What's new

Newest first. Beta builds land when they are ready, not on a schedule.

0.9.9 beta

0.9.9 comes to the Mac, on Download, and to Windows, through the Microsoft Store.

Multi-Output — one stage on several monitors. Add a monitor for every screen in the room in Settings › Stage › Output monitors — the main wall, a monitor facing the stage, the lobby — give each one a name and pick its screen. Every monitor gets a tile in the top band with a power switch at its right end: switch it on and that monitor’s output window opens, and LayerCue remembers it. Under each preview, seven cells — B, F and 1–5 — choose the layers that monitor shows: the words without the moving background for the singers, the background and the logo for the lobby. It is still one stage and one cue sheet; send a slide once and every monitor that shows its layer has it. A monitor can also be a virtual screen, shown only as a preview. The on-air chip in the status bar lists every monitor with its switch. More in Multi-Output.

YouTube on several monitors. A streaming YouTube slide goes out on every monitor that shows its layer — one plays with sound, the others are silent copies that keep up with it. Bring to preview moves the real player into its preview tile; Send back to output returns it. Streaming YouTube can now sit in a video box (shrink it and put it anywhere), Fill and Stretch work for streaming, and the caption position, font and size are in Settings › Files & YouTube.

A new look. Calmer and squarer, in the style of this website: a tab above each monitor preview, orange for what is on air, CLEAR at the top of the layer column with a × on each layer, square chips, numbered settings pages (01–07) with sections, a flat Library drawer and a solid title bar for each presentation.

Background slides and video boxes.

• A slide with a background — colour, picture or video in the editor’s background row, or an imported PowerPoint slide — is a background slide: its backdrop goes out on the B layer and its words on F, so a monitor with B off shows the words alone.
• Insert › Add video puts videos in boxes, several on one slide, with sound on by default, blurred margins and cropping. Set as background and Make it a picture box / video box move a picture or video between the background row and a box.
• A video that reaches its end keeps its last frame on screen instead of going black. Clear the background clears the picture, video, colour and gradient at once.

Pictures in their real colours. CMYK and wide-gamut photos (Display P3, Adobe RGB) are drawn through their colour profile — in the previews, on the output, in the editor and on the cards — so a print-ready JPEG no longer looks oversaturated.

Editor.

• Pick from screen works on Windows too: a live loupe follows the pointer over any app. Click to pick; Esc or right-click cancels; the arrow keys move 1 px (Shift 10 px).
• The ribbon is rearranged — Change and Box now start the second row — and the number fields are wide enough for their longest value.
• New text boxes have no outline.

Slide list. Rubber-band selection and file drops also work from the side margins, beside a title bar and below the last presentation (a file dropped there is added at the end).

Sound. The output device you choose in LayerCue also becomes the computer’s default output while the app is open, so YouTube’s sound goes to the same place. It is put back when you quit.

Windows. The Slide settings and Music windows open beside the main window at the right height, and the main window no longer creeps up a little on every launch.

Removed. The ⌘. / Ctrl+. shortcut — each monitor has its own power switch now — and the “output at 1:1 resolution” setting (the Mac always draws 1:1 on monitors that are on).

Status bar. The on-air chip counts virtual screens the way the monitor tiles do, and the right end now says what is on stage — the title of the slide that is up, or Stage clear. It used to repeat No output and name the slide under the cursor rather than the one on stage.

Choosing screens. The screen list (in a tab’s panel and in Settings › Stage › Output monitors) dims screens that are unplugged, marks them not connected, and sets the virtual screens apart with a line. Output 1’s screen can now be chosen in Settings too. If you switch a monitor that is on to the screen LayerCue’s own window is on, LayerCue no longer slides that output over your window: it turns that monitor off and tells you why — switch it on again to cover the screen on purpose.

Fixed.

