Also called: cursor, play cursor
What is playhead?
The moving marker showing the current position on a DAW timeline. Everything time-based in a session is measured against it, which is why a prompter that reads the playhead stays accurate through rewinds and loops.
Because the playhead is a musical position rather than a stopwatch, tempo changes are handled for free: the position advances through bars, not seconds.
This is the practical difference between a DAW-synced prompter and a standalone scrolling app.
The play, stop, record, rewind and loop controls of a DAW, and the clock they drive. Plugins can read the transport state, which is how a lyrics display knows whether the song is running and where it is.
A record of how the tempo changes across a project, rather than a single fixed BPM. Because DAW positions are measured in bars and beats, anything reading the timeline follows the map automatically.
A digital audio workstation: the software you record, edit and mix in. Cubase, Logic Pro, Ableton Live, Pro Tools, FL Studio, Studio One, Reaper and Cakewalk are the ones most vocal sessions run on.