CronoVent at roBOt Festival: rooms, technical activities and overnight schedules
An electronic music festival needs an operational schedule covering load-ins, setup, rehearsals, soundchecks, performances and load-outs, with crews often working in parallel.
Work at roBOt Festival in Bologna helped shape features for managing multiple rooms, shared activities and sessions continuing past midnight. For CronoVent creator Andrea Matteo Bassi, it was also a personal return: after working on editions 04, 05 and 06 at the start of his career after graduation, he returned with Pro Music.
From the artist schedule to a technical production schedule
The public programme tells audiences what they can see and hear. A technical production schedule also needs to cover the work that makes those performances possible.
Preparing the programme in CronoVent brought together sessions and available operational information, with separate fields for times, technical requirements, notes, rehearsals and documents. The title identifies the activity, the time slot shows its duration, and the detail view holds the information the crew needs.
Multiple rooms within one venue
One requirement involved venues with several rooms, such as Palazzo Re Enzo. A load-in may affect the whole building, while a soundcheck concerns just one room. Repeating a shared activity in every room makes the schedule harder to read and can suggest separate jobs.
In CronoVent, a parent venue can contain multiple rooms. Activities assigned to the venue appear as a single band spanning the room columns; room-specific sessions stay in their own column. Work on the schedule also helped refine text placement when these activities overlap. Shared activities must remain identifiable, and their details accessible by clicking the band.
Handling planned overlaps
Audio setup, lighting setup and stage preparation may take place at the same time. An overlap warning is useful while something needs checking; once reviewed, it can become distracting.
CronoVent now allows the warning to be disabled for an individual appointment. This changes neither its timing nor its visibility. It lets the person managing the schedule distinguish planned simultaneous work from a situation that still needs attention.
Activities that continue past midnight
At music festivals, an activity may start on one day and finish on the next. CronoVent lets users specify this explicitly. The continuation also appears in the following day’s schedule, so anyone looking at that day can see what is still happening.
This matters for technical work too: the end of the final set and the end of the crew’s shift are different moments, with dismantling, equipment handling and vehicle loading still to complete.
Faster access to notes and technical documents
Other improvements focus on everyday access: notes displayed directly in the schedule when enabled; venue contacts, crews and runners shown according to visibility settings; PDFs viewable inside the app without downloading them first; and a dedicated official-source link field.
The aim is to make essential information immediately available while keeping further detail a click away.
A successful experience and practical improvements
For the team Andrea worked with, the job ended at 03:40 on 10 October, with the vehicles packed and ready for the journey back.
The experience went well and provided concrete opportunities to refine CronoVent. Features developed while preparing and working on the festival are now available for other schedules involving multiple rooms, parallel work and overnight activities. CronoVent continues to grow through this connection with the everyday work of technical production companies and crews: identifying a need, turning it into a feature, and checking its usefulness in a real schedule.
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