• Export to PDF no longer drops the text on slides whose background is a picture or video (including PowerPoint slides with a picture background); Fill and Stretch are kept for pictures.
• An overlay video with an OUT point and Repeat off stops on its OUT frame instead of starting over; ▶ plays it again from IN.
• A background video keeps playing around a YouTube that is shrunk into a video box.
• Streaming YouTube no longer offers Fit + blur bg, which played as Fit anyway. Giving a YouTube slide a background colour no longer moves it to the background layer (and mutes it).
• An imported bundle goes straight into the open library; library and cue-sheet rows no longer offer Export to PDF….
• “All monitors are off” no longer appears when the only output is a virtual screen. A monitor renamed in its tab shows the new name in Settings › Output monitors too. The tooltips of the ■ next to ▶ and of the + on a library row say what they do now. On Windows, language names follow the app’s language when Windows uses the same one.

0.9.8 beta

LayerCue is on Windows. It is free in the Microsoft Store, for Windows 10 version 1809 or later, 64-bit (x64), and the Store keeps it up to date. The first Store build is numbered 0.9.7 but has the same features as this release. What is particular to Windows:

• The title bar is dark like the rest of the app, with Toggle list and Slide settings on the left. Most keys and places are named the Windows way: Ctrl+Z, Ctrl+Alt+V, Show in Explorer.
• The output window covers the whole output screen, taskbar included, and stays on top without taking focus from the main window.
• Your files live in C:\Users\<you>\LayerCue, not Documents, so OneDrive does not upload your media or turn it into online-only files.
• Fonts are grouped by family and named in your system’s language. If the Font Cache Service is off, which hides cloud fonts, the font picker offers to turn it on.
• YouTube downloads and Convert to H.264 work, and no console windows flash over the output.

Read this first — the data folder gets a new name. The first time you open this build on the Mac, Documents/LayerCue/Playlists is renamed to Library, once. The files inside are untouched. But if you go back to 0.9.7 afterwards, your presentations won’t show up — the old build doesn’t know the new name. On screen, “playlist” is now called “presentation” too.

Rebuilt around libraries and cue sheets. Presentations live in libraries (folders); the order of a service or event goes in a cue sheet. A cue sheet points at presentations instead of copying them, so a fix in one place shows everywhere. Cue sheets sit at the top left, libraries in the drawer below. Drag to add and reorder; the same presentation goes into a cue sheet only once. Launch reads just the list and loads a presentation when you open it, so hundreds of songs stay light.

Find (⌘F / Ctrl+F). Searches not only names but lyrics and body text, without opening any files. Spacing doesn’t matter, and Korean initial consonants work too.

Make slides with AI (MCP). In Settings › AI apps, one button connects LayerCue to AI apps such as Claude Desktop, LM Studio and Cursor. Say “make slides from these lyrics” or “darken the background and make the title bigger”, and the AI edits LayerCue directly. It gets back the picture LayerCue actually drew plus a problem list (overflowing text, contrast, overlaps) and fixes its own work — and each edit it makes can be undone with ⌘Z / Ctrl+Z. LayerCue talks to the AI app on this computer only. Settings shows “Connected” once it’s up.

More ways to design a slide. Linear and radial gradients, box shadows, polygon shapes, 1,500+ icons (search in English, Korean or Japanese), SVG artwork and photo boxes. Text gets paragraph spacing and a fixed line height like PowerPoint’s “Exactly”. A font that isn’t on this computer is drawn in the bundled font (Pretendard JP) instead of whatever the system picks.

PowerPoint and PDF. .pptx files come in as editable slides — text as text boxes, pictures as picture boxes, so you can keep editing after import (for old .ppt files the app asks you to save as .pptx first). PDF import turns each page into a picture (4K by default); PDF export keeps text as text.

A big pass over the editor.

