First gig at Folk'n'Fusion festival

Tablet

Our first gig with the ilive system was at the two-day folk'n'fusion festival in hildesheim, last week of October. The festival has a small bar-stage and a larger ballroom-stage, with many bands playing. We play here every year, and this year we started on the ballroom-stage on Friday, then played a concert for kids in the bar-stage on Saturday and finally played Saturday night again in the ballroom.



Normally, we spend much time on our sound check, and then some more time on writing down all mixing desk and outboard settings. This year was different, we brought the mixrack as part of our backline and just placed it on the stage. We also brought our own cabling and microphones and everything was pre-programmed. From the mixrack, an 8 channel snake carrying left, right and aux 1-4, connected our system to the house system. Initially, there was some ground-loop problem which is irritating. A 2-channel transform-box was inserted on left and right, and we found some channels on the house snake that has significantly less hum for the monitors. Gijs and Edwin performed some tests on Saturday to figure out whether just a cable without the ground connected, or a DI with ground lift could fix the problem. It turned out that both solutions were not really working. Perhaps this wasn't a ground problem, perhaps it something else. The house system had problems with phantom power not working on channels 17-32, so perhaps something else was really wrong.

Gijs working on the effects on the macbook

Our gigs were great. I just asked the band to play and used the tablet to set a room-mix (I always start with a rough room mix before doing monitors). All gain, channel-EQ, compression and gates were already programmed, so getting a main mix was easy. Then, I went on stage and fixed the monitors. This system is awesom :)

Mixrack on stage

Next to doing our own sound, I help the festival by running sound in the bar. This year, there was an GL2400 mixing desk which I've used for the friday bands. On Saturday, our mixrack was already downstars for the kid-concert of the Gonnagles, and I decided to just use this for the other bands this evening. Doing sound for bands you don't know on a tablet is a bit scary, but since there was enough time for soundcheck, everything was great. I had a chance to actually use test the system in a new situation with various bands I didn't knew. One band, Evelyn Kryger wrote about their experience:

 "Während der nette holländische Tontechniker (selbst Musiker bei den Gonnagles) mit uns Sound checkt, räkeln sich eine Handvoll Festivalbesucher auf alten Sofas. Alles wirkt ruhig und entspannt, nichts deutet auf das hin, was eine Viertelstunde später auf einmal losgeht: Der Raum füllt sich schlagartig, die Luftfeuchtigkeit steigt unaufhaltsam und der Lärmpegel ebenso. Dann geht es los und was in den nächsten 60 Minuten folgt ist der Wahnsinn!!!"

Translated to English: "While the friendly Dutch sound technician did our sound check, a handful of festival-goers lounged at the old sofas. Everything is relaxed and nothings indicates what happens next: suddenly, the room fills up, the humidity and noise level rise. Then 'es geht los' and 60 minutes of madness follow!".

Evelyn Kryger on tablet

There must have been a lot of people in the bar, and I had a hard time walking around with the tablet. But, I was able to get trough and do sound from many different locations with my tablet. It was a wonderful experience, doing sound for (i guess) 200 people using nothing more than a tablet and pen. One thing was a bit scary: at one point the wireless connection dropped (I tested the 5ghz network, which is not ideal for going through a lot of human bodies) and I had to wait almost 2 minutes to reconnect to the ilive. Those seconds were very scary, but nobody noticed a thing. At any time, my normal laptop was connected to the mixrack using a cable, so I could have made my way to the stage and change things from there during those 2 minutes.

Evelyn Kryger in the bar

Network bandwidth

Before deciding on the wireless access point to buy, it is useful to have some idea of required the network bandwidth. The IDR32 and ilive editor communicate using TCP/IP, and I installed ntop to get some information about the data thoughput.

In this graph, I started the ilive editor around 17:00. You will see a small peak of 1.4 Mbit/s while the editor receives the configuration and all other information from the IDR32. After this, there is a steady stream of 1.2Mbit/s. This steady stream does not depend on the number of channels actually receiving input, as I started with feeding 10 channels into the IDR and I stopped this from 17:07.

This information tells me that any network connection that we use must be able to sustain 1.4 Mbit/s. Hopefully, this will help us in making a decision on the wireless networking technology to use.

Latency of the system

A digital system always has some latency. On a forum, someone questioned the use of digital mixing desks because of the latency that is added by the system. Although my experience tells me that the latency is really small, it is always a good idea to measure it.

For this test, I downloaded the 'test tone generator' software an ran this from the tablet. The headphone-output of the tablet is split to two XLRs: one going in the IDR32, the other going in a two channel USB pre-amp. Then, a cable is connected between output 1 of the IDR32 and the second input of the USB pre-amp. Using Audacity, it is possible to capture the exact delay added by the IDR32.


The latency turns out to be 1.2 ms (or 53 samples at 44100 samples a second). This is equivalent to time it takes sound to travel 41 cm through the air. I think this latency is very acceptable for live sound, but things might be different when using in ear monitoring.


(BTW, the gain of the pre-amp was not matched, this is only a test on timing).

