Inkue

A professional, cross-platform show-control application.

Cue lists for live events — theatre, concerts, corporate shows — with a focus on reliability, low latency, and an extensible cue architecture. Runs on Windows, macOS and Linux.

Grab the latest installer for your platform from the Releases page:

Inkue is young software. If something breaks during a show-critical moment, please open an issue with the log (File → Logs… → Open folder).

Questions, help, showcases and release announcements live on Discord:

👉 Join the Inkue Discord

For confirmed bugs and feature requests, use the issue tracker.

Inkue drives the playback side of a live show from a single ordered cue list. The operator presses GO; Inkue fires the cue at the playhead — play a sound, roll a video, fade a light, send an OSC/MIDI message — and advances. Its vocabulary, keyboard flow and behaviour follow established show-control conventions, so experienced operators feel at home immediately.

It is built with Rust (real-time audio/video engine + show logic) and React + TypeScript (UI) via Tauri v2, which keeps the binary small and the audio path native and low-latency.

• GO / STOP / Hard Stop — keyboard (Space / Escape / double-Escape), toolbar, or OSC remote
• Pre-Wait / Post-Wait, Auto-Continue (overlap) and Auto-Follow (chain on finish)
• Pause / Resume and scrub / seek — individual cues or everything at once; counters freeze at the exact pause position
• Double-GO protection — configurable debounce (default 500 ms) drops duplicate triggers
• Show Mode (F5) — a read-only, large-type operator view

• Unified output window — a single persistent native window (mpv OpenGL Render API) for all video and image cues; no flicker between cues; fullscreen on any monitor or a draggable floating window
• Output timer — OSD overlay with the bundled DSEG7 7-segment font; configurable font/size/position; optional always-on-top floating timer
• Low-latency audio via cpal — WASAPI / ASIO on Windows, CoreAudio on macOS, ALSA / PipeWire on Linux

Inspector with per-type tabs · waveform start/end trim · drag-and-drop reordering and grouping · drop media from the file manager · toolbar-drag insert · multi-select (edit/delete/duplicate/color) · full undo/redo · copy/paste · resizable/reorderable columns · color tags · consistent dark theme on all three OSes.

Inkue listens on UDP 53001 (configurable). Examples:

A built-in OSC Monitor shows incoming packets in real time, and a 50 ms dedup cache eliminates duplicate UDP packets from controllers and Windows loopback.

• Rust (stable) and Node.js + pnpm
• libmpv — required for video/image cues (~113 MB, not versioned in git):
  • Windows: place libmpv-2.dll in src-tauri/vendor/mpv/ — get it from the baseline mpv-dev-x86_64 build at sourceforge.net/projects/mpv-player-windows (the release CI pins the exact build)
  • macOS: brew install mpv
  • Linux: install the libmpv2 (or libmpv1) + libmpv-dev system packages
• (Optional, Windows) The Steinberg ASIO SDK is already bundled in vendor/asiosdk/ under its GPLv3 option (see ASIO support).

pnpm install
pnpm tauri dev            # development (WASAPI/CoreAudio/ALSA)
pnpm tauri:dev            # development, with ASIO support (Windows)

pnpm tauri build          # production installers
pnpm tauri:build          # production, with ASIO support (Windows)

Installers land in src-tauri/target/release/bundle/.

cd src-tauri && cargo test     # cue registry, OSC, DMX, timecode, SR conversion, …
cargo clippy                   # zero warnings expected

ASIO is optional and Windows-only, enabled by the asio-support Cargo feature (pnpm tauri:dev / pnpm tauri:build). The Steinberg ASIO SDK is bundled in vendor/asiosdk/ under its GPLv3 dual-license option, which is compatible with Inkue's own GPLv3 license, so no separate download or agreement is required to build the open-source version. CPAL_ASIO_DIR is preconfigured in src-tauri/.cargo/config.toml.

ASIO is a trademark and software of Steinberg Media Technologies GmbH.

src-tauri/src/
├── cue/       # Cue trait + CueRegistry + every cue type (audio, video, image, group,
│              #   wait, stop, fade, osc, midi, light, mic, timecode, text, memo)
├── engine/    # AudioEngine (cpal real-time thread), OutputEngine (libmpv GL Render API),
│              #   DMX engine/sink, OSC server/patch, device manager — know nothing about cues
├── show/      # transport (GO/STOP/PAUSE), cue list + playhead, event loop, workspace I/O, undo
├── commands/  # Tauri IPC handlers
└── state/     # AppState — engines, registry, undo, clipboard

src/
├── components/  # CueList, Inspector, Transport, ShowMode, Preferences, Lighting, Osc, …
├── stores/      # Zustand: workspace, transport, timing
├── hooks/       # useTauriEvents, useKeyboardShortcuts
└── lib/         # types.ts, commands.ts (typed Tauri invoke wrappers)

Key invariants:

• The audio callback has zero allocations, zero locks, zero I/O — all comms via lock-free ring buffers.
• Every cue type implements the Cue trait; adding a new type never touches transport.rs, cue_list.rs or the CueList UI.
• Three layers never mix: engine/ (no cue knowledge) → cue/ → show/.
• Every feature compiles and works on Windows, macOS and Linux.
• Machine-specific settings live in the per-OS config dir; show-specific settings travel in the .inkue file.

Inkue uses standard show-control vocabulary: Workspace (the .inkue file) · Cue List · Playhead (next GO target) · GO · Pre-Wait / Post-Wait · Auto-Continue / Auto-Follow · Cue Number (a string — "1", "1.5", "Intro" are all valid).

Issues and pull requests are welcome. By contributing you agree that your contributions are licensed under the GPL-3.0-or-later, the same license as the project. Before a large change, please open an issue to discuss the design — the layering rules above are strict on purpose.

Inkue is free and developed in the open. If it is useful to you, you can support its development through GitHub Sponsors. Thank you 💚

Inkue is free software, licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0 or later.

Third-party components:

• libmpv — LGPL-2.1-or-later; loaded at runtime as an unmodified shared library (mpv.io).
• Steinberg ASIO SDK — bundled under its GPLv3 dual-license option. ASIO is a trademark and software of Steinberg Media Technologies GmbH.
• DSEG 7-segment font — SIL Open Font License 1.1.
• Rust crates: cpal, symphonia, winit, glutin, glow, rosc, midir and others under their respective MIT/Apache-2.0/MPL-2.0 licenses.

Inkue is an independent project and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Steinberg.