Turning memory locations into a live setlist

Pro Tools does not have a setlist object. What it has is the Memory Locations window, and for a live show that window is doing a job it was never designed for: it is the running order, the song map, the section map and the cue sheet, all rendered as a list of names somebody typed at 2am.

It can do that job well. It requires you to be deliberate about four things: what a memory location stores, how you name them, how you verify them, and how you keep the running order out of them.

What a memory location actually stores

More than you think, and that is the first live gotcha.

When you create a memory location, Pro Tools offers to capture, alongside the position:

• Zoom settings
• Pre/post-roll times
• Track visibility
• Track heights
• Group enables
• Window configuration

Every one of those is useful when you are editing and hostile when you are running a show. A marker that also restores track heights will rearrange your edit window in front of you, mid-set, the first time you recall it under pressure — and you will spend the next two songs convinced the session is broken.

For show markers, capture position and nothing else. And audit the markers you inherited: markers that came from the production or mixing stage almost always carry somebody's editing layout with them. Open a few, look at what they restore, and strip them.

The second distinction worth knowing is Marker versus Selection versus None. A marker is a point; a selection is a range; "none" is a memory location with no timeline reference at all, used purely to recall settings. For a show map, you want markers. A selection-type location will arm a range, which is a different and surprising behaviour when you are trying to simply stand at the top of a song.

The naming convention, and why each part earns its place

Here is a convention that survives a stranger, a change of operator, and a machine reading it. Every element is there for a reason.

Two digits, always. 01. not 1.. Sorted lists put 10 before 2 otherwise, and a one-digit number breaks alignment in every window you will read at speed. Two digits also gives you the vocabulary everyone on the show uses out loud — "from seven", "top of twelve".

A period, not a space or a dash. You need one unambiguous character that separates "this is a song number" from "this is part of the title". A period is the one nobody's song title contains at the front.

Slashes for tempo and key, in that order. 120/Am. Slashes because titles contain spaces, dashes and brackets, so those cannot be delimiters. Order fixed so you never have to think about which field you are reading. Both optional — 12.Jam is a perfectly good marker.

An explicit end marker per song. This is the item most sessions are missing and the one that pays most. Without it, "where does this song end" is a judgement made live, every night, by a tired person. With it, the end of the song is a fact in the session.

Nothing else. Two names per song is the whole marker map. Everything smaller than a song belongs somewhere other than this list — which is the next section.

Whatever you actually adopt, adopt one. The failure mode is not a bad convention; it is two conventions in one session, half-migrated, with the old ones looking plausible.

Sections belong on a track, not in the marker list

The obvious next step is a marker for every verse and chorus. It is also the step that quietly ruins the window you just made readable.

Count it: twenty songs is forty markers, which fits on a screen and can be audited in a minute. Add six sections per song and it is a hundred and sixty rows in a scrolling list, where every song start is buried between two chorus markers and the one location that got dragged in an edit session is invisible until the band is playing over it. Memory locations have no visible extent — they are points in a list, which is precisely the wrong shape for "the second half of this song".

Map the sections on a track instead. Add an audio track named Sections and place a short silent clip at the start of each section, named for it:

Clip name is the section name; clip start is the section start; clip length does not matter, because a section runs until the next one begins. What you get back is the thing a list could never give you: the sections sit at their real positions, on their own lane, under the audio — visible, draggable, renameable with a double-click, and wrong in a way you can see rather than deduce.

The one rule: a section clip belongs strictly between a song's start marker and that song's end marker. A clip left in the gap between two songs belongs to neither, and that is exactly what a dragged clip looks like.

Audio, incidentally, not MIDI — and not only as an aesthetic preference. Pro Tools' session-info export lists audio clips and omits MIDI ones entirely, so any tool reading your session over PTSL sees a MIDI Sections track as no track at all.

Colour, and using more than one ruler

Since Pro Tools 2023.6, memory locations can be coloured from a fixed palette. Use it as confirmation, not as meaning:

• Songs one colour, song ends another. At that point the timeline ruler alone tells you the shape of the set from across the room.
• Never encode information only in colour. Colour cannot be searched, cannot be read aloud, cannot be read at all by roughly one man in twelve, and does not survive a printout.

Recent Pro Tools versions also support more than one marker ruler, which lets you keep song starts on one lane and ends on another — worth checking on your version, because if you have it, it is the single biggest readability upgrade available for free.

Recalling them live

Get off the mouse. The Memory Locations window is fine for auditing and wrong for operating — it is a scrolling list, and scrolling lists are how you click the wrong row.

Numeric keypad recall is the answer, and the exact keystroke depends on Setup → Preferences → Operation → Numeric Keypad Mode. Pick the mode, set it on the show machine, and rehearse it until it is muscle memory.

Two related settings that belong to the same decision:

• Options → Link Timeline and Edit Selection — off. So that looking at something in the edit window does not change where playback will start.
• Dynamic Transport — decided in advance. Useful for song-to-song jumping, confusing if half the crew doesn't know it's on. Write which one you use in the session notes.

The audit, which is the actual work

A marker map is only as good as its last verification. Do this at every load-in, and after every marker change:

1. Count. Songs in the Memory Locations window against songs on the printed setlist. A mismatch here is worth ten minutes of anyone's time.
2. Every song has an end marker. The most-skipped check.
3. No duplicate numbers. Two 03. markers means the spoken shorthand "song three" is now ambiguous, which is a real hazard in a dark room on comms.
4. No duplicate titles. Same reason.
5. No stranded section clips. A clip on the Sections track sitting before any song start, or in the gap between one song's end and the next song's start, means something got dragged. Find out which.
6. Tempo sanity. If a marker says 120 and the distance between that marker and the song's end implies something far off, one of the two is wrong. Usually the marker was copy-pasted from the song before it.
7. Nothing unparseable. Old-convention leftovers — End, ENC., decorative markers, a bare title with no number — are how half-migrated sessions announce themselves.

Six of those seven are mechanical, which is the point of the next section.

Keep the running order out of the markers

The last rule is the most important, and it is the one that gets broken under time pressure.

The markers describe where the audio is. The running order describes what you play tonight. These are two different documents.

The moment you start renumbering markers to express tonight's order, you have two sources of truth: the session, and the setlist the band is holding. They will disagree. They will disagree at the worst possible moment, and the version that is wrong will be the one on the screen you are staring at.

Keep the marker map stable for the whole tour. Express tonight's changes somewhere else — a printed order taped to the desk, a note on the console, or software that holds the order separately.

Automating the mechanical parts

Everything above works with no software beyond Pro Tools, and you should be able to run your show that way. That is not a throwaway line: a rig you can operate by hand is a rig you can rescue by hand.

But the audit is seven checks against a scrolling list, repeated after every change, by a person who has been awake since six. That is the part a machine should do.

Prossible reads your memory locations and your Sections track over PTSL — no plug-in, no script, nothing added to the session, and it never writes back to your markers or clips — and does exactly the above. It parses the convention described in this article (NN.Title/BPM/KEY and SongEnd as markers, sections as named clips on the Sections track), builds a setlist from it, and reports the audit on every resync: missing end markers, duplicate numbers, duplicate titles, section clips outside any song, unnamed clips, tempo that disagrees with the measured length, and anything it could not parse. Resync reads the session without moving your cursor, counter or playhead, so it is safe between songs.

The running order lives in the app, not in your markers: drag tonight's order into shape, and the session stays exactly as it was. The order survives a resync and a restart.

Requirements: macOS 15 or later on Apple silicon, on the same Mac as Pro Tools 2023.6 or later with PTSL.