We have been using the Custom Control App for several years however we are limited to nine (9) users. We have fifteen (15) users at any given time. Is there any plan in the near future to increase the User Profiles?
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And what about dLive4u users? Right now there are none, which makes this app completely useless.
Would definitely appreciate more user profiles.
That said, my church uses nested tab containers to represent the different mixes and layers. It was tedious to maintain, but I’ve made a web app for generating layouts based on input from a YAML file: custom-control-layout-generator.502sound.com
It’s a little rough around the edges and could definitely use some polish, but feel free to try it out and let me know if you run into any problems.
I also agree that more users would be helpful. It seems very arbitrary that A&H decided on 10 users. There really shouldn’t be any reason they can’t increase it IMHO.
As J McRib said, you don’t need to run a dedicated user for each musician. There really isn’t any limit (other than the network limit of something like 40ish connected devices) to the number of people/musicians that can access the system via CustomControl.
Although our church has moved to using the IP6/8 devices for our musicians, here is a set of pictures that show how we used to handle our CustomControl layouts. There was only one layout/user and the 9-10 musicians simply selected the correct aux mix using the tabs on the top of the screen. There were also tabs at the bottom of the screen so that the musicians had access to every channel (we had too many to put all the channels on one screen).
PS - you can click on the above image to be taken to the image folder where there are many more screenshots of the setup.
PSS - the knobs at the bottom of each channel controlled pan. These images were taken while offline which is why they don’t reflect an accurate setting (no one had all of their channels panned hard right). It’s also why all the aux sends are at unity and why all of the meters show the same levels. When the mobile device was actually connected to the system, all of these graphical elements would reflect the actual settings.
PSS - I would agree that using nested layers can be frustrating to set up. Mainly because of the way the CustomControl editor seems to lose “focus” of the current tab you are working on and you’ll accidentially add a bunch of elements/widgets to a different layer than you intended. (Of course I was doing this several years ago, so perhaps the software has been updated to help fix this issue). I learned a couple of tricks/tips that made the process less frustrating however.
First, it was much easier to set up the nested tabs, but then to work on a single musician’s tab and add all of the desired elements/widgets to all of the nested layers (ie all of the channels in the various channel layers in my example) for/on that one musician’s tab. You can then cut and paste that completed tab into all the other musician’s tabs. Of course you will then have to edit each element/widget to point to the correct aux mix, but as annoying as that is, it was far easiest than trying to build out one tab for every musician (like the vocal channel tab), and then another tab for every musician (like the band tab), etc.
Second, I learned to navigate away from the tab I wanted to edit (different musician tab and different channel tab) and then navigate back to the set of tabs that I wanted to edit and clicked on the tab’s background about 3 different times before adding new elements/widgets to ensure I (and the system) really had “focus” on the correct tab.
Of course J McRib’s helper software wasn’t available back when I was doing this either. I would absolutely want to try it out and see how helpful it can be for building out the basic design.
I hadn’t thought through this lense. Thank you very much.
William “Andy” Barrett
AB Sound and Lighting, Inc.
(757) 537-4787
n2soundinva@gmail.com
Awesome. Thank you
William “Andy” Barrett
AB Sound and Lighting, Inc.
(757) 537-4787
n2soundinva@gmail.com
I do appreciate your offer however I guess I dont translate well. The file definitely confused my team. No one speaks yaml…lol
Is there any way you could share your file.
I sent you a DM.
(more characters to meet min).
Sorry so late responding. I’ve got the Tab issue solved but the program keeps closing as soon as I past something
William “Andy” Barrett
AB Sound and Lighting, Inc.
(757) 537-4787
n2soundinva@gmail.com
No worries! It’s not super polished and my documentation could be better. A little extra context:
When I originally acquired a dLive console for our church the dLive 4 You app didn’t exist. Coming from a Behringer X32 where musicians could mix their own ears with an app on their phones, this was a bit of a let down. Allen&Heath did have an app for iPad, but we weren’t going to purchase iPads for every team member. The only solutions at that point were to shell out funds for Mixing Station (great third-party app) or use Custom Control. We opted for Custom Control.
Now, for my IEM layouts I wanted to reduce the learning curve as much as possible for our volunteers. In service of that goal, I didn’t want to have a bunch of generic layers that showed channel strips for each group of 8 or so channels (eg. “1-8”, “9-16”, “17-24”, etc…). Instead, I wanted to have layers (tabs in a tab container) with more descriptive names, like “Drums” or “Vocals”. That would make it easier for people to find the channel they wanted to adjust.
This was great in theory, but increased the complexity of the setup needed on my end. We run about 10 in ear mixes each week, so each custom layer had to be recreated 10 times. Copying and pasting widgets helps, but there’s still a lot of effort involved.
That didn’t deter me though. I did the work (more hours than I care to admit) and everything was fine. Until I decided to re-patch a channel 
That meant going through each layer in each mix where there was a channel strip controlling that channel and updating the channel number. More hours invested… This only needs to happen a couple of times before you start getting frustrated. I got to a point where I wouldn’t make changes on the console because it would affect the Custom Control layouts…
And that’s when it occurred to me that it would be awesome to have an app that would accept a written description of my channels, layers, and mixes and just “covert” that into a usable Custom Control file.
Enter YAML…
YAML is a common format for configuration files in the technology industry. It’s similar to JSON or even XML, but generally considered more readable by humans.
The purpose of the YAML configuration for my app is to define what channels you want to be available on your Custom Control layout. You also define “layers”, which are composed of channels, and “mixes” which are composed of layers.
Now, in the event I decide to move a channel or aux around on the console, I just have to adjust some values in my YAML configuration, “re-build” the Custom Control configuration, then upload it to my dLive.
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