QLab
The industry standard for a reason.
QLab offers one central place to build your sound, video, lighting, and show control cues. Create intricate designs and have the flexibility to change them quickly. Collaborate remotely with other designers on a single workspace, or sync across departments using our show control features. When you’re done designing, run the whole show just by pressing the “GO” button. Explore just some of our features below, and try them all for free using demo mode.
Get Started
Many features are completely free — really! Download QLab today to see for youself.
Download QLab
Audio
Trusted by sound designers all over the world, QLab is the best software for creating and playing back audio cues for live events. Need to play a thunderclap for a school play? Drag and drop your audio file into the workspace and you’re ready to go. Need to send up to 128 channels of audio output to a custom speaker array? No problem: QLab has matrix-based audio routing and multi-channel audio support. QLab also has audio effects chains, support for Dante, AVB, and NDI, sophisticated mixing tools, and much more.
Video
QLab is a reliable and flexible way to design and run your projections. Play full screen videos and images, or customize the geometry for projection mapping. QLab offers up to 1,000 video layers, chained video effects, per-cue blend modes, text cues, NDI and Syphon for video input and output, and more. We rewrote our video engine from scratch for QLab 5, utilizing Apple’s new Metal framework and vastly increasing the power and flexibility of our video features.
Lighting
Patch and control your lights with the same flexible and intuitive cuing you use to control Audio and Video. Control an unlimited number of DMX universes over Art-Net or USB. QLab comes with hundreds of lighting instrument definitions included, or you can add your own to our library.
Collaborate
New in QLab 5, multiple users can log into a single workspace. Use remote connection to edit your design from a tech table, allow multiple departments to collaborate on a single workspace, give your stage manager read-only access, and so much more.
Workflow
While all of QLab’s pieces are powerful on their own, the true elegance of the program is the way they all work together. There are so many ways to customize your cues: trigger one cue from another, start 18 sound effects at once, loop through a playlist at random, or even set up your cues to start based on the time of day! You can also use timeline mode to adjust the relative start times of your cues with drag and drop. Our integrated Cart mode lets you trigger your cues with the press of a button.
Show Control
QLab has extensive support for OSC, MIDI, and timecode protocols for ingoing or outgoing show control. New in QLab 5, QLab syncs to incoming time code. Network cues can send custom OSC, ASCII, and Hex messages over TCP or UDP. These powerful show control tools make QLab an integral part of complicated, multi-department live shows.