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.
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.