External Monitor Question

theVAMband

Hey so I have time-coded all of my songs for an upcoming show, and have a question about how they display on the external monitor.

My setup is running my backing tracks off my laptop (Reaper DAW), triggering the Stage Traxx 3 on my device iPhone (via MIDI Bluetooth), and then taking the iPhone output with a lightning -> HDMI cable then running an HDMI to an external monitor set at the front middle of stage for my lead vocalist to utilize. In my testing, this all seems to work perfectly, and my plan is to roll this out at our next gig, next Friday. It all works as long as the band always stays on track.

Here is my dilemma, on rare occasions, the band will get off track, and I'll have to bail on the backing track entirely. The problem is, as soon as I hit 'pause' on your app, the lyrics on the external display are seemingly frozen at that point of the song. I can manually scroll down on my device, which is great, but the external display stays stuck on the timecode that it paused on, and doesn't continue to display the rest of the song's lyrics.

In my opinion, when a song is paused, and manually scrolled, the external display should follow that behavior. As a suggestion, there should be an option to initiate autoscroll behavior based on the remaining time in the song, as a 'plan B' to when timecode fails.

Peter- I noticed when lyrics are time coded, the 'Scroll Speed' buttons are replaced with 'Text Size', and also in the settings 'External Screen Settings', the 'Lyrics on External Screen' I have ON.

Is there something about this setting that removes manual scrolling behavior? Do you have any recommendations for the situation I presented? Much appreciated.

peter

It is not possible to scroll the external display with manual scrolling on the iPad because the external screen has a completely different screen size and can show a bigger or smaller part of the lyrics depending on your settings. So only timecoding works in this setup.

So you have two possible solutions for this problem:

Don't stop playback in the case the band takes a wrong turn and instead just mute the audio. You can map a pedal to toggle mute. That way the playback and scrolling will keep running.
Turn off "Lyrics on External Screen". Then the iPad screen will be mirrored on the external screen and everything you do on the iPad will also be shown on the screen.

theVAMband

peter thank you for the recommendations. again hopefully I can avoid this issue all together if all my musicians navigate the arrangements properly! but always want to be ready with a plan B when it comes to integrating new technologies.

…in thinking about this issue more, maybe its possible to create a setting to have that ‘External’ toggle on the actual lyrics screen. right now it takes 5 taps….. to close song, go to settings, toggle it off, go back to song list, tap song. if the toggle was on the lyrics screen, very quickly we could jump to ‘mirror’ mode and initiate autoscroll as needed.