Forums › Forums › iLive Forums › Archived iLive Discussions › Wireless problems again
- This topic has 18 replies, 12 voices, and was last updated 11 years, 10 months ago by bucks.
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2012/11/30 at 2:41 pm #32279chadsParticipant
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 T80For 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
2012/12/14 at 11:27 am #32412AnonymousInactiveI’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?
2013/01/18 at 5:46 am #32723AnonymousInactiveWe 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?
2013/01/22 at 1:35 pm #32767bucksParticipantHi 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.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/wireless/ps5678/ps10980/data_sheet_c78-593663.html
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 -
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