This page covers the Music column: a piece of audio that keeps playing across several cues. Background music under a run of slides, an atmosphere bed under the half hour before the start. It is not a cue and never goes to air by itself — it belongs to a stretch of the list.
What a bed is
A bed has no picture and is never armed or fired. It starts as soon as the playout enters a cue within its range, and it stops, fading out, as soon as you leave that range.
Because of that, the picture and the music are independent: you can cut between six slides while one piece of music runs on undisturbed.
Adding one
Select the cues the music should run under, then right-click in the Music column — not on the title. The menu offers Add music bed over N cues…; pick an audio file.
The bed shows as a bar in the Music column, spanning exactly those lines. Drag its top and bottom edge to make the range longer or shorter.
Its settings
Right-click the bar:
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Repeat | On: the music starts again if the block outlasts it. Off: it plays once and then there is silence under the rest of the block. |
| Volume | 0–100 % for this bed, independent of the cues above it. |
| Remove music bed | Takes the bed away; the cues are untouched. |
Like a cue, a bed carries a hidden, automatically measured loudness correction, so a bed at 100 % is as loud as any other file at 100 % — see part 7.
Where it is anchored
A bed is anchored to cues, not to row numbers. Add a line in the middle of the block, move something, delete something — the bed still runs from the same first cue to the same last cue.
That is what makes it survive the ordinary editing you do the day before a show. Delete the first or last cue of the range and the bed shrinks to what is left; delete the whole range and the bed goes with it.
Fading out
How quickly a bed fades when you leave its range is set once, under Settings → Cue list, and applies to every bed. Something around a second sounds deliberate; an instant cut sounds like a fault, and four seconds sounds like nobody is at the desk.
When not to use one
If the audio has to start and stop at a precise moment, or if you want to hear it in the countdown and the timeline, use an ordinary media cue instead. A bed is for background that nobody should notice starting.