Manual

The complete reference — every window, card, warning and shortcut. If you are setting the rig up for the first time, start with the Setup Guide instead: it is the same material as chapters 2 to 4, arranged as a ten-minute run-through. This page is what you come back to.

01 — What Prossible Is

Prossible follows a Pro Tools live playback session in real time and puts a stage display in front of the band. It reads the memory locations you already have — song number, title, tempo, key, song end — and the clips on a track named Sections, builds a setlist from them, and shows the players which song is running, which section they are in, and how many bars are left before the next one.

It adds nothing to your session. No plug-in, no script, no file to keep in sync, and it never writes back.

Two windows

Both windows share one engine, so anything you do in the Control Panel lands on the stage immediately.

02 — Install

Requirements

• macOS 15 or later on Apple silicon.
• Pro Tools 2023.6 or later with PTSL, running on the same Mac. (The one exception is the backup console in chapter 11, which runs its own Pro Tools on its own Mac.)
• An external display for the stage screen — optional, but that is the point of the app.

Installing

Download from the Mac App Store. There is nothing else to install: PTSL communication is built into the app over gRPC, and no helper, sidecar or Python environment is involved.

On first launch, allow Local Network access when macOS asks. LAN View and console pairing both need it; the rest of the app works without it.

03 — Pro Tools (PTSL)

PTSL is Pro Tools' own scripting interface. Prossible uses it to read the memory locations and the track list, and to send guarded transport commands.

On the Pro Tools side

• Pro Tools running, with the show session open. PTSL attaches to a live session, not to a file — with no session open there is nothing to connect to.
• MTC output configured as in chapter 4, so position follows as well as structure.

Switching to the real source

1. Control Panel → ⚙ (top right) to open Settings.
2. CONNECTION card → SOURCE → Real (PTSL+MTC).
3. Pick your IAC port in the MIDI Input dropdown that appears. Not listed? Press Refresh.
4. Press Reconnect.
5. SESSION SYNC card → RESYNC. The card reports how many markers it parsed.

Reading the status

Two dots sit in the Control Panel status bar at all times; the CONNECTION card carries the detail.

04 — MTC

MIDI Time Code is how Pro Tools tells Prossible where the playhead is. It travels over the IAC bus built into macOS. Set once per Mac; it stays set.

macOS — bring the IAC driver online

1. ⌘Space → Audio MIDI Setup → Return.
2. Menu bar → Window → Show MIDI Studio.
3. Double-click IAC Driver and tick Device is online.
4. The default Bus 1 is enough. Add a port with + if the list is empty.

Pro Tools — point the generator at it

1. Setup → Peripherals… → Synchronization tab.
2. In MTC Reader And Generator, set MTC Generator Port to your IAC bus. Pro Tools names it device-then-port, so Bus 1 reads as IAC Driver, Bus 1.
3. Leave MTC Reader Port alone — that is Pro Tools listening, and Prossible has no use for it.

Prossible — listen to the same bus

1. Settings → CONNECTION → confirm SOURCE is Real (PTSL+MTC).
2. MIDI Input → the same IAC port you just set in Pro Tools.
3. Reconnect, then roll Pro Tools and check that MTC: Normal comes up and the stage playhead moves.

Screenshots of the Pro Tools window are in the Setup Guide.

05 — Songs & Sections

Everything on both screens comes from your session. Songs are memory locations. Sections are clips on an audio track named Sections. That split is deliberate: two names per song keeps the Memory Locations window auditable, and the section map ends up somewhere you can see it.

Marker syntax

• Slashes, not spaces. 03.Runaway 120 makes "Runaway 120" the whole title.
• A non-numeric tempo field is dropped rather than guessed at.
• Whatever you type in a marker's comments field is read as that song's note and shown on the ready screen.
• Marker colour is yours to use as you like — Prossible does not read it, and the session behaves identically without it.

