Description:
In djay Pro (confirmed in both the latest and older versions), it is currently possible to scroll / skip beyond the actual end of a track into what appears to be a non-existent or “empty” space. Within this space, users can place hot cues — even though there is no waveform or audio content present.
Steps to reproduce:
Load any track into a deck.
Scroll (or scrub) toward the end of the track (with or without playing or PFL-ing it)
Continue scrolling — the playhead will pass the actual end of the track into blank space.
Observe that the timer continues to count up beyond the track’s real length (e.g., 150+ bars after actual end).
Place a hot cue in this empty area.
Notice:
The cue is saved and can be triggered
The waveform does not reflect this area or hot cue.
When reloading the track, the hot cue remains placed in this non-existent area.
Pressing the Cue button beside the deck returns to the start of the track, while pad-based cue triggers try to jump to the invalid area.
Expected behavior:
Once the track ends, scrolling should stop and probably bring you to the beginning again. No hot cues should be placeable outside the bounds of the actual audio file.
Actual behavior:
Users can:
Scroll indefinitely past the track’s endpoint.
Place and recall hot cues in an invalid, silent area.
Visibly see cue markers on the deck display, but not in the waveform.
Trigger unintended behavior when using cue buttons after this state.
Impact:
This causes confusion during performance or practice, as cues placed in these areas serve no purpose and may trigger glitches or inconsistencies during playback or deck reloads.
Suggestion:
Implement a boundary check that prevents the playhead from scrolling beyond the real length of the track and restrict hot cue placement to within the waveform/audio duration.
To us that makes sense, but strangely there are DJs out there who want to set cues outside the boundaries, where there is no audio and the track “doesn’t exist”.
Something to do with triggering the cue early, then letting the silence play, until the incoming audio starts at some later point (e.g. a drop in the outgoing track).
Why not just set the cue at the start of the audio and trigger it when you need it?
Hi @DJ_Big_Blender, I’m pretty sure this is expected behavior as @PKtheDJ has suggested. I have reached out to the team to determine if this is indeed expected behavior or not. I’ll let you know what I hear back.
Hi again @DJ_Big_Blender, I heard back from the team and this is indeed intended behaviour. Currently we have the same behaviour as other software as this is often used by open format DJs. However, your UI point about the Hot Cues not showing on the overview waveform is duly noted. The dev team is going to review options for this. Thanks as always for the observations and input!
Ok, but I don’t really understand why this is considered expected behavior, especially since the hot cues in that ‘empty space’ ultimately lead back to the start of the track. When you press them, it sounds like the track starts playing unstable. The purpose of this is unclear to me, as it seems to cause glitches and inconsistencies that could be confusing during a live performance or practice session.
It doesn’t make any sense to me. I was even able to scroll through to a point beyond 1.440 bars—and counting. That’s over 50 minutes of empty end-trail. Who uses this, and for what purpose?
The problem is that it causes a lot of confusion. If you (accidentally?) set a cue point there, sometimes it triggers a part from the beginning of the song, and other times the start cue jumps to that empty part—which isn’t even visible. So you’re left wondering why your track isn’t starting to play… really frustrating.
Hi @DJ_Big_Blender, thanks for checking in. There is no news to share on this. As discussed above, this was a user requested feature from a while back so the dev team intends to keep this functionality for the time being.
To be honest, this behavior still makes no practical sense to me, and I’ve yet to hear a convincing explanation for why a DJ would deliberately want to place a cue point 50 minutes into silent, non-existent space. Especially when triggering that cue often results in the track (after reload) jumping back to the beginning anyway. This just creates unnecessary clutter and unpredictable behavior during performance.
If anyone can genuinely explain a valid use case for this ‘hidden feature,’ I’ll happily give them €50. Otherwise, it feels like the development team may have misunderstood the actual user need or implemented this feature in the wrong way.
At the very least, I kindly ask the team to look into my video again and reconsider this behavior — or provide an option to disable it for those of us who value reliability and precision over fringe use cases.
Hi again @DJ_Big_Blender, engineering has resolved the issue where triggering a Hot Cue after the end of the file doesn’t always jump to it. This will be included in an upcoming update (likely 5.3.2).
Regarding the ability to scrub past the end of the song, this remains a feature that some users specifically requested so removing this will create conflicts. We can also see how it’s inconvenient to lose the active region of the track when you just want to scrub through the track. It’s not clear how we can address that without breaking other use cases. Perhaps only the first beat jump in a sequence is allowed to go past the end of the file - in this case you could still deliberately jump outside of the file, but you wouldn’t be able to do so while holding the beat jump controls for a bit. What do you think?
Hi,
Thank you for seriously reconsidering this issue — and great to hear that the dev team will work on resolving the problem where Hot Cues set beyond the end of a track end up jumping back to the beginning, or even better, on preventing Hot Cues from being placed in that no man’s land at all. That’s a valuable improvement, and I truly appreciate it.
Still, I remain unclear on what the actual use case is for being able to scroll endlessly past the real end of a track. As you mentioned, “some users requested this” — but so far, I haven’t seen any forum tickets about it, nor has any such user chimed in on this discussion. So to me, there’s still no reasonable explanation for why this kind of unintuitive and very uncommon behavior is useful or practical. I would’ve loved to learn and give away that €50, but for now, it’s staying safely in my pocket.
@Slak_Jaw — your suggestion to allow only the first beat jump beyond the actual end of the track sounds like the least problematic compromise. That way, the specific wishes of those — still mysterious to me — power users could be preserved, without introducing unnecessary confusion or errors for regular users like you and me.
Thanks again for listening and engaging in the discussion!
Bug: Being able to scroll past track end and set hot cues in empty space
