First live show with BH

[iguana]

This evening I used BH for the first time in a live setting. Don't know why it took me so long - set up my account months ago - but after just the one show, I'm hooked. Six more Christmas shows to do in the next two days, and then a completely different gig in a week. No more large binders of music to carry around and flip through!

For those interested in setups:
I'm primarily a guitarist, but regularly play other instruments. This Christmas show involves me playing accordion and melodica in addition to the guitar. The gig next week is just guitar, but I also need to run the drum machine.

I'm running BH on a 13 year old Windows laptop that has been converted to running Android. (it was laying around and has a large screen.) Not particularly fast, but runs BH well. Live control is from a Morningstar MC-6 foot controller, with connectivity via a generic USB MIDI dongle. My guitar rig is. Line 6 Helix with a few outboard FX pedals.

For the songs I'm playing something other than the guitar, I just using BH to bring up the chord charts. For the guitar songs, BH also sends MIDI to the Helix to pull up the correct preset. There's nothing particularly complex in the setup, but BH makes it seamless and easy.

For the cover band gig next week, I'm going to have BH fire off drum tracks. I expect that will be just as easy.

Thanks, Arlo, for making BH work so well!

[arlo]

You're welcome! I like the Android-on-a-PC idea.

[iguana]

Getting Android running on the old Windows PC was pretty easy. Easier than doing a Linux install, at least, and I've done lots of those.

I tried a couple of Android emulators running under Windows (including the one from the Android dev package). Both ran BandHelper, but neither supported MIDI function as far as I could tell - critical functionality for my use.

I found the Android-x86 project (http://www.android-x86.org/) with ISO installs and was off to the races. I'm running the Android 7.1 release but the current release is Android 8.0.

You can configure to run a dual-boot machine which makes trying it almost risk-free. I tried it first on an old netbook and while it runs fine, the screen is a bit small. I then installed it on the aforementioned laptop - I can read the 15" screen when it at knee level - and love it.

BandHelper runs perfectly, as far as I can tell. The MIDI support seems fully functional even using a cheap USB MIDI dongle. I've also tried running backing tracks (mp3s) and that works just fine. The only drawback I've found in BH - and this is probably due to the old hardware - is that the mouse pad doesn't support multi-touch so zoom operations are tricky. You need to double-click and drag in just the right area of the screen to avoid triggering the full-screen action.

Also, Android doesn't run fast with hard drives. My conjecture is that its architecture relies on solid-state memory and hard disk paging, if it exists at all, is an afterthought. Wouldn't be an issue if my laptop supported SSD drives, but it is too old. As it is, bootup takes about 4 minutes. But once booted, BH start in about the same time as it does on my Android phone (~1 second). And no performance issues once BH is running. It would only be an issue if the laptop crashed in the middle of a set.

I had BH running for ~11 hours straight today without any hiccup. That's impressive in a real-time music application. Our keyboard player rebooted her iPad running MainStage after every set, just as a precautionary measure based on previous experience. I realize there's a world of difference between what BH and MainStage do, but if an ancient x86 laptop running an open source Android kernel is more stable than an up-to-date Apple - I just have to giggle :-)

I apologize for prattling on about something that is only peripherally related to BH, but want to document my experience for those who might be interested in running the app on an unconventional platform.

[iguana]

Further update to this - had a rehearsal with my cover band today and the plan was to use BH to play drum tracks,  instead of using the drum machine.

I had done a bunch of prep to record the drum tracks directly from the drum machine to my DAW (Reaper, on Windows). Converted them to MP3 and attached them as recordings to songs. Didn't do much more than a superficial test to verify that something resembling a drum track was coming out of the Droid laptop speakers.

Anyways, hooked up the laptop to the PA system and fired off the first song to rehearse to.... And it sounded like utter crap. Hard to describe. Wet farts, maybe. The drum track was there, but it sounded heavily clipped, then heavily compressed. Unusable.

This evening I went back through the processing chain to see where the bizarre sound was being produced. The raw track in the DAW was good on my desktop. So was the exported MP3. Listened to the attached recording through the BH website on the desktop - it's good. Listened to it through the BH website on the laptop - good. However, listening to the recordings through the BH app on the laptop - not so good.

Figured I'd try a few different encodings to see if that makes a difference. Among other formats, Reaper can export OGG, FLAC and WAV. Uploaded them, and all of those sound perfect through the BH app on the laptop.

So, something is weird with the MP3 decoding through the BH app on that laptop. Not likely the hardware - and I'm sure the BH app has been thoroughly tested - but something in the Android distribution. Oh well, OGG produces smaller files anyways. Guess I know what I'll be doing tomorrow ahead of the gig on Saturday...

Just posting in case someone else goes down this path...