Thanks for the responses, guys. I know it’s incredibly bad form to come out swinging, but for the amount A&H asks us to pay for this app, it’s EXTREMELY disappointing that it’s not more polished.

arsound – I’d be interested to hear how you’ve specifically worked around the sliding fader lag thing, and selecting mixes.

zblebt – I’m also using an iPad 3. I found the Yamaha apps to be quite limited as well, but since they offer 100% control via MIDI, it didn’t bother me since I could just create my own.

Stix – Sounds to me like you have the same 2 biggest gripes I do. Slow redraws, and poor mix selection method. For today’s gig I actually had the luxury of being in a theater, complete with FOH position, so I took advantage of the desk to setup my laptop via wifi and have the editor open alongside the iPad. Worked better than just the app, though I’m going to have to read the section in the manual about aux routing to figure out how to make the monitors mute when I turn off a channel on the main mix. Apparently PRE means before the On/Off toggle…

audioamerica – If you read my whole first post (admittedly way too long), you’d notice that I’ve been using an iPad and router for the past few years. Specifially, my iPad 3 and router have been working together since July of last year. The ONLY thing that changed in my rig was swapping out an 01V96, and swapping in an iDR-32. That shouldn’t suddenly cause me to have to buy a new router, new iPad, new something else, etc. My rig worked flawlessly at a gig on Tuesday night with the 01V and Lemur, then trouble city on Saturday night with the iDR-32 and native app, so to me that indicates the problem is not the hardware.

I’ll figure out how to get some screencaps of my Lemur template to share on here so you can see what I think is a much more logical workflow. []

quote:

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Originally posted by arsound
I’m probably not a typical user.

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It’s live audio. I’m not sure a “typical user” exists.

Thanks for the massive configuration list, arsound. I’ll try some of that out and see if it makes it more stable. I like the idea of having the router where it should be at .1, with everything else above that. Makes more sense with a typical configuration, especially if the MixRack isn’t configured to provide DHCP.

As promised, here are some screencaps of my Lemur template that to me makes perfect sense. I know that it’s a completely different direction from what A&H has gone, but will demonstrate the things I think should be readily accessible, anyway. There’s plenty of space on the common page to add a tab for the additional limiter/de-esser that the Yamahas don’t have – if I can just figure out the control commands…

[img]https://db.tt/Nc3ps7G5[/img]

This first one is my main page. The maroon page buttons in the top left corner select banks of 8 channels (completely customizable) to pull up in the left 8 channels (green is selected.) The right 4 channels don’t change. This template is sending Yamaha DM1000 MIDI commands. Obviously, the “Outs” selects Master sends, and that page does remove the 4 channels to make room for 4 additional output faders.

The blue buttons on the bottom half select mixes to work on; the faders move accordingly, and background color of fader changes to blue to make a quick visual indicator that I’m not on the FOH mix. They’re a little hard to see, but the row of dots along the left side of each fader are LED’s that illuminate depending on input level, yellow at -9dB progressing to red at 0dB. No HA control on DM1000, but lets you know if you have to walk to the console and adjust a gain knob. The green dot in the comp section is a gain reduction meter, each LED is a 3dB step, with gradual color fade to red with more compression, same meter for gate tab. Verb button is a quick toggle for my vocal verb FX send aux. Pressing the channel name dark green button selects that channel and all gate/comp/eq settings update to reflect that channel, as does the green label in the center.

[img]https://db.tt/QPbkBy4p[/img]

For this page, I eliminated the pages and channel on/off toggle opting to use the channel label for on/off to save screen space. No point in having a select anyway without controls to use on it. This is my during show default page where I have access to 24 faders and mutes, and single-button access to any mix. If you turn off multi-gestures on the iPad, you can use all 4 fingers of both hands simultaneously, if you’re brain can keep track of which finger is going which direction, that is. I have large hands, and have no problems moving adjacent faders opposite directions.

PS – I don’t know why this template doesn’t have the Verb mute on the mix page above the mix select buttons. Most of them do, so I’ll have to patch that

Thanks for the feedback, Stix. I spent a whole lot of time on that template and because it has a few minor glitches, I’ve been reluctant to share it on the Liine forum, but was so frustrated by the A&H app that I just had to post some screenshots. I’m not ready to provide support for my creation just yet.

Perhaps jumping straight into a big band gig revealed so starkly the limitations of the app. I’ve since done a number of jazz combo and 6-piece rock band gigs where the app was far less limited due to, as you describe, the ability to have 2 custom fader layers with up to 16 channels on screen at any time with any combination of input/fx/dca/mix etc available.

I do miss having 12 faders + either comp or gate, and in addition EQ on screen all at once though…

For today’s function I had FOH, one monitor mix, one IEM, and two auxiliary zones. One was a delay send to a slightly separate area that still had some acoustic connection to where the band was playing needing only slight augmentation. The second was to a completely isolated area, requiring a completely separate mix. With very careful configuration of my custom layers, I was able to accomplish this task for a 5 piece jazz combo with minimal sliding of each layer required.

After a few weeks of using the app, I still deem it to be mostly unusable for two very simple reasons. The sliding needs to be much more responsive. There needs to be a quicker way of selecting a mix without having to have access to the mix faders to double tap on.

There are some nice features I’ve discovered since my initial rampage. If you’re on Mix mode with mixes on one of your layers and inputs on the other, and double-tap an input, the mix layer will reflect the output levels for that input. Again this depends on a very specific configuration, but can be helpful during soundcheck if you need to adjust say solo or vocal levels in all the sends quickly. Drummer wants less vocal, keyboard player wants more, front wedges need less, patio mix needs more, isolated mix needs less, etc…

My clients are very high profile, have very high expectations, are impressed by technology, and yet don’t want to see the nuts and bolts behind the scene and don’t want those nuts and bolts to affect their event.

As a result, I have high expectations of the equipment that I use. I’ve spent a lot of time on my other equipment getting my templates dialed in for how I need to work. I was hoping that I wouldn’t have to do that this time when I tried out some new gear. I like the sound quality and form factor, just need to get the usability to where I expect.

iDR-32

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Originally posted by Stix

Yes that is a great feature, but the selected input also cannot be easily changed to the next or previous channel (if you are adjusting in the mix window) without going back to the inputs window. Its the same problem. Here’s hoping this will be addressed in a future upgrade…

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Like adjusting the sends to different mixes, assuming that you have outputs on one layer and your inputs on the other layer, you can double tap the next input to get it to be highlighted on those outputs. You still only get 8 of each on screen at a time and have to scroll to get to the others, but it eases the pain a little.

For me, the time that Next/Previous channel would be useful is in the editor. When I’m configuring the rack to get ready for a gig, it would be great to select channel 1 and get the pop-up window. Configure it however I deem necessary, then click an arrow or something at the top of the window and be on channel 2. Rinse and repeat until all my channels are done instead of having to close the window and hit select on channel 2, then move the window from whatever arbitrary location it decided to open to the middle of the screen again and finally get around to setting up channel 2. This process gets pretty tedious after a few channels. That said, it seems that adding a means of selecting the next or previous channel would be easy enough to implement in the app, and would probably make a lot of folks happy.

iDR-32