The Sections track

Add one audio track named Sections. Drop a short silent clip at the start of every section and rename each clip to the section name. That is the whole convention:

• Track name. Matched case-insensitively, ignoring leading and trailing spaces — sections and SECTIONS both count. It has to be that one word.
• Audio, not MIDI. Pro Tools' session-info export never lists MIDI tracks, so a MIDI Sections track reads to Prossible as no track at all. This is not a preference; it is the only thing that works.
• Clip length is ignored. Only the start matters — a section runs until the next one starts, or until the song ends.
• Stay inside the song. Every clip must sit between a song marker and that song's SongEnd (or, with no SongEnd, the next song marker). A clip in the gap between songs belongs to nobody, so it is dropped and reported.
• Name every clip. An unnamed clip has no section name to show, so it is skipped and reported.
• Section colours are automatic — assigned by role and position, not inherited from Pro Tools. Nothing to configure.

A correct session, end to end

Warnings, and what each one means

When something looks wrong, a ⚠︎ N chip appears in the Control Panel status bar; clicking it opens the SESSION SYNC card with the list. The app keeps working with warnings outstanding — but clear them before the doors open.

RESYNC

• After editing markers or section clips in Pro Tools, stop the transport, then Settings → SESSION SYNC → RESYNC.
• While stopped, Prossible also polls for changes on its own and catches up within seconds. RESYNC is the "now, and definitely" button.
• Resync does nothing during playback. That is deliberate — the drummer's screen must not reshuffle mid-song. It lands at the next stop.
• Resync reads the session without moving your cursor, counter or playhead, so it is safe between songs.
• RESYNC is locked in SHOW mode (chapter 6).
• Your running order and per-song settings are reconciled onto the new markers, not thrown away.

Mistakes people actually make

06 — Running a Show

PLAY / STOP / NEXT

The transport row carries three equal buttons: PLAY (green and reading PLAYING while rolling), a square STOP, and NEXT. They are one-way, not toggles — pressing PLAY while playing, or STOP while stopped, does nothing at all. Alongside them: the current title, Section · N BARS LEFT, and elapsed / total time.

NEXT targets the next song in the running order. Stopped, it jumps there and stands by as READY. Playing, it leaves the current song alone and books that song as where the next stop lands — a blue NEXT badge marks it. At the end of the set the button greys out.

The spacebar

With the setlist focused — which it is when the window opens — Space does exactly what PLAY/STOP do. It is deliberately dead while you are typing: in the quick-message field, in song search (⌘K), while renaming a note, and whenever Settings, Setlist Appearance or a dialog is open. If the spacebar stops responding after you send a message, click any setlist row to hand focus back.

The setlist

The list is fully keyboard-operable, and the hint line under it says so: ␣ Play/Stop · ↑↓ Move · ⏎ Select · Right-click for more.

• ↑ ↓ move the cursor ring one visible row at a time, skipping the sections of collapsed songs. At either end it stops rather than wrapping — nobody wants the cursor back at song 1 mid-show.
• Return fires the row under the cursor, by the rules in the table. On a note row it does nothing (there is nowhere to jump to).
• ⌘K or the magnifier searches titles.
• Right-click a song for Song Color, Flag for Review, Skip This Song (struck through for tonight), Count-In Bars, Play From… (REHEARSAL, stopped only), Move Up / Move Down, Add Note Below.
• Turning off Click to jump (chapter 7) makes row clicks view-only while leaving the right-click menu live.

Reordering

• In REHEARSAL, every song row carries a faint ☰ handle at its left edge. Drag the handle to move the song. The handle exists precisely so that dragging is never something you do by accident while aiming for a jump.
• Move Up / Move Down in the right-click menu do the same thing one row at a time.
• Reordering changes Prossible's order only. Your markers, numbering and audio positions are untouched, and the order survives a resync and a restart.
• In SHOW mode the handles disappear entirely — the column is reclaimed — and Move Up/Move Down grey out.

Sections in the list

• Rows show titles only until you click the ▸ arrow on a song that has sections.
• Stopped, clicking an expanded section jumps to it. Playing, it does nothing — same rule as songs.
• While playing, the section you are actually in is highlighted, and repeated section names inside one song are told apart by position.

