Songs from locators
How Downstage turns the locators in your arrangement into a list of songs.
Downstage 0.9.0 · updated 13 Oct 2026Downstage does not have a song list of its own. It reads the locators in your arrangement, and each one becomes a song. Nothing is imported or copied: change a locator in Live and the song changes in Downstage.
One locator, one song
Put a locator at the first bar of each song and name it after the song.
To add a locator in Live, right-click in the scrub area above the tracks in the Arrangement View and choose Add Locator. Select it and press ⌘R to rename it.
| In Live | In Downstage |
|---|---|
A locator named YELLOW at bar 1 | Song 1, YELLOW |
A locator named SHUT UP AND DANCE at bar 100 | Song 2, SHUT UP AND DANCE |
- Songs are listed in the order they sit in the arrangement, whatever order the locators were made in.
- A song's name is the locator's name, exactly. Names in any script work — Devanagari and Gurmukhi as well as Latin.
- A song starts at its locator. It ends at a
SONG ENDlocator if there is one before the next song, and otherwise where the next song starts. See Song end and stop markers.
Names that mean something else
Not every locator is a song. These are read as instructions instead:
| Locator name | Meaning |
|---|---|
Starts with > | A section of the song it sits in, such as > Chorus. |
SONG END | Where the song before it finishes. |
STOP | Somewhere silent for Live to stop. |
SONG END and STOP are matched whatever the capitals, so Song End works too. The
cheat sheet has every name on one page.
Launch quantisation
Every jump Downstage asks for is carried out by Live on its launch quantisation — the same setting that decides when a clip you launch starts playing. It is the menu beside the metronome in Live's control bar.
- Set it to 1 Bar and jumps land on the next bar line. This is what most bands want, and the top of the show screen says Jumps: next bar.
- 2, 4 or 8 Bars make every jump wait for that boundary instead.
- None makes every jump happen the instant it arrives — mid-bar, and audibly. Downstage shows a red warning when it is off.
When you change a locator
Downstage notices new, moved, renamed and deleted locators by itself, within a couple of seconds, while Live is stopped. It does not re-read the set while Live is playing, so an edit made mid-song shows up when you next stop.
Two songs with the same name
Give every song its own name. Two locators with the same name both appear, but a setlist cannot tell them apart, and neither can you on a dark stage. Downstage raises a warning naming them; rename one in Live.
Renaming a song you have already put in a setlist
A setlist remembers each song by its locator's name. If you rename the locator, the setlist entry can no longer find it: it stays in the list, greyed and marked Locator renamed — not in this set, rather than silently disappearing before a gig.
To fix it, either rename the locator back, or open Backstage › Setlists, add the song under its new name and remove the old entry.
Song lengths
The length shown beside each song is worked out from the tempo Live reports in that song. Downstage learns it as the playhead passes through, and remembers it from then on. Until a song has been played or selected once, its length is an estimate at the tempo of the song before it — so the first time you open a set, play through it or tap each song once while stopped, and the numbers settle.