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