The little things that save your show (and your sanity)

If you've ever run a show, you know the job isn't really about the big dramatic moments. It's about the thousand tiny things that can go wrong at 7:58 PM when doors were at 8:00. You lose a tag on an act. Someone uploads an AIFF and Chrome won't play it. You spend twenty minutes hunting for which troupe you're supposed to be in this week.

We've been heads-down on exactly that kind of friction lately. Nothing flashy enough for a press release — just the stuff that makes show week feel a little less like juggling flaming chainsaws. So, what's new?

Your dashboard finally knows what "next up" means

I work with a lot of troupes. My dashboard used to feel like a pile of company names and event lists I had to mentally sort them every time I logged in. That's not how my brain works at 6 AM with coffee number one.

The dashboard got a proper rethink. You can pin the companies you actually work with — and they stay pinned, synced to your account, not lost when you switch browsers. Events are grouped by month so you're not scrolling through last year's festival to find this Saturday's gig. And there's a Next Up strip that tells you what's coming — "Tomorrow," "In 3 days," that kind of thing — without making you click through three screens.

If you're the person who always knows what's on deck, this is for you. If you're the person who should know what's on deck but had it written on a napkin that's now in the laundry, this is definitely for you.

Act editing: fewer ways to accidentally lose your work

The act editor got a lot of love this month, and honestly, it needed it.

Duration input — We added a proper duration field. Hours, minutes, seconds, the way you'd actually think about an act's runtime. No more typing 3:45 and wondering if the system heard "three minutes forty-five" or "three hours." (We also fixed some edge cases where the field was being… creative. It behaves now.)

Tags — Cleaner tag editor. Because "find the act tagged opener-final-revised-FINAL-v2" shouldn't require archaeology.

File selection — A big cleanup on how you attach files to acts. Picking audio, images, and supporting assets is smoother and more predictable — which matters when you're uploading twelve acts the night before submissions close.

Unsaved changes warning — This one hit close to home. You know that moment when you've been editing an act for forty minutes, you click something thinking you're done, and the page just… leaves? We added a warning when you try to navigate away with unsaved changes. Stay and save, or leave on purpose. Your call. But no more silent goodbyes.

Audio problems you can see before show night

Sound issues are the backstage boogeyman. Low volume. Clipping. A track that starts with thirty seconds of silence because someone exported it wrong. You usually find out when the performer is already on stage and the board op is giving you that look.

Audio quality warnings have been in the act editor for a while — but now they show up in Live View too. Little warning icons right in the cue grid, with tooltips that tell you what's wrong: low volume, leading silence, clipping, the works. You can spot a problem during run-through instead of during the actual run.

And if you're dealing with AIFF files in Chrome (we've all been there), the compatibility warnings are wired through the places that matter — act edit, file previews, and Live View — with a download link when playback isn't going to cooperate. Use Safari, download and play locally, or convert to MP3.

Just don't find out at cue 14.

Company setup that doesn't feel like admin homework

Creating and managing companies got a visual refresh to match the rest of the app. If you're spinning up a new troupe or cleaning up memberships between seasons, the pages are clearer and more consistent. Less "where do I click?" and more "done, next thing."

Fixes you might not notice — but you'd have noticed if we didn't

• Email warnings — Some of you were getting nagged to "fix your email" when your email was fine. That's fixed. One less yellow banner to dismiss.
• Download page icons — Restored on the show download page. Small thing. Unless you're the SM grabbing files backstage on your phone and the icons were broken. Then it's not small.
• Favicon — TroupeIT now has a proper favicon in the browser tab. You'll know which of your forty open tabs is the show.

What's happening behind the curtain

Most of the rest of the month's work was infrastructure — faster deploys, security updates, spam protection tweaks. The kind of stuff that doesn't change your Tuesday but keeps the platform stable when you're running a weekend festival with 200 acts and zero tolerance for downtime.

Worth a fresh look

If you haven't logged in recently, poke around the dashboard and open an act to edit. Pin your main troupes. Check whether any of your audio files are waving yellow flags. And if you've been meaning to set act durations properly for your run sheet — the new duration field is genuinely nice.

We're building this for people who live in the gap between "rehearsal went fine" and "why is the wrong track playing." That gap is where stage managers spend most of their lives. These updates are meant to shrink it.

See you on headset. Go!