Marking the ending of every song by ear is satisfying for the first fifty songs and a lot less satisfying for the next three thousand. AutoCue does it for you. It listens to how each song in your Music folder ends and gives it a Cue or an EOM, placed where the next song should come in.
It's a lot smarter than a silence detector. It can tell a fade from a cold ending, a ring-out from an "afterglow" that's still part of the song, and the end of a song from the studio noise that follows it. It spots hidden tracks, and it knows how long to let a live crowd cheer.
You'll find it on the Transitions tab, as the third sub-tab after Cue/EOM and Ramp.
For each song, AutoCue picks one of two marks:
A song with neither mark gets AutoCast's standard 1-second overlap.
Both marks belong to the song that's ending. They're measured in seconds before the very end of the file and rounded to a tenth of a second, just like the marks you drop by hand with E and C. A song gets one mark or the other, never both.
The description at the top of the tab sums up the ground rules:
"AutoCue marks the ending transition of every song in your Music folder and its subfolders: a Cue for songs that end cold, an EOM for songs that fade or ring out. Songs that already have a Cue or EOM are never changed. You can fine-tune any mark AutoCue makes on the Cue/EOM tab."
Don't confuse AutoCue with Outcue Detection, which transcribes the last few spoken words of a file for your jocks. AutoCue is about where the next song comes in.
The big button tells you how much work is waiting, for example:
AutoCue your Music folder (438 unmarked songs)
The count is the songs in Music and its subfolders that have no Cue and no EOM yet. (MP2 files, and songs AutoCue has already found it can't read, aren't counted.) When there's nothing left to do, the button says (no unmarked songs) and is greyed out.
Click it and AutoCue gets to work:
You can keep working in Librarian meanwhile. If you mark one of the songs by hand while AutoCue is busy, AutoCue checks again before it saves and leaves your mark alone.
When the run is done, a one-line summary takes the progress bar's place:
412 marked (280 EOM, 132 Cue) · 1,204 already marked
Sometimes there's a little more on that line:
Stop ends the run early. Every song marked so far keeps its mark, and the summary starts with Stopped. and tells you how many songs were not reached. Those are still unmarked, so the next Run picks them up. Quitting Librarian mid-run saves what's been marked the same way.
How long does it take? AutoCue only needs to hear the last minute of each song, so it's quick. Even a library of a few thousand songs is usually a matter of minutes on a recent Mac: a coffee break, not an afternoon. Older Macs and music on a network drive take longer.
Now and then AutoCue asks you to wait, for example: "The Ripper or an Import is still adding songs. Press Run again once it has finished. Nothing was changed." It means what it says. And if you switch to a different Station folder in the middle of a run, AutoCue stops and tells you so, rather than write marks into the wrong library.
Changed your mind? Undo This Run, next to the Run button, puts back exactly what the last run changed:
Anything you've changed by hand since is left alone. The summary line tells you what happened, for example Undo: 412 songs put back · 2 left alone (changed since).
Belt and suspenders: before each run, AutoCue also saves a copy of your library as library_autocue_prerun.tsv in {StationFolder}/Logs/Database/. The copy is replaced only by a run that becomes the new Undo step.
Below the Run button is a slider with Looser on the left and Tighter on the right. Looser lets more of each ending play before the next song starts; Tighter brings the next song in sooner. The middle is the calibrated default, tuned against real hand-marked songs. The slider clicks between eleven positions, and one move adjusts every kind of ending at once:
| Ending | Looser | Middle (default) | Tighter |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fades hand off at | 21 dB down | 16 dB down | 11 dB down |
| Longest fade played | 30 seconds | 20 seconds | 10 seconds |
| Cold-ending tail that still gets a Cue | up to 6 seconds | up to 4 seconds | up to 2 seconds |
| Cold-ending pull-in | 0.10 second | 0.25 second | 0.45 second |
| Afterglows hand off at | 9 dB down | 6 dB down | 3 dB down |
| Live applause played | about 8 seconds | about 5 seconds | about 3 seconds |
Don't worry about the numbers; they're here for the curious, and How AutoCue Listens explains each one. The short version: move right if your segues feel lazy, left if they feel rushed.
