The Player Window

Fusor Studio's main window is a compact strip, 384 pixels wide and 148 tall, designed to sit out of the way during a live set. It's frameless and floats above other windows by default so you can keep it visible alongside your DJ app without it getting buried.

The window has three horizontal regions, top to bottom: the menubar, the picker row, and the progress strip, plus a single-line status line along the bottom edge.

The menubar

The top row holds two text menus on the left, a row of toolbar icons in the middle, and the window controls on the far right.

The App menu holds the small set of application items:

• Settings... (Ctrl+,).
• Toolbox, a submenu holding Step Sets..., which opens a separate window for building and managing your step set library with no fusor open. See The Toolbox.
• Blind Mode, a checkbox toggle. It tells Fusor Studio to keep sending but stop listening to your DJ app, and it's off at every launch. See Blind Mode for what it changes.
• Unload (clear player), which drops the loaded fusor and returns the player to its empty state.
• Quit (Ctrl+Q).

Settings... and its shortcut disable while a transition is running, so a mid-mix configuration change can't disturb it. Both it and Blind Mode read (locked while running) for the duration; Windows greys a disabled menu item so faintly that the label has to say it. An open Settings window closes itself the moment a transition starts, and both items re-enable once the transition ends, including after an abort. Pausing does not unlock them, and neither does reaching 100%: the lock holds through the completion wait until the transition is finalized.

If you had unsaved controller bindings open when the window closed itself, they are written to disk rather than lost, and the status line tells you so. If that profile was the active one, it is re-activated with the saved bindings.

The Library menu opens the Library popover — a separate alwaysOnTop window that sits next to the player. Its header switches between two sections: Fusors and Actions, each with search, sort, filter, and detail views. The popover restores the section that was open the last time it was closed.

If you have Fusor Studio Plus, the Library popover also includes Transitions and Venues sections — see the Plus manual.

Between the menus and the window controls sit two groups of toolbar icons, separated by a thin vertical divider.

The transition group (left of the divider) holds the three controls that configure the next transition. All three are always visible, and disable when no fusor is loaded or when Blind Mode locks them:

• Mode (stopwatch). Toggles between Manual Run Mode (dark) and Auto Run Mode (blue). Locked to Auto in Blind Mode.
• Start-with-Incoming (chain link). Off by default, so you press Play to start. When on (blue), the transition auto-starts when the incoming deck begins playing. Enabling this also enables Auto Run Mode.
• Tempo Ramp (rising trend line with arrowhead). Arms a routine that walks the tempo of both decks from the outgoing track's tempo to the incoming track's tempo over the course of the transition. Dark when idle, blue when armed, blinking yellow when queued for a Traktor late-start.

The session group (right of the divider) holds the always-on session controls:

• Pad Mode (grid). Toggles the 8-pad action grid in place of the picker row and progress strip. Blue when active. See Pad Mode.
• Swap (two arrows). Flips which deck is incoming and which is outgoing. Always visible in Blind Mode; visible by default otherwise, and can be hidden via Show Manual Role Swap while Online in Settings → General. It stays visible but inactive in Pad Mode. Swap is a momentary action rather than a toggle, so it keeps a neutral dark body at all times. See Manual Role Swap.

Window controls anchor the far right: Collapse (chevron, only when the expanded panel is open), Pin on Top (push-pin, on by default), and Close (×).

Every toggle in the menubar turns blue when it's on. Buttons that fire an action rather than hold a state stay neutral.

The picker row

A fusor picker sits in the row, labelled with the currently loaded fusor. Clicking it opens the Library popover focused on the active collection's Fusors sub-tab. Selecting a fusor there closes the popover automatically and loads it into the player. See Loading a fusor.

Next to the fusor picker is a small info icon. Clicking it opens Session View, an inline details panel below the player that shows the loaded fusor's name, the author's intent, the domains the fusor will drive, and any actions it runs before or after the transition, laid out as a single chronological stack. Session View is also where you make session edits: quick adjustments that apply only to the upcoming run and never change the fusor file itself. See Loading a fusor — Session View for the full walkthrough. (Unlike the picker itself, the info button stays in the player window and doesn't route through the Library popover.)

When Pad Mode is on, the picker row is hidden and the pad grid takes its place.

If you have Fusor Studio Plus, a second picker, the transition picker, sits alongside the fusor picker and becomes the normal way to load. See the Plus manual.

The progress strip

A single horizontal strip with the progress meter as the background and a transport button at each end, with the timing readouts in the middle:

• Left: the Arm / Play / Pause button. Its behavior depends on the mode:

  • In Manual Run Mode, this button toggles between armed and unarmed. When armed, moving your DJ app's crossfader advances the transition.
  • In Auto Run Mode (default, press-Play), the button is the PLAY button. One press arms the player and starts the transition. Once running, the same button toggles between play and pause.
  • In Auto Run Mode with Start-with-Incoming on, the button is a solid dot you click to arm. The transition starts when Fusor Studio sees the incoming deck begin playing. Once running, the same button toggles between play and pause.

