I was a bit nervous to leave the MixWiz and snake in the truck and use the new setup in an acoustically challenging room, but I bit the bullet.
I used my regular FOH, amps & monitors, along with:
. iPad Air 2 with IOS 8.1.1
. Master Fader v3.0
. Apple AirPort Extreme Wireless Router with 802.11ac (very easy to set up and use)
. Mackie DL32R
. WD 1 TB Bus Powered USB drive
Here's some impressions:
1) Lots of compliments on the mix, and audio quality was comparable to the Allen Heath board
2) Although I did not need break music for this gig, I preloaded over 2,000 48KHz .WAV files in the \Music folder on the USB drive. On Friday, the music player would do nothing but spin as it tried to initialize. The next day, I deleted all but 600 .WAVs from the drive, and the listing of songs came up as expected. Maybe there's a practical limit to the number of files / size in the music player?
3) I recorded both nights 16 tracks. 16 bit the first night, 24 bit the second. The file storage is fairly efficient with the POLY .WAVs, but I can't read them in WaveLab. I downloaded a beta of Wave Agent, which converts them to mono .WAVs just fine.
4) To start a multitrack recording, you must create a name first. If you hit record with the default name, it stops immediately. Because I did not notice this, I missed part of the first set the second night. For the rest of the night, subsequent recordings are automatically named _2, _3, etc., which is convenient.
5) Because of the acoustically live room (high metal ceilings, tile floor, big glass garage door behind band), I did not use any reverbs all night. For delay, the "Tape Echo" setting sounded just fine compared to the Lexicon I usually use.
6) I returned home Saturday night a full 15 minutes earlier than usual, mostly because I did not have to break down that nasty snake and #14 50' extension cord I used to use at this venue.
Overall, it was a success, and there was feedback only once -- when the singer decided the mic needed to be in the throat of the floor wedge horn, while he looked at his lyrics