If AutoCue has already marked songs, moving the slider asks first:
Change the AutoCue setting?
"Changing this setting will potentially affect the transitions of all songs previously set by AutoCue (as well as any newly added songs). Go ahead?"
If AutoCue hasn't marked anything yet, the slider simply remembers its new position for your next Run and for new songs. Each Station folder keeps its own slider position.
Under the slider is a checkbox:
Continue marking the ending transitions of any new songs added to the Music folder or its subfolders.
It's off to start with, and it's saved separately for each Station folder. Turn it on and AutoCue keeps an ear on your Music folder: any song that arrives from then on gets its ending transition automatically, whether you copied it in with the Finder, brought it in with Import, or ripped it with the Ripper. (There's one exception for .aif files; see the note below.)
A status line under the checkbox tells you what's going on, for example:
New songs can also wait for files in your Station folder to finish copying, or while the Attribute Editor has changes you haven't applied. That's AutoCue being polite: adding a new song means refreshing the library, and it won't do that mid-copy or while you're halfway through an edit. Press Apply (or pick another song) and it carries on.
Turning the checkbox off stops the watching, and songs added while it's off aren't picked up later. Use the Run button for those.
AutoCue marks new songs live only while Librarian is running. Songs that arrive while it's closed aren't forgotten, though: they're caught up the next time you launch it. Most stations leave Librarian open on the studio Mac anyway, and that's the intended setup. If your Music folder lives on a network drive, the Mac may not report new files right away. They're then picked up the next time something else changes in the folder, or at the latest the next time you launch Librarian.
A word about .aif files: Librarian doesn't add .aif/.aiff files to your library when they arrive with the Finder, by dragging them onto the song list, or through the Import guide, and AutoCue can only mark songs that are in the library. The status line says so: 1 not in the library yet (.aif files aren't added automatically). AIFF tracks from the Ripper are fine, because the Ripper adds them to the library itself.
For each song, AutoCue reads the last minute of audio and first learns how loud the song normally is from its body. It measures loudness the way your ear hears it (the same kind of measurement as SteadyCast™ on the Touchups tab), then follows it through the ending, moment by moment, and works out what kind of ending it's hearing. Each kind gets its own treatment.
AutoCue was tuned against hundreds of transitions hand-marked by experienced ears at a working radio station. More than half of its marks land within half a second of where a person put theirs, and more than 8 in 10 within two seconds. Where the person chose a Cue, AutoCue is typically within a fifth of a second. Its applause handling was checked against dozens of real live recordings.
What it hears: the song gradually loses level, the classic studio fade-out.
What it does: it hands off once the song has faded about 16 dB below its normal level and stays down, so a little swell late in the fade doesn't fool it. That's where people marking by hand tend to drop their marks. On a very long, slow fade, it won't wait more than 20 seconds into the fade. The song gets an EOM, and AutoCast's fade tidies up the rest. (In the rare case that there's nothing left you'd hear by then, it gets a Cue instead, since there's nothing to fade.)
What it hears: the song drops sharply, from full level to well below it (about 16 dB), in a second and a half or less, like a band hitting the last chord together or a horn stab to finish.
What it does: if the last hit dies away within about 4 seconds, the song gets a Cue. AutoCue pulls the mark in by a quarter of a second, so the next song lands right on the final hit instead of a beat after it, and the final chord plays out naturally underneath. No fade, no clipping.
What it hears: a final chord or cymbal that keeps ringing after the last hit.
What it does: a brief ring is treated like a cold ending: a Cue, ringing out under the next song. A ring that goes on longer than about 4 seconds gets an EOM at the same spot, still pulled in to land on the hit, so AutoCast fades the long tail instead of letting it hang around under the next song's intro. A slow, gradual decay is handled like a fade.
