Wireless problems again

iLive Archived iLive Discussions
1

OK, so the wireless/MixPad experience was an absolute disaster tonight. In the same venue last month I had no problems whatsoever. Tonight I couldn’t sustain a connection for more than about 30 seconds. Unfortunately I have virtually no common setup - since the last gig I have gone from iOS 5 to 6 and iLive 1.8 to 1.9 so I can’t lay my finger on what exactly is the problem.

What I do know, however, is that MixPad is far too sensitive to network dropouts. While I’ve had many failures with MixPad, I’ve had precisely none on iLive editor, whether the laptop has been hard-wired or wireless connected. I get the impression that the MacBook IP stack is rather more resilient than the iPad one, but the dropouts on the iPad should not cause the problems that they do.

In order to try to figure out what was going on, I had the laptop ping the iPad at 1sec intervals. This gave some interesting data. Without MixPad running, the ping response time was around 50-100ms. With MixPad running the RTT drops to about 2ms - clearly MixPad reconfigures the stack to make it more responsive. At some point the iPad drops off the network. It stops responding to pings for 2-3 secs, then responds in 500ms or so before returning to normal. At this point MixPad disconnects and the ping response time returns to 50-100ms.

A comment was made in another thread that MixPad regards a data interruption of 10s as the trigger for lost connection. In my experience it only takes a data interruption of ~3s to make MixPad disconnect.

I know some A+H guys read these forums so can I make a couple of requests please?

MixPad needs to have an option whereby if is detects a data loss it doesn’t disconnect completely. Every single time I’ve had a disconnect I can immediately reconnect, but it takes ~10sec to connect,get logged in again and return MixPad to the settings I was previously using. Things seem to have got slightly worse with v1.9. About half of the time, when it disconnects it quits the app completely, so I have to restart the app as well.

Provide an option to reduce the data demands. MixPad is transferring a lot of real-time data, but in my typical usage a lot of that data is unneccesary. The signal meters show pretty much a realtime level when all I really need is signal present and peak warning. I’m using MixPad for control, not monitoring. I don’t really need to see the levels - all of the gains have been set during soundcheck (or are conservative for those gigs where you don’t have the luxury of a soundcheck!).

All I need is the ability to control. Every time MixPad disconnects it takes that control away from me.

As things stand I won’t be using the iLive in this venue again. I’ll be going back to the MixWizard and only use the iLive in venues where I’ve got space for the T80.

For the record I’m using the D-Link DIR-815 in 5GHz only mode with iPad 3

2

Have you tryed to switch the meters off on iPad settings (scroll the screen down)?

best regards

Przemko

3x iDR32, 1x iDR48, R72, T80, T112

3

I hadn’t found that option, thanks. I’ll give it a try next time…

4

Hi Chads,

If you have recently updated from iOS5 to iOS6 it may be worth a look at this information in the iLive Knowledgebase:

https://allen-heath.helpserve.com/Knowledgebase/Article/View/507/86/ios6--problems-connecting-to-wi-fi-network

Regards,

Carey

5

I take it there’s no fresh news on iOS6?

6

@Carey D, yes I did consider this problem before upgrading the iPad, but I had no difficulty and didn’t need the workaround. This is with 6.0.1 so maybe Apple addressed the ‘no internet’ problem with that. I don’t have the issues related by others (mostly iPhone4 users) on ZDnet and elsewhere with greyed-out options.

The main difficulty I have at the moment is inconsistency. After the upgrades I tested the system at home and had no dropouts at all during a 30-minute test run. That was the day before the gig experience related above. I’m about to run a test today with the meters turned off so I’ll see how that gets on. It doesn’t help that the locked-down nature of the iPad means that you can’t get much in the way of diagnostics out of them

7

well that’s irritating. 1hour test with the meters running. No dropouts and only a couple of ping RTTs above 3ms. I’ll try again this evening when there are a few more WiFi radios around…

8

I’m really interested in your findings because I have same problem and setup. I have MacBook Pro and two iPads. MacBook can sustain a wireless connection while iPad struggles but reconnects immediately. I don’t notice the problem as much at home in tests so I figure it has to be something with other wifi. I’m still on ios5 and 1.83 but was going to upgrade in the next couple of weeks as I have a quite a few shows through December 19. I’m not the best with networking once it gets deep but please give me any setups or tests you would like me to run and I will. I want to get to the bottom of this as soon as possible so we can get a stable setup with known settings.

