Searching for mixer unsuccessful

edited February 2018 in Bug Reports Vote Up0Vote Down

I have an external WiFi router connected to my XR16 via Ethernet, and connected my phone over the 5GHz band.

When I fire up the mixer app, it pops up the "Searching for mixer" message, but never completes.

What's weird is that is tells me:

Mixer Address: 192.168.1.1
You are connected to "(my network's SSID)"

But I've configured my router's DHCP server with an IP address/netmask of 10.10.10.0/255.255.255.0.

I've tried deleting and re-installing the app to no avail.

Is the app making assumptions about the IP address space of the private network? Or is IOS not passing along the correct information to the app?

BTW - The official X-Air Mixer app on my iPad searches for and finds the XR16 just fine over the same networking setup.

Comments

  • 6 Comments sorted by Votes Date Added
  • ETET
    edited February 2018 Vote Up0Vote Down

    My app isn't telling you what the mixer's address is, it's telling you what IP address it's going to use to try to find the mixer. It's looking at 192.168.1.1 which can't be right if your mixer is on a 10.10.10 subnet.

    The official X-Air Mixer app on my iPad searches for and finds the XR16 just fine over the same networking setup.

    Go into the network configuration screen in the iPad app. That will show you the IP address of the mixer. Click on the IP address in XAir Monitor Mixer and type in the mixer's IP.

  • I hadn't known about tapping the "Mixer address:" part in order to enter an IP address manually. However, I guess my point is that I shouldn't need to. The search function should be able to query the phone on which it's running for that device's IP address and netmask and use that information to seed the search.

  • ETET
    edited February 2018 Vote Up0Vote Down

    The search function should be able to query the phone

    There really is no search function, not in the sense of Behringer's app. I can see now that the "searching for mixer" text certainly suggests that, but in the context of my app it simply means that it's looking for the mixer at the specified IP address. In other words, it's sending out packets and waiting for a response from the mixer. As soon as it gets one, it goes to the next screen (bus selection/options).

    It would be nice if there was a search function, one that automatically found the mixer's IP on the current subnet, but that's more of a feature request than bug report.

    I took at look at doing it last weekend, but it's going to be a fair bit of work. First, I have to write and test code for both Android and iOS (which means working on completely different machines) to reliably get the subnet of the phone (testing that it works when you're on cellular, wifi, disconnected, etc.), abstract that so that I can use it in cross-platform code. Next, I need to figure out, using .NET's C# APIs, how to send UDP packets out to multiple IPs and listen to responses for any of them (the API calls I'm using now are not conducive to that). Presumably I can just iterate through 1 to 255, build an IP address on the correct subnet ending with that number, send out an UDP packet that the mixer understands, then if I get a response, I'll know the mixer's IP.

    That complicated app startup quite a bit, but it's worse than that. What if you have more than one mixer on your network? I have to let you select. That means I should wait around a bit after hearing back on one IP to make sure no more mixers are found. I also have to continue supporting the option to manually type in an address, in case you want to do that, too (like Behringer's app does).

    It doesn't sound like much, but it adds a lot of complexity to a fairly simple app. I'll do it eventually, but typing the mixer's address should work for now. You only have to do it once, it remembers it, and as long as your mixer's IP isn't constantly changing (it shouldn't be), it will just automatically connect when you run the app in the future.

    In any case, thanks for the report. It's funny how a UI seems obvious to you if you wrote it, but in retrospect I can see the source of the confusion. To me, it says "Mixer Address: blah", where "blah" is editable, and that means you type the address in there. But I've gotten a lot of reports from people who had no idea that was editable, an in conjunction with the "Search for mixer" text I can see that it probably looks like the "Mixer address" label is specifying where the app thinks it found the mixer rather than where it should look.

  • Thank you for the explanation. It's been awhile since I first used the app, and I don't recall ever having to manually enter an IP address for the mixer. It just worked. Maybe I've only ever used this app when connecting to the mixer using the built-in WiFi access point, in which case the mixer probably assigned itself 192.168.1.1 as its IP address.

    Perhaps, instead of "Searching for mixer" that screen could say something more like "Waiting for mixer to come online at IP address:" or something to that effect.

    Also, if I may digress a bit... Maybe it's a sign that I'm getting old, but a lot of GUI paradigms that I'm used to are changing out from under me. It used to be pretty clear when you looked at a screen which fields were outputs of the app, and which fields were inputs. That distinction is getting more and more blurred lately.

  • It's not you. It's in no way obvious that the IP address is editable. It's one of those things where I knew it was editable, so I saw it as editable, and it took outside eyes to show me that it really wasn't.

    I like your suggesting, but I'll probably take a stab at actually searching the subdomain for the mixer.

  • FYI - Now that I understand how the IP address stuff works, I am, once again, able to use this monitor mixer just fine with my XR16.

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