What it hears: some songs don't fade all the way out. The ending settles into a quiet section that holds its level (a sustained pad, a ringing chord, a soft vamp) and only dies away at the very end. A fade keeps losing level; an afterglow doesn't.
What it does: when a quiet section holds steady for at least 8 seconds, AutoCue treats it as part of the song. It lets the afterglow play, even past the usual 20-second limit for fades, and hands off as it finally dies away, about 6 dB below the level it was holding. That's usually an EOM (or a Cue, if nothing you'd hear is left by then). This one came straight out of listening tests: those soft endings really are part of the song, and cutting them off sounded wrong.
What it hears: the song has clearly ended, then there's a gap of silence (at least a second) or near-silence such as tape hiss (at least a second and a half), and then something comes back: studio chatter, a stray noise, a snippet of something else.
What it does: it treats the song as ending at the gap, so the next song comes in no later than that, with an EOM, and AutoCast's fade takes the leftover away. It's never a Cue, because a Cue would let the leftover play under your next song.
What it hears: the band stops dead, there's a moment of silence, and then it comes back loud for a coda or one last hit. Or the song dips down and comes back up.
What it does: it keeps listening. Music that's loud right up to the gap and loud again after it is still the song, not a leftover, so AutoCue waits for the real ending. Likewise, for a song that dips and recovers, it waits for the point where the song goes down and stays down.
What it hears: the song ends, then 6 seconds or more of dead silence, then more audio: the classic "hidden track" at the end of an album cut.
What it does: it marks the end of the main song with an EOM, so the hidden track never plays on air. A long, dead-silent pause before a reprise gets the same treatment. It's the radio-safe choice, because the alternative is several seconds of dead air.
What it hears: a live recording that ends in applause or crowd noise. A crowd can be as loud as the band, so AutoCue listens to the character of the sound instead: applause is a dense, even, noisy texture with no bass line and no held notes. It only looks for applause after the music has ended, and a whistle or a shout in the middle doesn't throw it off.
What it does: if the applause keeps going, AutoCue lets about 5 seconds of it play, counted from when it starts. That's enough to keep the live feel without turning your station into a concert recording. Then the next song comes in with an EOM, and AutoCast fades the rest of the crowd away. Applause that's over sooner is handled like any other ending, and music still playing under crowd noise isn't mistaken for applause. In testing on studio recordings, the applause rule never kicked in by mistake.
What it hears: a few seconds of silence after the last note, common on files ripped or edited without trimming.
What it does: nothing special is needed. Because marks count back from the very end of the file, the silence is simply included. A cold ending followed by 3 seconds of silence gets a Cue of a little over 3 seconds, and the next song comes in right on the last hit.
Some endings don't fit neatly into any box. When AutoCue isn't sure, it doesn't skip the song; it gives it a best-guess EOM. That's the safe choice on air: the next song starts on time, and AutoCast's fade tidies up whatever's left.
AutoCue quietly keeps track of which marks it set. The moment you change one of those marks by hand, it becomes yours, permanently. Slider changes, re-runs, and Undo never touch it again.
Any of these counts as a hand change:
So the natural way to use AutoCue is: let it mark everything, listen to a few, and fine-tune any you'd like different on the Cue/EOM tab. Your changes stick.
AutoCue's marks don't get a special color or badge. They look exactly like any other Cue or EOM, which keeps the song list uncluttered. Behind the scenes, Librarian keeps a hidden AutoCue column in library.tsv. You won't see it anywhere in Librarian, though another app that lists every library column might show it. Just leave it alone.
Escape clears the loaded song's marks completely, on the Cue/EOM sub-tab and on most other tabs too, as long as you aren't typing in a field. That makes it an unmarked song again, so the next Run gives it a fresh AutoCue mark. If you want a song to keep a particular ending, set it with E or C instead of clearing it.