Columns… offers a Loudness column, hidden until you choose it. It shows the number alone (“−8.4”), with the whole line on hover. A copy of the rows carries it with its unit (“−8.4 LUFS”).
Prepare’s transition strip: each track’s loudness ends its title line, and the words between the two halves say how much louder or quieter the next track is: “+2.1 LU”. See Prepare.

Reading the numbers.

LUFS is loudness as you hear it, over the whole track: closer to zero is louder. A loud club master sits around −6 to −9 LUFS; a dynamic one, or an older record, around −12 to −16.
The peak, in dBFS, is the single highest sample in the file. 0.0 dBFS is the most a file can hold, so a peak at or next to 0.0 means the track was mastered to the top.
LU is a difference in loudness: “+2.1 LU” means the next track is 2.1 LU louder than the one before it, which you would hear when you mix from one to the other.

Some tracks have no number, and say why:

“Too quiet or too short to measure” (the column says “Quiet”): silence, or a file shorter than four tenths of a second, which is the shortest stretch the measurement works on.
“Silent”: not one sample above zero.
“Loudness is measured with the next analysis”: the waveform is there, and the loudness is still to come (see below).

It changes nothing. CuePoint never turns a track up or down for its loudness, in the player or anywhere else, and never writes it to your files or to Rekordbox. The number is there for you to read; gain is yours and the mixer’s. The column cannot be sorted by, for now.

A library analyzed before CuePoint measured loudness keeps every waveform. Each track is measured once more, in the background, after any track that has no waveform yet; until then its waveform is drawn as before, and Track details says the loudness is still to come. A track you select or play while it waits is measured first.

What the colors mean

Settings → Waveforms → Colors chooses one of two looks; the choice is remembered on this computer. Reset to defaults goes back to Three bands, after asking, with Undo.

Three bands draws the lows, the mids and the highs in colors of their own, layered as Rekordbox’s three-band view is: the lows in blue, the mids in amber over them, the highs in white over those. A kick-heavy section is wide and blue; hats and air show as white on top.
One color draws the whole sound in one color.

Each column is as tall as the loudest moment in its stretch of the track, so a short peak is never lost in a narrow column. On top of the waveform:

You see	It is
A dimmed part	Already played (the bar and Track details), or outside an entry’s planned times (Prepare)
A thin bright line	Where playback is
A colored line with a lettered flag	A hot cue, A–H, in the color Rekordbox gave it
A thin line without a flag	A memory cue
A tinted stretch	A loop
Faint vertical lines behind the waveform	The beat grid: a line every bar, or every 4, 8, 16 or 32 bars when bars are too close to draw

Every theme has its own version of these colors, each readable against its panels, and a custom theme gets them worked out from its colors. Settings shows a preview: the track in the player, with its cues, grid and playhead, so you can judge the choice on music you know.

How they are made

CuePoint works waveforms out itself, from your audio files, with the same decoder the player uses. It reads none of Rekordbox’s own analysis files.

It starts on its own. After every import, refresh or file check, CuePoint analyses each file that check found in its place, in the background, at low priority, so playback and browsing are not held up. Tracks in your Sets come first, then tracks in your Collections, then the rest, newest first. A track you play or select while it waits jumps the queue.

How long it takes. A first analysis reads every file once, measuring its loudness as it goes. On a recent desktop that is about 6,000 six-minute tracks an hour, so a 50,000-track library takes about eight and a half hours, and a few thousand tracks take minutes. The status strip counts it as Analyzing waveforms · 1,234 of 50,000; hover over it for the rate and the time left. After that, only new and changed files are analyzed, and a library that has not changed is checked in moments.

A changed file is analyzed again by itself after the next file check. A file that could not be read is not tried again until it changes. A file that is missing (an unplugged drive, say) is not counted as a failure: it is analyzed when it is back.

Pausing it

The analysis can be paused, and stays paused, after a restart too, until you resume it:

from the status strip while it runs (its button is Pause);
from Settings → Waveforms;
from Clean → Health, where Waveform drawing says how far it has got.

A paused analysis keeps everything it did. Resuming carries on where it stopped, not from the start. A track you play or select is still analyzed while the rest is paused, so the waveform you are looking at appears.

It also steps aside on its own for an import, a refresh, a file check or a tag write, and carries on after them.

Cue points and beat grids are Rekordbox’s

The cues, loops and beat grids on a waveform are the ones in your Rekordbox export, read on every import and refresh. CuePoint shows them and never changes them: there is nowhere to edit one, and an export to Rekordbox never writes them. To move a cue, move it in Rekordbox and refresh. Track details lists them in words under the waveform.

Where the data lives

Waveforms are kept in waveforms.db, beside your library in CuePoint’s folder (~/.cuepoint/ on macOS and Linux, %USERPROFILE%\.cuepoint\ on Windows).

It is not part of your backups. It can always be made again from your files, so the launch backup leaves it out rather than copying a few hundred megabytes every time. Restoring a backup keeps it, and every track finds its waveform again by its file.
“Clear cache” leaves it alone, and so does clearing the cache on exit: making it again takes hours.
It is not in the support bundle.
About 5 KB a track, its loudness included: about 250 MB for 50,000 tracks, and less for real music, which packs tighter than the test data this was measured with.

Settings → Waveforms → Disk space → Delete waveform data… (under the Disk space disclosure, which says how much room waveforms take) deletes it, the loudness measured with each waveform too, after saying how much space it takes and that the whole library will be analyzed again; unless the analysis is paused, that starts at once. Your cue points, beat grids and everything else in your library are untouched. You never need this to fix a changed file.

When there are no waveforms

A build without the player’s decoder says so once, in words: “This version of CuePoint can’t draw waveforms.” Nothing else errors, and the bar keeps its plain slider. On Linux, CuePoint does not include the player; name your own mpv with CUEPOINT_MPV_PATH and both playback and waveforms work.