Festival production software for organizers

The job: a lineup, a pile of riders, and one showday

As an organizer you are the point where everything converges. The booking team hands you a lineup. Each artist — a DJ, a band, a live electronic act — sends a technical rider describing what they need on stage. Those documents arrive as PDFs, scans, and exports, written to no shared standard, and every one lists gear, inputs, monitoring, and hospitality in its own way.

From that pile you have to produce concrete things, usually in spreadsheets and under deadline. Broad festival management software tends to handle tickets, vendors, and budgets; TRACE handles the technical production layer — the riders, the gear, and the stages. It sits between the tools artists use to write riders and the platforms that sell tickets, and it reads what you already receive rather than asking anyone to re-enter it.

• How many CDJs, mixers, and backline pieces to rent across the whole festival
• What equipment sits on each stage, on each day
• How one act clears the stage for the next inside its slot
• How much crew each stage and day needs
• Where two artists have asked for the same piece of gear at the same time

Rider extraction: structured data from every technical rider

TRACE reads each technical rider PDF and pulls out structured equipment data — the DJ booth, the backline, inputs and monitoring, power, and hospitality — mapped to schemas for DJ, band, and live-electronic setups. Text, tables, and scanned pages all go through the same pipeline, with OCR as a fallback when a rider is an image rather than selectable text.

Every extracted field carries a confidence score, so you can see at a glance where the model was certain and where a page was ambiguous. Low-confidence fields are flagged for a human to check rather than passed off as fact. You review, correct, and confirm — the rider becomes clean data you can plan against, not a document you re-read five times.

Festival-wide equipment totals and a single rental order

Once riders are structured, TRACE adds them up across every stage and every day. Instead of counting CDJs by hand, you get festival-wide equipment totals: how many of each machine the whole event needs, what each stage carries, and how demand moves from day to day. Spares are handled per stage, and the totals reflect the heaviest day, so your rental order covers the peak rather than an average.

That gives you one procurement view to send to a rental company, and a stock-by-stage breakdown to hand to whoever is loading each stage.

Changeover planning and showday conflict detection

Between two sets, a stage has to change over — one artist's gear comes down, the next goes up, inside a fixed slot. TRACE plans changeovers from the structured riders, using the canonical equipment each act actually needs, so you can see which pieces stay, which swap, and how tight each transition is.

Conflict detection runs across the schedule: two artists asking for the same shared item at overlapping times, a slot that leaves no room to reset the stage, gear that appears on two stages at once. Catching these while you plan is far cheaper than discovering them at 22:00 on the night.

Crew calculation, hospitality, and transport logistics

From the same data, TRACE estimates the crew each stage and day needs, so staffing is grounded in the actual setup rather than a guess. Hospitality riders are extracted alongside the technical ones, so catering and dressing-room requests are collected in one place instead of scattered across inboxes.

For the parts that happen off-stage, the logistics module covers hotels, airports, and ground transport, including a transport Gantt to lay out pickups and drop-offs across the festival. It reads the same artist roster, so travel and production stay in step.

A free public festival timetable for your audience

When the schedule is set, TRACE publishes a public festival timetable your audience can open — stages, set times, and lineup — without another tool or a separate ticket platform. It is free to publish, and it stays in sync with the running order you already maintain inside TRACE, so the version the public sees matches the one your crew works from.

TRACE is open source under AGPL-3.0, with a Free tier and paid plans that scale with the size of your operation. You can read the core, run it, and start with a single festival before you commit to more.

Frequently asked