When building a setlist, I often need to listen to the transitions between songs several times before I can decide whether the order works musically.
I would like to suggest a temporary “Song Transition” mode. When enabled, AbleSet would only play the first and last section of each song in the current setlist order.
For example:
- first section of Song 1 → last section of Song 1 →
- first section of Song 2 → last section of Song 2 →
- first section of Song 3, and so on.
The main purpose would be to quickly audition the overall flow of a setlist without having to listen to every song in full or manually jump between sections.
This would make it easier to evaluate:
- the transition from one song into the next,
- changes in energy, tempo and atmosphere,
- whether intros and outros work well together,
- and whether the overall setlist has the intended dramatic flow.
This would be a setlist-planning and rehearsal tool rather than a performance feature.
I would also be interested to hear how other AbleSet users currently evaluate and rearrange their setlists.
- Would a condensed setlist preview like this be useful in your workflow?
- Would you prefer AbleSet to play complete first and last sections, or a configurable number of bars or time from the beginning and end of each song?
- Should pauses, count-ins and automatic transitions be included in the preview?
- Would you mainly use this while planning a setlist, during rehearsals, or for both?
- Are there other elements that would need to be included for the preview to represent the actual flow of a live set? Maybe the Chorus?
Perhaps other musicians, playback operators or musical directors have similar workflows or additional ideas for how such a mode could work.
I would also be interested to know whether this would require a dedicated feature, or whether a similar workflow can already be created using AbleSet’s existing functions.
According to the documentation, I think this workflow could technically be approximated by adding +SKIP to every section between the beginning and end of each song, or by creating an automatic jump from each intro to its outro.
However, both approaches would require manually modifying every song and would also affect normal playback. A dedicated preview mode would make this behaviour temporary, apply it automatically to the current setlist, and avoid changing the underlying song structure.
Is there already a cleaner way to toggle this kind of behaviour without editing all section markers?
