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Backing Tracks

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Backing Tracks

Posted on 2026-05-27

It is very common for artists to perform with backing tracks, and thus need a way to play them during their performance. While simple on the surface, there are many ways to do this with various pros and cons for each. We can work with you in the following ways, but please always speak to us about your requirements:

  1. Professional playback device with jack or XLR outputs
    You control your professional device and control the songs as you want.
    Pick the songs in real-time, the order, you use the correct versions, skip songs, and talk between songs as needed. The audio is provided as jack or XLR connections, with laptops with interfaces, samplers, or ‘SPD’s’ being common in these scenarios. This is by far the preferred option as it provide professional quality and reliability with minimal issues and faster setup.
  2. Your own consumer device with a 3.5mm headphone socket
    You control your phone or tablet to play your songs how you want.
    You can pick the order, you use the correct versions, talk between songs, and can skip songs as needed, all played from your device which has a traditional 3.5mm headphone jack socket . This means reasonable quality and reliability and good compatibility with sound systems without the expense of professional equipment.
  3. USB drive to play songs directly from the mixing desk
    A more technical and less flexible solution, but often more suitable for a variety of reasons.
    Songs in WAV format are loaded onto the mixing desk ahead of time and triggered by the sound engineer.
    To play songs from a USB drive plugged into the mixing desk, the USB drive and songs must use the following specification:
    1. Ensure the USB drive is empty and formatted in FAT32.
      • If the USB drive is larger than 32GB you may need to use a custom tool to format it correctly.
    2. Ensure the songs are in WAV format, in 16bit or 24bit, using 44.1KHz or 48KHz sample rate, and in ideally in stereo.
    3. Prefix the songs numerically to ensure they are ordered as desired e.g:
      • “1 – The Blues.wav”
      • “2 – 10s silence.wav”
      • “3 – Another Song.wav”
    4. They will play automatically in the defined order, so if you want a noticeable gap between two songs, make sure you add a wav file of silence of the appropriate duration, and name it numerically as needed so the silence appears at the correct point in the playlist (see example above).
    5. Make sure you take the length of the silence into account when calculating the length of your set. If the playlist overruns, the sound engineer will miss the last song(s).
  4. USB cable direct to your laptop
    We can plug your laptop directly into the mixing desk so all sources can appear individually.
    This enables a much richer integration, and for example., multiple audio source from your laptop, perhaps playing back from a DAW, to appear as separate sources on the mixing desk. Ideal for those with multiple instruments, cues and click etc that cannot provide separate analogue feeds.
    However, this is limited by the distance between the playback laptop and the mixing desk as USB has a maximum length of only a few meters before glitches arise. This is also only possible if the USB socket on the mixing desk is not being used for other purposes.
  5. Bluetooth
    As a backup option, a high-quality Bluetooth receiver is available to connect your device to so you can play the songs from your device. This is stereo only and may be suseptable to interference, if for example your device chooses to join a different Bluetooth receiver during your performance.
  6. Dante / Waves SoundGrid
    Provide separate audio feed sources over a network
    On the off-chance you have Dante or WSG software installed on your device, we can take these sources over an wired ethernet network. If you don’t know what Dante is, I wouldn’t worry 😊.

We also have the following advice:

  • Playing back from a YouTube video is strongly discouraged in the strongest terms.
  • Having the song file on your device is the way to go. This coulld be downloading the mp3 or wav from the online source, including using Spotify or Tidal’s ‘offline’ features.
  • Always check before the event that your device can play the file truly offline by enabling ‘flight mode’ with all 3G, 4G, 5G & Wi-Fi radios off.

Other methods using connection adapters, Apple Lighting and USB-C are not available unless you provide an adapter, however these will remain potentially unreliable and of lower quality.

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