• Even when a picture fills the slide, clicking the margin around it deselects. Boxes can hang off the slide (a little always stays on it).
• Insert › Shape / Icon drops your pick straight onto the slide. You can also drag pictures in from Finder or File Explorer.
• You can draw a rectangle or text box on top of a picture. Esc steps back one level at a time (drawing → typing → tool → selection → close).
• ⌘Z / Ctrl+Z undoes only the current slide. The editor is locked during show lock too.
• Arrow keys move 10 px (Shift 100, Option / Alt 1 px), and a handle rotates. Resizing snaps to the size of other boxes, three or more boxes can be spread evenly, and ⌘C / ⌘V (Ctrl+C / Ctrl+V) copies boxes (they paste as text in other apps).

Font picker. Your 5 most recent fonts sit at the top. Search by the name you see — a Korean font like 「SD 초양」 is found by its Korean name, by a word in the middle, or with different spacing.

Sound.

• YouTube now shows on the audio meter. It accounts for YouTube turning loud videos down on its own, so you see what actually goes out (the same song can play about 5 dB quieter from YouTube than from a downloaded file).
• Taking YouTube down fades the sound with the picture instead of cutting it. Fixed: sound leaking out when you took YouTube down with the master turned down or muted.
• YouTube can go on the background layer and can loop.

For first-time users. A fresh install gets a “READ ME” library with five short guides (22 slides) and a “Tour” cue sheet that walks through them, in English, Korean or Japanese to match the app. It never touches the data of people already using LayerCue.

Opens faster, waits less. Launch is quicker, and the heavy first-time work (YouTube, fonts, editor) is done right after launch, so nothing hesitates the first time you use it during a show. YouTube thumbnails are kept on disk and show up without internet.

Show safety. A file that can’t be opened no longer turns into a silent black screen — it tells you — and unsupported files never get into the list. Fixed several things that could go wrong on stage, including the next cue being wiped when you put it up while a stop was still scheduled.

0.9.7 beta

YouTube can go on an overlay layer. Streaming YouTube used to go out on the foreground only, so it stayed put no matter what you started on another layer. Now it lives by the layer rules — start something else on the same slot and it comes down, change a slide on another layer and it stays. Quality, chapters, speed, the progress bar and mute all work from an overlay too.

Only one web view exists, so YouTube uses one overlay slot at a time. Start YouTube on another slot and the first one comes down, and handing the slot from YouTube to YouTube switches rather than crossfades. The background still takes downloaded videos only.

Choose which device the sound goes to. Bottom of the window, just right of the screen picker. Pick System default at the top and it follows the Mac’s setting — connect Bluetooth mid-show and the sound moves with it. Until now the app held on to whatever device it found at launch.

YouTube’s own controls stay off the stage. The progress bar, title, channel picture, share button and YouTube mark are gone, along with the More videos grid at the end and the suggested thumbnails on pause. The preview in slide settings is the same.

Fixed: English subtitles would not appear. Two things were tangled together. Registering caption languages let three-letter codes (eng) in, and YouTube only understands two-letter ones. And once a translated track failed, picking that language again did nothing — the failure had been recorded as success. Picking it again now retries, and it retries three more times on its own.

Smaller things. On the output screen nothing was clickable and the close X would not appear when YouTube was on an overlay. To Screen on an overlay YouTube played from the start instead of holding the frame you had picked. Narrowing the window drew the slide name over the controls in the status bar; the screen and sound pickers now split that space. The layer picker uses the same pill shape as the layer chips and is laid out in stacking order.

0.9.6 beta

Please update. Deleting a track from the music list could crash the app. Worse was when it did not crash — then it quietly deleted the wrong track.

One root cause. Rows in the list include folder headers, so a row number and a track number are not the same thing — and four places treated them as if they were. That produced all of this:

• Deleting the last track in a folder crashed. Deleting any other one removed a different track.
• A track’s duration and title were written onto another track. Tracks inside a collapsed folder were never read at all.
• “Play next” stopped on the last two tracks. It wrapped to the top of the list while tracks remained, landed on a folder header, and playback died without a word.
• Deleting the last track made the folder look deleted too. It was only hidden — the whole list was, so adding a track brought the folder back.

