Auto-advance

Auto-advance makes LTCast automatically load and play the next song when the current one finishes. Enable it for unattended playback through a show, or leave it off to stay on each song until you manually trigger the next one.

Enabling auto-advance

Tick the Auto-advance checkbox at the bottom of the setlist, under the song list. It is off by default. It is not in Settings. The setting is saved in the show file.

Gap between songs

A gap adds a pause between the end of one song and the start of the next. When Auto-advance is on, a Gap (s) field appears beside the checkbox: the pause in seconds, from 0 to 30 (default 2). Set it to 0 for no pause — the next song loads and starts as soon as the current one ends. The field is hidden while Auto-advance is off, but a song with its own after-finish destination still waits for the saved gap.

During the gap LTCast is stopped: the audio and the LTC output are silent, and the playhead is back at the start. LTC does not keep counting through the gap, so a device that follows it sees the signal stop and then start again with the next song. A Next: … in … banner with a ✕ counts the gap down above the transport controls; click the ✕ to cancel the advance.

A song's fade-out (see Per-song settings) happens inside the last seconds of the song itself, so the music has already faded when the song ends. The gap counts from the end of the song. The silence between two songs is the gap, not fade-out plus gap.

Per-song overrides

Each song can have its own after-finish destination that overrides the global auto-advance setting. For example, you can have auto-advance on globally but set a specific song to Stop at the end of an act. A destination you set this way applies even when the checkbox is off, and it still waits for the gap. See After-finish destination for all available options.

Behavior at the end of the setlist

When auto-advance reaches the last song that is not skipped and no per-song after-finish override is set, playback stops. To loop the entire show, set the last song's after-finish destination to Go to first song.

Seeing what comes next

The setlist does not highlight the next song by itself. The amber STANDBY row is your own cue: you set it by clicking a song, with the ↑ / ↓ keys or with MIDI next/previous (see Song card). While Auto-advance is on, the name of the song that follows is shown as a NEXT line over the countdown during the last 15 seconds of a song, and as the Next row of the fullscreen timecode display, which is always visible there and counts down to the start of the next song including the gap. The NEXT CUE panel has a row for the song that follows.

Manual override during auto-advance

You can load a different song at any time by double-clicking it or clicking its ▶ button. That loads the song and stops whatever was playing; it does not start by itself, so press Play, Space or Enter. Loading a song, pressing Play, Pause or Stop all cancel a pending advance, so the countdown disappears. Auto-advance then continues from the song you loaded.

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