What's the same, what's different, and how to move a show across
If you program shows in MainStage, most of Joue will feel familiar: songs, patches, layers and splits. The differences are about what happens when something goes wrong.
Side by side
| Topic | MainStage | Joue |
|---|---|---|
| Where plugins run | Inside the app, together. A plugin that crashes can take the concert down with it. | Each in its own process. One that crashes or falls behind is restarted, or switched off, and the rest play on. |
| Sounds | Apple’s instruments and a large sound library, built in. | None of its own. Apple and third-party Audio Unit plugins, and imported EXS instruments. |
| Patches and controls | Songs and patches in a concert. Hardware controls are mapped to screen controls in a layout, then assigned again in patches. | Songs and patches. Pedals, wheels and knobs are set up once for each keyboard, in My Rig, and every patch follows them. A patch changes one only when it needs to. An intelligent layout view avoids dealing with a clunky and arcane interface. |
| Hardware | Set up in the concert’s layout. | Set up per Mac, as its rig. The show stays the same on the main and backup Macs. |
| MIDI tricks | Scripter, and Apple’s MIDI plugins. | Built-in MIDI effects on each route: a harp gliss now, a chord trigger next. |
| When something fails | In our experience: sounds just stop mid-show. MainStage freezes when renaming a patch, or at random times. Sounds can go missing, even after consolidating the concert. | Optimised for memory use, so memory issues don’t happen. If a plugin fails, only that plugin is stopped. All sounds and settings go with the project. |
| Mac | Needs enough memory to load the whole concert, and the same versions of the libraries the concert was built with. | Runs on a much smaller machine. Needs Apple silicon and macOS 26. |
Moving a show across
- Gather your instruments
Find the EXS instruments your concert uses, and the samples they point to. - Import them
Channels › Import EXS. Joue finds samples that have moved, and can split a stacked instrument into separate channels. - Build the patches
One song at a time, a patch per bar number, with layers and splits on the key map. - Set up My Rig
Tell Joue which keyboards and pedals this Mac has. Do it again on the backup Mac: the show doesn’t change.
What doesn't come across
- Logic's and MainStage's own instruments (such as Alchemy) and their sound library. They only run inside Apple's apps.
- Scripter scripts. Joue has its own MIDI effects instead: a harp gliss now, a chord trigger next.
- The concert's screen layout and its controls. In Joue, the screen dynamically incorporates everything it needs to, without having to build custom layouts.