Not every stop is a failure. A news drop-in, a live interview, a phone segment — all of them need the playlist to stop and wait for a person.
A cue point is that instruction, placed deliberately in the running order.
How it behaves
A cue is a marker placed after a given playlist row. When the track before it finishes, playback stops rather than advancing.
Critically, the engine is prevented from preloading the following track at all — the next-track lookup returns nothing when the current row has a cue after it. Without that, the engine would have already begun crossfading into the next song before the stop took effect.
A cue stop overrides repeat mode. It is an operator handover point, and handing over matters more than looping.
Whether playback reaches the end naturally or through the engine's end-of-track event, the same stop logic applies. Two paths, one behaviour — a discrepancy there would mean a cue that works only sometimes, which is worse than one that never works.
Telling the operator
Feedback is specific and restrained. The cue row's label changes from CUE to CUE ACTIVE. Only the title cell pulses red — not the whole row, so surrounding timing and metadata stay readable. The Now Playing panel shows Stopped at CUE.
That restraint is deliberate. A flashing full-width row obscures exactly the information an operator needs while deciding what to do next.
Ready for the handover
After stopping, the track after the cue is selected automatically. The operator does the talk segment, presses play, and continues. No hunting for the right row while live.
The active indication clears when playback resumes or when the cue is removed.
Two different things called cues
Worth separating, because the naming collides.
A cue point in this sense is a playlist stop — a row-level instruction to hand over. Intro and outro markers are per-track positions in milliseconds that control mix timing. Both are called cues; they do entirely different jobs.