Song end behaviour — ■ / ↓

• The button at the right edge of each row decides what happens at that song's SongEnd: ■ stop (default) or ↓ run straight into the next song.
• It toggles on click and is remembered per song across restarts.
• A song set to ■ raises an AUTO-STOP in N… countdown five seconds out, with a CANCEL beside it that skips the stop this once. The arming resets every pass, so the next time through the same song it stops again.

Count-in bars

Right-click a song → Count-In Bars → 0 to 4 (default Off). Fixed choices rather than a text field, because this gets adjusted mid-rehearsal with a drummer waiting. Songs with a count-in wear a grey −N badge — grey and not amber, because a count-in is preparation, not a hazard.

Note rows

• Right-click → Add Note Below inserts a free-text row (default MENT) for talk breaks, encore standbys and running notes.
• Notes are not playable, are not counted as songs, and survive a resync.
• Click the text to edit; right-click for Move Up, Move Down, Delete Note.

REHEARSAL / SHOW

Settings → the MODE card at the very top. The current mode is always visible at the right of the status bar.

The way out is the same card — it never locks. A standby console in a redundant pair carries similar locks for a different reason; see chapter 11.

Dimmer

Settings → STAGE DISPLAY → DIMMER, 15% to 100%, with 100 / 70 / 40 / 15 snap buttons. It will not go below 15%, so the stage screen can never be dimmed to nothing by accident. Available in SHOW mode.

Quick messages

• The only place to type one is the bar under the setlist in the Control Panel: a field, SEND, and a BIG toggle. Maximum 20 characters.
• Settings → QUICK MESSAGE holds exactly one control — the toggle that shows or hides that bar. There is no input field in Settings, on purpose. Hiding the bar removes the ability to send.
• On stage the message appears as a MEMO banner and clears itself: 4 seconds for short text, 8 for long.
• BIG puts it across the middle of the screen for 8 seconds, for when it has to land.

Presets and windows

• Two presets ship: Timeline Focus (⌘1) and Drummer Focus (⌘2), from the Layout menu or Settings → STAGE DISPLAY → Preset. Your own saved presets join the same list. Switching cross-fades rather than cutting.
• The stage window is windowed by default; ⌘F makes it full screen.
• Window → Show/Hide Stage Display (⌘⇧D) brings it back if you closed it. If you never want it, turn off Open Stage Display at launch — every operator feature works without it.
• Settings → STAGE DISPLAY → OUTPUT moves the stage window to a chosen display and goes full screen in one action.
• Settings → DISPLAY → Auto-move stage to external display (on by default) does that automatically the moment a monitor is connected, and returns to a window when it is unplugged — built for moving one cable to the backup Mac mid-show.

07 — Setlist Appearance

Type size and state colours for the Control Panel's setlist. These are per-Mac display settings — nothing here touches your session, and a paired backup console does not inherit them.

Open it from the slider icon at the right of the SETLIST header — a different control from the ⚙ Settings button. It replaces the contents of the Control Panel window; ✕ at the top right goes back.

Text size

Five steps, applying to the setlist only. Row height and padding scale with the type. Titles and state badges are never truncated: when space runs short, tags give way first, then durations.

State colours

PLAYING, READY and NEXT can each be left on AUTO or set to one of eight hues. Only the hue changes — lightness and saturation stay fixed by the app, so no combination can make two states hard to tell apart. Warning and caution colours are not customisable.

The cursor ring (SELECTED) offers AUTO or three brightness steps and no hue at all — it is deliberately neutral so it can never be mistaken for a transport state.

Preview and reset

A live three-row sample, unrelated to the loaded session, updates as you change things — cursor ring included. Reset Colors & Text Size resets this card only; song colours, flags, skips and count-ins are stored separately and are not touched.

Setlist options

• Show song notes — marker comments in the setlist.
• Show song durations — per-song length.

Panel options

• Click to jump — off makes setlist rows view-only. The right-click menu keeps working.
• Show progress bar (transport row)
• Show timecode (transport row)

08 — Edit Layout

Everything on the stage screen is a widget you can move, resize, recolour or switch off. Open the editor with ⌘E, or Settings → STAGE DISPLAY → EDIT LAYOUT. The stage screen holds its last frame while you edit and cross-fades to the new layout on APPLY. Locked in SHOW mode — build layouts at rehearsal.

