Audiobus: Use your music apps together.
What is Audiobus? — Audiobus is an award-winning music app for iPhone and iPad which lets you use your other music apps together. Chain effects on your favourite synth, run the output of apps or Audio Units into an app like GarageBand or Loopy, or select a different audio interface output for each app. Route MIDI between apps — drive a synth from a MIDI sequencer, or add an arpeggiator to your MIDI keyboard — or sync with your external MIDI gear. And control your entire setup from a MIDI controller.
Download on the App StoreAudiobus is the app that makes the rest of your setup better.
Why is there so much latency using midi over wifi and Bluetooth
I’m using an iPad, triggering midi notes using the built-in keyboards in either AUM or Cubasis 3. I have MIDI Wrench on my iPhone and it takes a full 10 seconds or so for Bluetooth and even longer for wifi messages to register. I tried sitting next to my router and it made no difference.
I know this was much faster in the past as I was instantly triggering the MIDI Camera app a couple of years ago using midi over wifi.
This amount of latency makes it pretty much useless so something must have changed. Any ideas?
Comments
I wish I could delete posts. So, it turns out I wasn’t connected to my iPhone via bluetooth and was still receiving midi over wifi which is super slow. I went back and checked settings and got AUM routed to iPhone via bluetooth and it’s instantaneous. So, I have a serviceable setup but I’d still like to know why midi-over-wifi has so much latency.
10 seconds?
Something is really messed up.
I would ditch midi wrench and try Bluetooth directly between AUM sessions on your iPad and iPhone.
That's not normal. Bluetooth latency is generally less than 3ms. WiFI latency can easily be several times that, but should in no case be more than 1 second.
Bluetooth and WiFI transmission are two completely separate pathways. Your router has nothing to do with Bluetooth. If you're seeing similar delays over both, then that strongly points to a separate MIDI configuration issue. You should probably start off by limiting your tests to Bluetooth. That will remove uncertainty about wifi delays and router issues.
It will be impossible to troubleshoot without way more details about your setup.
@Sabicas. You can edit posts for a month. Sometimes you see posts edited down to just a dot.
If network MIDI seems unusually slow, are your devices on the same network?
WiFi latency generally sucks, BLE Midi will always be better. But no way WiFi should be on the order of 10 seconds.
To route over WiFi requires setting up a network session, which used to be complicated, but is now easy with AUM. If you do want to try to troubleshoot WiFi maybe detail how it's set up.
Anyway, glad you got it working.
Yeah, I know the difference between bluetooth and wifi. Sorry if I made it sound like sitting close to the router was related to bluetooth at all.
Before pulling up Midi Wrench to diagnose, I I was trying to trigger MIDI Camera over wifi midi and definitely counted to 10 Mississippi. I had to have it routed properly or it would not have worked at all, right?. I had never set up bluetooth midi but once I got it figured out, it was all good.
Something has definitely changed with my midi over wifi, however. I’m now using Eero mesh routers with better connection stability and speed than I had two years ago when I was using a cheap Linksys router.
All I remember doing, back then, was setting up AUM to use network session. Midi Camera can’t really even be configured other than changing the midi channel and note.
both devices in same network? ie 2.4ghz/5ghz? some routers will only broadcast a single SSID for both networks and then bridge them internally depending on router. still even going over bridge in router 10s is long.
As reliable as wifi can be for MIDI, the latency tends to be more like 10-60 ms. I've seen higher but I don't think I have seen anything even close to 1 second. If you are getting even one second, I think there was something unusual going on.
@Sabicas : have you tried powering everything down and restarting?
Once, I had a really weird situation while testing Loopy Pro where wired MIDI got very wonky with long delays. I thought it was a loopy bug but the same thing was happening in AUM. After disconnecting everything and rebooting, the issue went away and I have never seen it again.
Sounds like this is the new WI-FI TAPE DELAY plug-in from 4Packets...
Yes, both on the same network.
Ok, good call. I checked and my iphone is connected at 2.4ghz while the ipad is 5ghz.
likely the 2.4ghz spectrum is saturated in ur area. especially if u live in apartment complex or similar. can try finding clearer channel but probably best to force both on to the 5ghz network. if u can shutdown the 2.4 altogether, though many home automation and other IoT devices can only connect via 2.4. trade offs. 🫤
That's a good theory, but I think if that were the cause then the phone should be behaving similarly accessing the internet. @Sabicas is showing 10 second lag for just a few packets of data. I'm thinking it's more of a routing issue between the 2.4ghz network and the 5ghz network within his router. It shouldn't be that way though.
@Sabicas - I assume you've tried restarting your router? It's possible that there's an IP address conflict or something. I've had issues like that when using two networks with the same SID. There have been cases where a certain device connecting would get a duplicate IP address, and neither would work OK until that was sorted out. Usually a router reboot would take care of it.
@adam_murphy @wim Ok, I restarted both devices (but not the router) and it seems to be fixed. Latency is now less than a second.