Just got back from my first gig using the mixpad app to run FOH for a big band.
Summary: Unusable.
Background: I’ve been doing live sound as my full time career for 12 years, and mixing FOH with Lemur on my iPad via wifi through a Win7 virtualbox on Debian hosting their daemon through an external MIDI device controlling an 01V96 for the last few years with 0 dropouts, 0 lag, and 0 worries. I expected a $100 app to be an upgrade over my home-grown template.
I realize this is not A&H tech support, and I also realize that A&H guys occasionally poke their heads in to answer questions or whatever. I don’t expect to get a resolution, and I also expect some folks telling me I should take it up with A&H. I also don’t want someone to purchase an iDR rack, like I did, thinking that it’ll upgrade their workflow for iPad only based mixing.
Let me explain, no there’s not time - let me sum up:
-
The scroll animation is really annoying. You have to wait for it to finish settling in on where the faders are going to be before it even starts updating levels, much less you can adjust anything.
-
LAG!!! - Holy cow. It takes forever for the faders to update to the rack!
-
Dropouts! We played 2, 40 minute sets with a brief intermission this evening. I lost connection 5 times, and ended up sitting in the second row because it was the only place that was stable - the whole point of mixing on an iPad is flexibility to walk the venue and be where the VIP or prime sponsor is to guarantee optimum mix at that location.
-
Those little animations that go with the gate and comp are fun, but completely useless. I have ears, I don’t need a little red line to tell me that I’m compressing or gating something. Waste of bandwidth. Use that to update my faders, please!
-
I miss my template that had 4 fixed faders that I could assign to whatever channels I deemed important, and never left the screen - say MC, solo mic, vocalist, etc. The remaining bank of 8 could scroll (or page, in the case of Lemur) to select whatever else you wanted to mess with.
-
Selecting alternate mixes is ridiculous. Soundcheck was a disaster. So, the keyboard player asks for something different in his monitor. I’m on the “channel” mode, so have to hit the Mix button below Inputs to get outputs on the page, scroll over to his channel, wait for the thing to sync, double-click his mix, click on Inputs, scroll to the channel he wanted changed and then ask him what he needed because I got so damn distracted by interfacing with the app that I forgot what he asked for. At which point, the drummer realizes that there’s something wrong with his mix, so rewind to the top of this paragraph and repeat twice because the vocalist needed something else halfway through fixing the drummer’s mix. MAKE IT EASIER TO SWITCH BETWEEN MIXES!!!
-
Forget muting the effects send on the vocal mic at the end of the song before the vocalist starts talking, unless you’re in mix mode with outputs on one row and inputs on the other.
Now, I’m sure (based on reading through pages and pages on here about Mixpad), that someone is going to point out that I need to move my router, or make sure it’s operating on 5Ghz, or is this or that. It’s the same router I’ve used for the last six months, setup the same way I’ve used it, in the same type of venues. Dropouts are unacceptable from a $100 app FULLSTOP. My wifi/router is not the problem. My iPad is not the problem. They’ve worked great together for ages now.
If anything, this system should be infinitely more simple, since I’m not connecting through a virtualboxed OS to a cloned USB device. Just one IP to another. The lag is unacceptable. A&H needs to figure out a way to transfer less data and make the connection more reliable.
Suggestion - a row of user assignable programmable buttons down one side of the screen. Let the user pick which side they want, so you don’t anger the southpaws. I’m right handed, so the row would be down the left near my thumb as I hold the device. I would have an FX send mute toggle, and a row of mix select toggles. Single click on any of the buttons and you’re instantly mixing that monitor, that FX send, that recording mix, or back to the FOH mix.
Suggestion 2 - reduce the amount of data being transferred to the iPad. Leave all the extra cruft at the laptop on the editor. All the fun little graphics and whatnot. I don’t need to see pumping gates and comps in little boxes on each channel (even if not enabled in the signal path…) on my iPad. Send me the gain reduction meters when I’m in channel edit mode, with the comp or gate pulled up to edit. Otherwise, it’s wasted data. I know this is possible, because I made Lemur do it from my Yamaha consoles.
Suggestion 3 - make all the iLive parameters editable via sysex MIDI and/or OSC - comps, gates, fx, eq’s, meters, etc. The whole nine. I think the LS9 series has a wonderful MIDI implementation. Let the user choose to spend hours creating their own template if they so desire to work they way they want to work, or purchase your app if they feel that’s more to their liking.
As for me, I’m going to throw the iPad in the backpack and carry my laptop around with iLive editor up for tomorrow’s gig, mixing from the trackpad. Maybe I can play some Sudoku on the iPad at intermission or something.
]