Tour production management, from advance to showday

Advance festival dates without the email archaeology

Advancing a festival date usually means chasing the latest rider version through a long email thread, then re-typing its contents into someone else's spreadsheet. TRACE takes the rider PDF you send and reads it into structured data — DJ, band, or live electronic — so the production you are advancing with works from the document itself, not a half-remembered summary of it.

Every extracted field carries a confidence score, so the requirements that matter most — CDJ count, mixer model, monitor mixes, power — trace back to the exact line in your rider that produced them. When you send an updated version, it gets read again, and the plan follows the rider instead of drifting away from it.

Make sure your artist's technical rider is actually read

The failure mode when advancing is rarely disagreement — it is omission. A DI line missed, the wrong number of turntables, a spare that never got counted. TRACE reads the whole technical rider, including body text, equipment tables, and scanned or photographed pages through OCR, and maps it to structured equipment schemas rather than skimming for keywords.

If the festival invites you into the artist portal, you can see exactly what was extracted from your rider, check the confidence score on each field, correct anything misread, and upload updated documents. Your side reviews and confirms while the festival keeps control of its own plan. What you sign off is what feeds the day.

• Backline and DJ equipment — CDJs, mixers, turntables — with model and quantity
• Input lists, DI, and monitor requirements for bands and live-electronic acts
• Hospitality and rider notes, kept alongside the technical detail

Spot equipment and changeover conflicts before showday

Once every rider on a stage is structured, TRACE plans across all of them at once: festival-wide equipment totals, per-stage changeover timing, crew load, and conflict detection. Your artist's specific needs sit against the shared stage, so a clash — two acts wanting the same backline in back-to-back slots, a changeover too tight to strike and reset, a missing spare — surfaces days ahead instead of at load-in.

For a tour manager, that early warning is the whole point. You learn that a stage cannot turn your set around in the eight minutes between acts while there is still time to move a slot or add a piece of kit — not when the crew is already on the clock.

Keep hospitality and logistics straight across the run

A rider is more than a channel list. TRACE also extracts hospitality requirements and feeds the logistics side of a festival — a transport Gantt, hotels, and airports — so ground moves, room needs, and arrival windows live in the same plan as the technical detail.

Across a run of dates, the same rider drives each stop. Set times land on the free public festival timetable that your artist and crew can check without an account, and the production detail stays where the people building the show can act on it.

Where TRACE fits for tour and artist managers

TRACE is not a rider builder and not a ticketing platform. It reads the technical riders you already send and turns them into festival production plans. In practice, the festivals and production companies you tour with run TRACE, and you are brought in through the artist portal to review and confirm — though you can also run your own account to advance a run of dates yourself.

It is open source under AGPL-3.0, with a free tier to start and paid tiers (Explorer, Builder, Scale, Enterprise) as your calendar grows.

Frequently asked