  See Transport Controls for the full behavior and Manual Run Mode vs Auto Run Mode for the mode distinction.

• Center: a two-column timing readout, shown only in Auto Run Mode (in Manual Run Mode the crossfader drives timing, so the readout is hidden). The left column stacks the bars stepper (< N > bars) over the incoming-deck BPM (@ NNN.N BPM); both numbers are click-to-edit. The right column shows the resulting transition duration (= NN.Ns) at a larger font, which is the value the bars and BPM combine to produce.

• Right: the Abort button, live once a transition is actually under way. It's a press-and-hold gesture rather than a click, and it terminates the transition permanently. See Transport Controls.

The progress meter itself fills from 0% to 100% as the transition progresses. The background of the meter shows a chevron pattern indicating the direction of the transition: left-deck to right-deck or right-deck to left-deck.

Like the picker row, the progress strip is hidden in Pad Mode.

The status line

A single-line strip at the very bottom, with two zones:

• Left side: status messages. Carries the persistent engine state plus capture results and short notifications. The state text updates as you toggle Mode, Start-with-Incoming, and Tempo Ramp, which is how those toggles confirm.

  The resting states are Unarmed, Armed: move crossfader to start (Manual), Armed: Press Play to start (Auto), Armed: starts with incoming deck and Armed: restart incoming deck to start (Start-with-Incoming), then Playing / Paused in Auto, Manual / Frozen under a takeover, and Completed — stop outgoing deck or press End. at the completion wait. With Tempo Ramp armed, Armed becomes Armed with Tempo Ramp and Unarmed becomes Unarmed with Tempo Ramp.

  Up to one prefix sits in front of the state. In Blind Mode the line reads BLIND – … in grey. Before a successful control state capture it reads UNCAPTURED – … in orange, which is your cue that arming will be refused until you capture. When Fusor Studio owes a fresh capture but is holding it back because a transition is armed or running, the line reads RECAPTURE PENDING – … in dimmed grey until the deferred capture actually happens. Grey rather than orange or red, because nothing is broken: the control baseline is only stale, and arming and starting work normally while it waits.

  A fourth prefix, NO DJ APP – , appears in grey when no DJ application has been chosen yet. Like UNCAPTURED it means arming will be refused, but the fix is in Settings → Connection rather than a capture.

  If more than one of these is true at once, only the highest-priority prefix shows, in this order: BLIND, then NO DJ APP, then UNCAPTURED, then RECAPTURE PENDING. A missing baseline is the more serious fact, so it wins over a merely stale one, and having no app at all outranks both.

  Messages and engine states are color-coded by severity so you can read the line at a glance: green for things going right (running transition, fusor loaded, save succeeded), orange for things needing your attention (Armed, Tempo Ramp armed, transition Completed and waiting for you to stop the outgoing deck), red for failures (save failed, action blocked, mode switch rejected), and dimmed grey for idle or informational text (Unarmed, Paused, navigation hints). The same color step set is mirrored at the bottom of the Library popover.

  Warnings and errors are prefixed with a short code (e.g. CAP5-Uncaptured: run Capture first). Look the code up in Status Messages for what it means and what to do about it.

• Right side: a small telemetry indicator LED.

  Colour	Meaning
  Green	The DJ app has been heard from
  Amber	A transition was running and nothing came back from the DJ app
  Dark	Nothing has ever arrived this session
  Grey	Blind Mode

  Amber is the one to watch. It appears when a transition is running and the DJ app goes quiet: a running transition is moving controls constantly, so the app should be answering constantly, and total silence means something is wrong.

  Once amber, the light stays amber until the DJ app is heard from again, including after the transition ends. Only traffic from the DJ app clears it; Fusor Studio stopping its own sends doesn't. Touch any control over there, or wait for it to send anything at all, and the light goes green immediately.

  Amber never appears while Fusor Studio is idle and has heard nothing troubling. A DJ app you aren't touching sends nothing, and silence then is normal, so an idle player says nothing about the connection either way.

  Amber means Fusor Studio was driving and heard nothing back. It does not stop the transition for you; deciding what to do is your call. See Troubleshooting.

If you have Fusor Studio Plus, the right side also surfaces the active session as a small text label: a dimmed set-list name with a coverage count (e.g. 5 / 12) when a set list is active, turning green and showing the venue once you start a performance. See the Plus manual.

Window behavior

The window has no title bar and no resize handle. The player strip itself is a fixed 384×148 pixels, and Pad Mode preserves that size by reshaping the contents rather than growing the window.

Opening Session View with the info icon is the one thing that changes the window's height: the panel extends below the strip, and the Collapse chevron in the menubar puts it away again.