9

I’m at a bit of a loss at the moment to be honest. My second test in the evening was also flawless for about 90 minutes (with an extra 6 APs visible in my local area), but in Saturday’s soundcheck it was unusable again. Murphy’s law seems to be applying - tests are fine, but it fails when you actually need it. Fortunately it did work for long enough at the opening of the first set when our FOH engineer forgot to switch my monitor feed on.

I’m not sure that much can be done from the user end - there’s virtually no configuration options on the iPad network setup (they ‘just work’), so all I’ve been able to do is correlate the 2-3 second network disconnection to the MixPad disconnection

10

Well for what it is worth, I was the one who posted the thread awhile back about using the same router with a different board in the same venue. Results being iLive drop outs common, other board no drops outs. This led to the 10ms timeout comment from A&H.

I have sinced ditched my 2.4Ghz router and switched to a 5Ghz. Back to same venue last weekend with packed house - no drop outs. To soon to be conclusive but switching to a 5Ghz router (and disabling the 2.4 reception and 2.4/5ghz SSID broadcast) has seemed to help me. Time will tell.

New router:

11
quote:
Originally posted by jgrooms

Well for what it is worth, I was the one who posted the thread awhile back about using the same router with a different board in the same venue. Results being iLive drop outs common, other board no drops outs. This led to the 10ms timeout comment from A&H.

I have sinced ditched my 2.4Ghz router and switched to a 5Ghz. Back to same venue last weekend with packed house - no drop outs. To soon to be conclusive but switching to a 5Ghz router (and disabling the 2.4 reception and 2.4/5ghz SSID broadcast) has seemed to help me. Time will tell.

New router:

the OP is already using 5ghz exclusively …

RayS

R-72/iDR32/iPS10

12
quote:
the OP is already using 5ghz exclusively .......

missed that - thanks.

13

It may be useful for A&H to add some log text that says why the mixpad is disconnecting. May help isolate some of these problems, or at least point us in a more specific direction.

14
quote:
Originally posted by jgrooms

New router:

I am contemplating purchasing that same router.

I really wish A&H would co brand something a little more professional with a company other than Belkin.

Interested in your feedback.

CRJ

Oswego, IL

T112 & iDR48

Sony F 1.73GHZ I7 8 Core

Win 7 Pro 500GB HD 8G RAM

TP-Link WR1043ND & Airport Express

15

Hi Chads,

I hear your pain … I’ve also had some strange problems with wireless, although to be fair, I think most of them are caused by 3rd party interference from other networks, the ubiquity of smart phones, and that’s just a fact of life I think from now on.

However: you say you just want control. As a suggestion, why not use Tweak for this purpose? The App is really configured to run on iPhone, but I use it on the iPad, and it works flawlessly, with none of the dropout problems that you mention, probably because there is no metering and thus a much lower data transfer loading. I realise that it’s a workaround, and means having both running (I guess), but it would solve your ‘control’ problem.

I effectively do this anyway; once we’ve done soundcheck, I almost exclusively use my iPhone for level changes in the room.

Best of luck!

www.pianojam.nl

16

Tweak isn’t really suited to my 2 main use cases for iPad:

  • setting monitor mixes from stage during soundcheck

  • providing multitouch fader control when I’m doing FOH+MON without the T80

For both of these, MixPad is absolutely brilliant when it’s working smoothly which is why I get so annoyed when it doesn’t work.

For the second use case I can replace MixPad with MIDI faders, but I love being able to wander around to the back of the stage during performance to check & adjust monitor levels.

