Cue: Love it, and leave it (except for cold endings and sweepers)

TuneTrackers, if you've been relying on the Cue attribute as the trigger at the end of songs, there's now a better way; one that you'll love from the moment you try it. In the Command Center 4.6 and above, we have added an EOM feature which is much more powerful and results in far better transitions.

To understand what EOM does for you, let's first look at what Cue does.

Cue is like the wonderful old blue "Sec tone" button on a cart machine. At whatever point it is triggered, it results in the next audio event being fired over the top of the currently-playing event, with both events at full volume. Cue's behavior is terrific for things like jingles and sweepers that have a tail intended to carry into the next song, but it's not ideal for the ends of songs themselves, other than songs that have cold, "stinger" endings.

EOM is more subtle, and more appropriate for song transitions. Let's say you have a song with an EOM value of four seconds (meaning, four seconds from the end of the song). When the song is four seconds away from being over, TuneTracker will start the next song, and then begin a three-second fade-out of the current song. At the end of three seconds, when the current song is completely faded down, TuneTracker will eject it. The result is a very smooth, clean transition, with none of the potential for train wrecks that you would have using Cue.

The question is, how does it sound? The answer is, terrific. As you may be aware, we have our own radio station, Fair Harbor Radio, and have completely moved over from Cue to EOM.

But there's more to EOM than just clean, safe transitions. EOM's fade-after-three-seconds approach also lets you eliminiate those long "artistic" fades that normally just don't work well in commercial radio. Let's say you have a song with a loooooong fade of 15 seconds, and you haven't the patience for it. Try setting the EOM at about 10. What'll happen is that, after five seconds of natural fade, TuneTracker will start the next song while doing a quick, three second fade-under of the current song. Thus, EOM doubles as a slick way to trim the length of songs.

The nice thing is that your entire music library can be converted from Cue to EOM in one fell swoop. We now include a Cue2EOM tool that can be used to copy all your Cue values to EOM. And since EOM takes priority in TuneTracker, the old Cue values will be ignored.

There's one exception, and that's cool too. Let's say that, among the songs you've converted from Cue to EOM, you have a song that had a Cue value of "2." Hmm...that's less than the three seconds required by the EOM feature. What to do? Simple. TuneTracker reverts to Cue for that song. Problem solved.

We've had a lot of fun incorporating this EOM new feature, and we hope you enjoy its capabilities as much as we do.

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