Handling

Widgets

The inspector's WIDGETS list holds every widget, each with an eye icon for show/hide.

• Available: Song Title · Song Form Timeline · Bar/Beat Count · Elapsed Time · Remaining Time · Tempo · Next Song · Current Section · Next Section · BPM Pulse Dot · Count Stem Lane · Track Lane · Custom Text · Custom Image · Lyrics (in development, disabled).
• Bar/Beat Count has a Display segment — BAR (bars remaining), BEAT (beat only) or BOTH — and a Large Countdown option that promotes the number to hero size.
• BPM Pulse Dot is a visual metronome, hidden by default.
• Labels: Show Label and Label Size per widget.
• Colour: with one widget selected, Color changes its text or numbers and Auto restores it. Per-song palette colours and warning colours are fixed in meaning and cannot be recoloured.
• Custom Text / Custom Image: add as many as you like from + ADD.

Track Lane

New in v1.1. A Track Lane draws one Pro Tools track's clips across the whole current song, on the same time axis as the song-form timeline — which recreates, on the stage screen, what a drummer already knows how to read from watching the click and count tracks in the Edit Window.

• Add one from + ADD. You can place as many as you want — a click lane and a count lane, sized and positioned independently, is the common setup.
• With a lane selected, pick its Source track in the inspector. Any audio track in the session is eligible; likely candidates (names containing "click" or "count", plus Sections itself) float to the top of the list as suggestions, and the choice is always yours.
• The list row names the lane by its track — Track Lane: BAND CLICK — so multiple lanes stay identifiable.
• Size and position are free, like any other widget. A lane stacked directly under the song-form timeline lines up with it exactly, because both derive x from the same song time axis.
• The source-track choice is stored per session, alongside the Count Stem Lane's, rather than inside the layout preset — track names belong to the session, not the layout. It follows that the pick is not part of undo, and that a preset carried to another rig arrives with the lane empty until you choose a track.
• Lanes draw inside a song. In a gap between songs, or in a song with no confirmed SongEnd, the lane stays empty rather than inventing an axis.

Presets

• Toolbar PRESET area: SAVE (overwrite), Save As New…, Rename…. Saved presets appear in Settings → STAGE DISPLAY → Preset.
• EXPORT / IMPORT move a layout between Macs as a JSON file. Two things do not travel with it: image files used by Custom Image widgets, and Track Lane source-track picks — both live outside the preset.

09 — Purchase & Licensing

Prossible starts as a trial and unlocks in two tiers, Stage and Pro. One-time in-app purchases — a perpetual licence, no renewal, no licence server at the gig. Current prices are on the Pricing page and in the app.

The trial

Every feature is open; the setlist shows the first 3 songs of each session — first by position in the session, not a choice of which three. Song four onwards is simply absent from the list rather than shown as a locked row. Settings → SESSION SYNC carries a chip: Trial: N of M songs shown.

Buying

Settings → UNLOCK, directly under SESSION SYNC.

Prices are fetched live from the App Store. With no internet you get Prices unavailable — purchasing needs an internet connection. and a Retry button. BUY hands off to the standard macOS purchase sheet; a family-approval hold reports Purchase pending approval — it unlocks automatically once approved.

Restore

New Mac, or a reinstall: Restore Purchases in the same card. Needs the same Apple Account and an internet connection.

10 — LAN View (PRO)

The stage display served to every phone and tablet on the local network, with nothing for the band to install. Local only — this is not remote access over the internet — and it works on a router with no uplink at all.

Requires the Pro unlock. Without it the LAN VIEW toggle is locked with an explanatory line, and the REDUNDANCY card does not appear in Settings at all.

Starting the server

1. Settings → LAN VIEW → turn on LAN view server. It stops when the app quits, so it belongs in your show-day routine.
2. The card shows the port (with a note if it had to fall back from the default), Bonjour status, a QR code and the plain address. On a network that blocks Bonjour the QR and address still work.
3. If the Mac is on no network, you get No usable network address — connect this Mac to Wi-Fi or Ethernet. Join a network first.