Choose whether to delete the file too. Music is copied into a managed folder when you add it, so removing it from the list leaves that copy behind. Tracks now offer List only and Track and file; folders offer Folder only and Folder and files. The file route asks first and moves the file to the Trash rather than deleting it. If another track uses the same file, you are told before it happens.

Crop & fit is on the slide’s right-click menu. Pick Fill, Stretch, Fit, or Fit + blur without opening the sheet, and clear a crop from there too. With several slides selected it applies to all of them. The crop area and anchor stay in the sheet — those need dragging — and the last line of the menu opens it.

Card artwork after cropping. Changing crop & fit could turn a card black, leave the old framing behind after you undid it, or bake the gear icon into the picture. Fixed.

Smaller things. Turning on the sidebar no longer makes the Slide settings window pop out for a moment. The inset labels in the crop sheet were using the long words, which widened that row — they are back to L, T, R, B. The layer chip you see when hovering a slide was black for foreground only; it now has its own colour like the others (indigo), and reads FG instead of Slide — a match for BG.

0.9.5 beta

Works on a small screen. The window now shrinks a long way. Narrow it and the playlist sidebar folds away on its own; narrow it further and the Slide settings panel folds too, while the slide list keeps shrinking to fit. Two buttons in the title bar bring either one back, and each widens the window by just enough — not to some full size that rearranges everything.

Slide settings in its own window. When the panel is folded, right-click a slide (or click its name row, or Option-click it) and the same panel opens as a real window beside the app. Not a copy — the panel itself moves house, so it behaves exactly as it does inside the app. It stays until you close it, and sending another slide just changes what it shows. Widen the app and it tucks back in; narrow it again and it comes back — unless you closed it yourself, in which case it stays away until you ask for it.

The status bar makes room. As the window narrows, the monitor name shortens and the feedback button drops to an envelope, so the card-size slider and settings never get pushed off the edge.

Update, fixed properly. The update notice now tells you what went wrong and offers Try again — before, a failed download left no way back except the website. Settings › Tools shows LayerCue’s own version with Check and Update beside it. Checking says something when it succeeds, not only when it fails.

Smaller things. Chapter marks and skip buttons sit just above the progress bar without stretching anything. The line between the control bar and the list is gone — one gap instead of two. The first playlist header keeps its rounded top when fully expanded. Sheets and popups sit on shadows. And this build carries a current YouTube tool: from now on every release does, because the release script fetches it.

0.9.4 beta

YouTube chapters. Videos that are split into chapters now show those splits as ticks on the progress bar, in slide setup and on the stage bar. Skip to the previous or next chapter with the two buttons above the bar — the first press goes back to the start of the chapter you are in, so one press replays it. While you are presenting, the panel over the monitor has a Chapters list: open it and jump straight to any chapter by name. LayerCue reads the chapter list without downloading the video, so it takes a couple of seconds.

YouTube downloads work again. YouTube tightened its rules and the download tool shipped with 0.9.3 stopped working — every download failed. This build carries a current one. More to the point, the tool the app actually ran was not the one the Settings screen was showing: pressing Update installed a new tool that then went unused. That is fixed.

The status bar tells you when the tool goes stale. A small wrench appears at the bottom right with an orange dot when a newer download tool is out. Click it and Settings opens on Tools, ready. This matters because when YouTube changes something, it is the tool that has to be updated, not LayerCue — and you should not have to know that.

Sheets and popups have shadows. Without them a window sat flat against the screen, and the “quit?” question in particular read as part of the page behind it.

Smaller things. Qualities the video does not have no longer leave blank rows in the quality menu. The download percentage no longer nudges everything beside it as it counts up. The output button says Output, not Fullscreen — it sends the show to the other screen, it does not enlarge this window.

0.9.3 beta

Drag files in. Drag an image or a video from the Finder onto a list and it becomes a slide. You can see where it will land, and dropping onto an existing slide swaps just the picture on that slide — its text boxes and layer stay where they were.