PL10 working

I tested the PL10 device, and it works brilliantly. Using the 8 rotary knobs, you can control the levels of your channels, the aux sends for each channel etc. The 16 push knobs at the top allow you to select different scenes. For now, just a picture showing the levels for the first 8 channels on the tablet and on the PL10.

One problem I found was that when the tablet is unplugged, the PL10 stops responding for almost a minute. This is a problem since I planned to use the PL10 as backup in case the tablet has some problem. I've been told that A&H is aware of this problem and is working really hard on fixing it.

Soon, I'll do some digging around on the network protocols to see what is actually happening on the cables.

Poor man's multitrack

A while ago, I wanted the ability to practice mixing without a band present. Normally you would buy a nice multi-output for your computer (or go digitally, for example with MADI) and connect that to your mixing desk. There are many expensive solutions for this, and I settled for a very cheap one.

Buying two cheap USB 5.1 channel sound devices, I now have 12 outputs (14 including the outputs of my macbook pro). These outputs are minijack, so using minijack to 2x XLR I can connect to the mixing desk.

Very cheap USB 5.1 Audio Devices

Minijack to 2x XLR

Combining the two usb devices in one aggregated device

In Mac OS X, there is a nice feature called aggregate devices (in Audio MIDI setup). An aggregate devices allows you to tie multiple sound devices together. Using this, I create a virtual sound device with 4 inputs and 12 outputs.




Next I installed Ardour and Jackpilot. This open source 'digital audio workstation' allows me to load my tracks and play them to the different outputs I have. With this, I have my poor man's multitrack output for less than 100 euro's. Such a system is unsuitable for real use, but allows me to play around with the IDR32 without a band present.

Jack Pilot

Ardour

The complete setup

It works!

IDR32 and PL10 arrived

Today the IDR32 and PL10 arrived!

The tablet and IDR32 work!

First test is connecting the tablet to the IDR32 with a network cable. The process is fairly simple: connect the tablet to the IDR32 with the network cable, set the IP address of the tablet to 192.168.1.10 (netmask 255.255.255.0) and run the ilive editor.

Some problems did occur. First, I had to update the firmware of the IDR32 to match the editor (V1.70). Second, when I connected the system said something about a connection error. There were no problems at the next try, but this is something to keep an eye on in the future. Finally, it seems that the pad is turned on default for the input channels. When connecting my SM58, I had to turn up the gain significantly to get any signal and the resulting background-noise was terrible. Of course, when I figured out the pad was turned on the problem was solved.

Now we have a nice system and can start playing with wireless, the PL10, multitrack, etc!

The firmware needs updating

Updating the firmware is simple

First connection attempt failed

Second attempt succeeded

Don't forget to turn of the PAD!

IDR32 and PL10 are on its way

We have ordered the IDR32 and PL10 @ TMaudio, and they will arrive tomorrow or the day after! We are really looking forward to testing this system, the tablet is already in place and we also have some poor-mans multi-track playback system.

ilive IDR32, tablet, ipad, T112 demo

On Wednesday, Gijs and me traveled to Utrecht to meet Martijn from TMAudio. He responded to my e-mails inquiring about the possibilities of using a mixrack and tablet by inviting us over to play with the system. In three hours time, we learned a lot about the system and the possibilities.

Martijn is showing Gijs the ipad app

I must say, the ilive system sounds incredible and has real good potential. Martijn started of by showing us the T112 surface in combination with the IDR32 mixrack. All processing is handled by the mixrack and the surface is just one very big remote with many nice and shiny buttons and faders. Another way to control the mixrack is using a laptop or tablet using the ilive editor software. Also, there is an app for the iphone (iTweak) that has the ability to change basic channel levels and EQ. Finally, there will be a nice ipad application that has the ability to perform many of the editor functions. You want to use the ipad over the tablet because it has multi-input, which allows you to change the levels of multiple channels simultaneously. Martijn is working closely with Allen & Heath of the development of this app and therefor has a beta version of this app, allowing us to actually try it out. When the app is released (in 2 month time), it will be a really nice way of controlling the mixrack!

T112

The control of the mixrack is performed using a computer network connection. This means that you can also use a wireless router that connects to the mixrack and use your ipad and tablet from anywhere in the room or stage. The ilive surfaces are also connected using a cat5 network cable to the mixrack, but use a different protocol (ACE) which combines the control with some channels of audio. These audio channels allow the surface to receive the PFL and allows some local input/output (at the back of the surface). These audio channels are not possible when using the ipad or tablet.

In three hours time, Martijn showed us a lot about the system and we were able to make a basic mix on the T112, the tablet and the ipad using the multitrack we brought with us. It is a bit slower to build a mix from scratch then using a normal surface with faders and such. However, when the basic mix is made, the control is more then adequate to mix the rest of the show. In our case, we will need to perform a sound-check once (and spend much time on that to make it right), save it, and recall it whenever we need it.

We ordered the IDR32 with the PL10, which is a small controller you can connect directly to the mixrack. This controller gives us direct access to all channel levels and aux sends, in case something goes wrong.

I'll write much more information when we receive the IDR32!