I engineer a couple of regular jam sessions with a lot of performers changing around during the evening so all mixes need a lot of on-the-fly adjustment

Hopefully this issue might be addressed by OneMix, but to me it feels like the communication protocol needs to be made more resilient to dropped packets - display a dropped connection warning on MixPad, then automatically catch up as soon as it can after connection is restored

17

I’m having connection problems (at least once a minute) with the mixpad in a rack-only setup. I’ve tried different settings (with/without metering), different ipads (ipad 1 on IOS5 and the latest ipad 3 on IOS6), different wireless routers with different settings, and different firmware versions (recently upgraded). Nothing seems to help.

When I ping my ipad from a connected laptop (running editor software without problems), it appears that the ping times sometimes increases, packet loss occurs and then the mixpad loses connection. When the IDR system is not connected to the router, the ping times are consistenty low without packet loss.

I’d really like to be able to use the mixpad again. My theory is that there are two problems: 1. Too much traffic is transmitted over the network, which introduces some packet loss and 2. The mixpad cannot handle any packet loss.

Is anyone successfully using their mixpad? What setup are you using and what might be different from mine?

18

We had been running up to eight iPads at a time for personal monitoring for a year and a half with few problems, but after upgrading to the latest firmware and the latest version of Mixpad and Onemix, we’re dead in the water.

For two days we’ve had our IT contractor working to find a solution. We’ve used our original router setup, moved to an enterprise level router, been on the phone with A&H support, and nothing so far has worked. The iPads simply will not stay connected. Weird stuff happening and we can’t seem to figure it out; one iPad will stay on for a while, then not connect at all, others might connect for a few minutes and then drop signal. One of the strangest things we’re encountering is simultaneous disconnects. We’ve watched all iPads in a line loose connection at the same moment, other times it’s completely random. The one constant is that they will not maintain connection and are currently only good for Angry Birds.

Any breakthrough in stability would be great. Suggestions?

19

Hi Guys

I can probably give an insight into what’s going on.

I posted here about some testing we’d been doing gearing up for the release of OneMix:

https://iliveforum.allen-heath.com/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=2279

What we do is send a small UDP message across the network from an iPad ( or any client ) to the mixer every second, then wait for a reply.

We then have a timeout, I.E if we don’t receive a reply to this small message within 10 seconds, we display the Lost Comms landing page.

We do this because if you walk out of wifi range and start pushing the fader up and down, you’re not actually affecting the mix, and worse if you come back into range, the buffered messages can be delivered all in one go – and make an unexpected big change to your mix.

The timeout was 10 seconds in V1.8.

After requests saying “10 seconds is a long time before telling me I’m out of range”, we lowered it to 5 seconds in V1.9.

You can then get customers like Jim saying, it worked previously, but since upgrading it doesn’t.

This is probably because of the lowered timeout.

As a possible solution, we could put the timeout back to 10 seconds, but also display a QOS warning far earlier, to give you guys a clue that you might not have control of the desk.

Any feedback would be welcome ?

All this is wrapped up in a slightly larger issue of router stutter / throughput.

The consumer grade access points we’d previously recommended behave OK in a single iPad / laptop environment.

What actually happens is when a client roams out of range the access point can stop passing traffic / stutter and buffer traffic while it tries to work out where the client has gone. Even if the traffic is UDP.

If you’ve only got 1 client connected, this doesn’t matter, but in a multi-client / iPad situation I.E OneMix, if one client walks out of range, all other connected clients will have their traffic interrupted… and potentially disconnect as Jim has observed – dependant on how long the roaming client stays out range.

This manifests as the packet loss you can see if you wirelessly ping across the access point, after a client goes out of range , as Frank has observed.

The solution to all this ?

We’ve been testing more “pro” access points, and have updated our Router Compatibility document to include the Cisco Aironet 126N.

https://www.allen-heath.com/UK/CategoryDocuments/iLive_Router_Compatibility.pdf

This access point suffers from noticeably less stutter (consistent ping response), and quickly deals with clients which have roamed out of range, allowing other clients still in range to not loose communications.

It also has external antennas which can be remotely positioned for better wifi coverage at the venue.

To sum up, if you’re a single iPad user we can tweak the timeout back up, if you’re a OneMix / multi MixPad user, you might want to consider purchasing the recommended pro access point to give better throughput performance.

Hope this helps.

Andy

A&H