Same filename, your call. Bring in a file whose name is already taken and LayerCue asks: replace it, keep both, or use the one you already have.

Delete the file too, if you want. Right-click and Delete now splits in two — the slide only, or the file as well. If other slides use that file, LayerCue tells you how many before you go ahead. Those slides are not deleted; they stay and show as missing.

Undo brings the file back. Delete a slide together with its file, press ⌘Z, and the file comes back out of the Trash. LayerCue also tells you what it just undid. And undo only reaches what you are looking at — leave the editor, press ⌘Z in the list, and your text is left alone.

See and change YouTube quality. While you are on air, the preview shows the quality actually going out, and you can raise it right there.

One YouTube view, moved rather than reloaded. Start output and the view you were watching moves to the stage as it is, so nothing reloads and nothing stutters. Meanwhile you can set in and out points on a different video in slide setup, muted.

Register the caption languages you use. YouTube offers over a hundred auto-translations. Now you keep a short list of your own and pick from that. It starts with your computer’s language and English, and the names are written in the language the app is set to.

Delete a downloaded YouTube file. Deleting it puts that slide back to streaming. While the file is there you can pick any frame as the thumbnail.

File dialogs open in your language. They used to come up in English regardless. Right-click a slide and there is now a Reveal in Finder.

LayerCue tells you when a new version is out. A marker appears in the bottom bar; press it and the app downloads the new version and opens it for you.

⌘Q asks first. So a mistyped shortcut never takes the screen down mid-show.

Separate Intel and Apple silicon downloads. Half the download size.

0.9.2 beta

Faster lists. Opening a folder with 33 slides went from 1111 ms to 122 ms. A folder with 300 slides now opens in under 200 ms and scrolls without dropping a frame. Most of it was one thing: the app was rebuilding its whole string table every time it looked up a single word.

Background loops actually loop. A looping background video used to cross over cleanly on the first lap and then run straight past its out point forever. Three separate faults were stacked on top of each other. Fixed.

Esc no longer stops output. Esc is the key you press when you want to undo something, so it is the key your hand reaches for by accident — and it was taking the screen down. Use ⌘., or the ✕ that appears when you move the mouse over the output screen. Press Esc during output and LayerCue tells you which key to use instead.

The playlist sidebar, rewritten. Folders read as section headers now, with the lists hanging off a rail beneath them, so you can tell a folder from a list at a glance. Drag a folder to reorder it; it folds up while you drag and opens again when you drop it. Hide the whole sidebar with the button beside the traffic lights, or ⌘\.

A READ ME folder on first launch. Seven slides on what LayerCue does, instead of an empty window. Delete them when you are done.

Portrait output screens. Choosing a 9:16 screen used to stretch the preview down the whole window and leave no room for anything else. The preview and the cards stay a sensible height and get narrower instead — at exactly the ratio you picked, to the pixel.

Korean text stopped losing its last letter. Rename a folder, a list, a slide or a music track in Korean, click OK, and the syllable you were still typing was dropped — the folder you named 한글 came out 한. Anything typed through an input method was affected, so Japanese and Chinese too.

Smaller things. All five overlay slots show all the time, so you can see which one a slide went to. A red bar marks the list that is going out, in the sidebar and on the section header. Plug in an external screen and output moves to it, unless you picked a real screen yourself. New app icon and title bar, matching this site. And LayerCue no longer announces that no external screen is connected — you can see that for yourself.

0.9.1 beta

Google sign-in, which opens Settings. Settings sync across your machines, for people who turn it on, and account deletion for people who want out. Group-resize for text boxes. Section headers that stay put as you scroll. Slide thumbnails that pick a frame you can actually see.

0.9.0 beta

First public build. Universal — Apple silicon and Intel — and macOS 13 or later. Per-slide loop and crossfade, IN and OUT points, 1:1 output resolution, and virtual screens so you can build a show before you are in the room with the screen.