Connecting a phone

1. Scan the QR in Safari or Chrome on the same network, or type the address. With Require PIN on (the default) the QR carries the PIN, so scanning is enough; typing the address asks for it once.
2. Pick a view — the stage mirror by default, or any other preset, with the one currently on stage marked. The device remembers its choice.
3. Leave it as a browser tab rather than a home-screen icon: some iOS versions do not hold the screen awake reliably from a saved icon.

The page updates live, with position interpolated smoothly between updates. If the network drops it freezes on the last frame and shows RECONNECTING…, then picks up on its own — the same principle as the stage window.

Up to 24 devices at once; beyond that a new connection is told Maximum viewers reached.

Controlling from a phone

Viewers are read-only. One device — in practice your own phone — can be promoted to run the transport.

1. The phone presses CONTROL, bottom left; the button goes to REQUESTING….
2. A LAN Controller Request alert appears on the Mac, naming the device. If another device already holds control, the alert says so.
3. You press Approve (or Approve and Switch). Unanswered requests expire after 60 seconds; Deny ends it.
4. The phone gains PLAY / STOP / NEXT and nothing else. They run down exactly the same path as the Control Panel's — same double-trigger protection, same "playback is sacred" rule, same logging.

One controller at a time; approving a new device demotes the old one to view-only. Transport is not locked in SHOW mode, so requests and control both work mid-show.

Security

In practice

• House Wi-Fi is house Wi-Fi. Carry your own small router if the show depends on this.
• Same network only. There is no path in from outside.
• Some widgets do not render on a phone — see the note in chapter 8.

11 — Redundancy (PRO)

Two Macs, one show. Each runs its own Pro Tools and chases its own timecode; the pairing syncs your decisions — running order, colours, skips, mode, dimmer — so the backup mirrors the operator, not the playback. Audio and MIDI redundancy stay with your existing failover rig.

Pairing

1. On the main Mac: Settings → REDUNDANCY → Pair Consoles… → Show Code. A one-time six-digit code, valid five minutes.
2. On the backup: same card → Pair Consoles… → Enter Code → pick the main Mac from the list, type the six digits, Pair.
3. Both cards show the other console and CONNECTED. The Mac that showed the code becomes PRIMARY, the one that entered it BACKUP. Swap them with the PRIMARY / BACKUP segment if that landed the wrong way round.

Pairing survives reboots and re-finds the partner over Bonjour even when IP addresses change.

Role badges

On standby

Reorders, colours, skips, dimmer and mode changes on the active console reach the standby within about a second.

Failover

1. If the main Mac dies, the backup's badge flips to STANDBY — LINK LOST within five seconds. Music and stage display never stop — it was already following its own session.
2. Press Promote to Active. The badge becomes ACTIVE and editing, dimmer and mode unlock.
3. Promotion is never automatic, and it is never locked — not even in SHOW mode. It ranks with STOP as a recovery action.

When the old main comes back it reconnects and settles quietly into STANDBY (linked) with no popup, inheriting whatever changed while it was gone.

Split brain

If both consoles were promoted while disconnected from each other, neither is demoted automatically on reconnection: both show a red SPLIT BRAIN badge and a line saying both claim Active. Press Promote to Active once more on the console that should lead; the other stands down quietly. The ordinary case — one side promoted — resolves itself silently.

Push State Now / Unpair

• Push State Now forces a full state resend from the active console. It does not touch playback; it is there for peace of mind.
• Unpair breaks the pairing, needs confirmation, and is locked in SHOW mode. Leave the pair intact until the run is over.

12 — Troubleshooting

Nothing connects — check in this order

1. Is Pro Tools running with a session open? Without one there is nothing to attach to.
2. Is Prossible on the same Mac as Pro Tools?
3. Is SOURCE set to Real (PTSL+MTC), and did you press Reconnect?
4. PTSL fine but no timecode? Walk chapter 4 in order: IAC online, MTC Generator Port, then MIDI Input.
5. Still stuck: capture the red error line under the CONNECTION card and send it to us.

Common questions