Automating Cue Sheets with Music Reports

Music Reports processes more than a million cue sheets a year through Cuetrak®, connecting rights holders, music supervisors, and content creators directly with performing rights organizations (PROs).

Every cue sheet depends on knowing exactly what music appears in a piece of content, where, and for how long. For most productions, that identification has been a manual step — reviewing content by ear or against incomplete documentation. To help accelerate and improve accuracy across the cue sheet reporting process, Music Reports wanted to:

• Let Cuetrak users start a cue sheet directly from a media file, without logging music by hand
• Capture music accurately in fully mixed and unlabeled content, including archival catalogs
• Close the data gaps that send earned royalties to the black box
• Scale cue sheet creation across film, television, games, podcasts, and emerging formats

Music Reports turned to AudioShake to add an automated music detection and identification step to the front of the Cuetrak® workflow. When a user uploads a media file, AudioShake leverages its industry-leading sound separation technology to first separate the music within the audio into a clean, isolated music track. Working from that isolated signal rather than the full mix, it detects where music is present and identifies each cue, returning structured data such as track, timing, and duration.

This sequence is what makes the hard cases manageable: a score under a tense scene, a needle-drop competing with a play-by-play call, a cue in an unlabeled archival reel — each is isolated and identified on its own, rather than competing with the noise around it.

With the integration, Cuetrak users can:

• Upload a media file and have AudioShake identify the music within it, including tracks present in noisy environments, with no metadata, and layered underneath dialogue and effects.
• Pass that identification data into Cuetrak
• Generate a formatted cue sheet suitable for distribution and reporting.

For Cuetrak users, that turns one of the most manual, error-prone steps in reporting into an automated first pass — more complete cue sheets, delivered faster, and fewer royalties stranded in the black box before they reach the people who earned them.

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