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  • HDMI (monitor) plus USB (audio) at the same time?

Hello Peter and everybody else who might stumble upon this!

I'm writing this on behalf of my uncle, who has been using Stage Traxx for many years (and is a huge fan of the app) but doesn't speak English very well. He is looking for an answer to a specific setup-question and I offered to ask here on the forum if anyone can possibly assist.

My uncle is currently using the following setup with Stage Traxx: his iPad is connected to a "Lightning -> USB + Lightning" adapter. The USB cable goes into his mixing desk and the Lightning cable charges the iPad (with this mixing desk he needs to use a USB connection because the audio quality of the backing tracks is noticeably worse when he uses the headphone jack).
The above setup works brilliantly, but he would also like to be able to add an external monitor via HDMI (for Karaoke-like situations and occasions where there are several singers who need to see the song lyrics).
Trying to make this work he purchased an adapter offering "Lightning -> HDMI + USB + Lightning" and tried to connect the monitor to HDMI, the mixing desk to USB and the charger to Lightning. This does not work however, as the HDMI connection automatically "grabs" the audio and there is no audio going into the mixing desk.
Granted, those adapters are probably not meant to be used like that - and hence are not capable of "splitting" audio and video so that the audio would be available to the mixing desk via USB. But before giving up on the idea entirely we wanted to ask if Peter or someone here in the forum maybe knows about an adapter (or a different solution) to achieve this setup.

TLDR: does anyone happen to know of a way to grab the screen/lyrics from the iPad via HDMI while simultaneously grabbing the audio via USB? If so, we would love to know 🙂

Thanks for reading and cheers from Austria,
Anna

    As far as I know you can't route the audio seperately from hdmi if the hdmi monitor indicates that it has audio capabilities. That's the same with Airplay. If you redirect the screen to Airplay, audio will follow.

    I hope I will be able to work around this when implementing multitrack playback in version 3.4. I hope that I can make the audio output choosable seperately for each track. But it is too early to tell at the moment.

    Currently a possible workaround would be to use an iOS device as a network client and connect the HDMI cable to this client. It will display lyrics just like connecting HDMI directly to the main iPad.

      Hi Peter! Thank you for the fast reply, very much appreciated 🙂

      peter As far as I know you can't route the audio seperately from hdmi if the hdmi monitor indicates that it has audio capabilities. That's the same with Airplay. If you redirect the screen to Airplay, audio will follow.

      That's pretty much the conclusion we came to... whatever monitor we might use, the audio would follow - and there does not seem to be an adapter that works around that fact (understandably, considering this is really an edge case).

      I hope I will be able to work around this when implementing multitrack playback in version 3.4. I hope that I can make the audio output choosable seperately for each track. But it is too early to tell at the moment.

      Wow, that would be fantastic! I discussed this very thing with my uncle and we wondered if it would even be possible for you to control this from within the app. If it happens to work out sometime in the future I can guarantee you that one guy in Austria will be super excited about it 😉

      Currently a possible workaround would be to use an iOS device as a network client and connect the HDMI cable to this client. It will display lyrics just like connecting HDMI directly to the main iPad.

      Spot on. That's exactly what my uncle is doing right now (with two iPads) and it works like a charm - it's a great workaround, so thank you for pointing this out!!

      Thanks again for the reply and all the best,
      Anna

        shadylane

        The USB on your 3 way splitter is charging your iPad while you are using it 😉

          3 years later

          I have the same problem and I am not willing to by another iPad to fix Apple's lack of basic functionality like being able to choose an audio output device.

          iOS always uses the last interface connected to the device. So if you connect your audio interface after the hdmi monitor, it should theoretically use the usb interface for audio output.