Getting Started

The queue and processing

Every operation in fMusic runs through one queue. There is no separate code path for immediate runs: confirming a run enqueues a job and starts it right away, so a batch run and an immediate run can never behave differently. The screen is titled Queue at rest and Processing while it runs.

Two kinds of jobs

The queue holds two kinds of jobs: exports, and imports (an organize is an import job that also edits the existing session). Every card carries an EXPORT, IMPORT, or ORGANIZE badge, a title (the session name), a subtitle such as the print or track count, and the date it was added. Each job stores a self-contained payload: everything needed to run it travels with it, which is why queued work survives quitting the app.

Run now still queues

The final action of each wizard, Import, Organize, or Print, enqueues the job and starts it immediately, taking you to the processing screen. Add to Queue parks the same job instead and returns you to the dashboard. In Export, pressing Print while other jobs are already waiting asks first: Print this only runs just your print, Process all runs the whole queue, so a quick print never silently drags older jobs along.

The queue screen

The Queue control in the toolbar opens the queue from any screen. Its badge shows a spinner while a run is active, otherwise the failed count, otherwise the waiting count. Opened from inside a flow, the queue adds a Back button that returns you to that screen with its state intact.

The bottom bar holds the run controls: Start runs every waiting job in order and becomes Stop during a run; Clear finished removes completed, failed, and cancelled cards (clearing the last card returns you to the dashboard). While a run is active a progress bar tracks the whole queue and the headline counts sessions; when it ends, a summary reports how many completed, failed, or were cancelled.

Reading a job card

Each card shows a status glyph (a dashed circle while waiting, a dot while running, a green check for a clean finish, a yellow triangle for a finish with issues, a red triangle for a failure, a crossed-out circle for a cancellation) and a matching badge: Queued, Rendering…, Completed, Completed with issues, Partially applied, Failed, or Cancelled. A status strip under the header always shows the current phase, and on a failure the error message is right there on the card, no digging.

Clicking a card expands its checklist, and the two states read differently on purpose: a waiting job lists its plan, every step it will perform, while a finished job lists only what deviated: skipped tracks, a route that failed, a rename Pro Tools refused, a tempo that was not applied. A clean run shows a clean card.

Per-job controls

• Reopen (waiting jobs): rebuilds the wizard where you left off, reopening the right session and restoring your destination, placement, routing choices, and settings. One fidelity limit: an import job stores one whole region per track, so splits, trims, and clip moves made in the editor are not part of the queued job and do not come back on reopen. An organize job reopens in full.
• Reveal in Finder (finished jobs): opens the folder the job wrote to. For an export that is the destination you chose, or the session's Bounced Files folder.
• Move up / down and remove (waiting jobs, while the queue is stopped): reorder or drop jobs before the run.
• Stop (the running job): stops that job only; the queue continues.
• Retry routing (imports that completed with failed bus assignments): re-runs only the routing of the tracks whose assignment failed. Nothing is re-imported.

⇧-click or ⌘-click selects several cards at once, and the context menu carries the same actions, including removing the whole selection from the queue.

What stopping means

Stopping is not the same for both job types. An export stops cleanly between bounces: solos and mutes are restored, and no file is left half-written. An import or organize asks for confirmation first, because changes already made in Pro Tools are not undone: tracks already created, renamed, or deleted stay that way. Stopping one job marks it Cancelled and the queue moves on to the next; Stop in the bottom bar ends the whole run and leaves the remaining jobs waiting. A failed job never stops the queue either.

Quitting and relaunching

Waiting jobs are persisted: quit fMusic with a full queue and every pending job is back on relaunch, in the Queued state, ready to run. Progress inside a job is not persisted, so anything that had started but not finished simply runs again from the start.