Hi Arlo. I had gigs these last two Saturdays (9/13 and 9/20) and I had some major issues with live sharing that I've never had before.
My iPad is the lead device and two other iPads connect to mine for live sharing. We have our own dual band router and we use separate SSIDs for the 2g and 5g networks. We typically use the 2G one for live sharing while the FOH engineer uses the 5G for the mixing board. This has been working perfectly until last week.
For the gig on 9/13, the drummer connected to my iPad no problem. However, the bass player had trouble connecting to mine. I had to quit the apps on all iPads several times and refresh the broadcasting. My iPad would appear in the list but when he would try to connect, it would freeze on the "connecting screen". The app would become unresponsive and a force quit was the only way to fix it.
We gave up on trying to connect his iPad and carried on with the show. However, after a few songs, the drummer's iPad, stopped following song changes. There was no indication that he lost connection or anything. I refreshed the broadcast on my end and it fixed the issue but only temporarily.
This is where it gets a little strange. All of a sudden, my iPad was then booted off the wifi network. I tried to reconnect. At first it just timed out and said "unable to reconnect". I tried again and then it prompted me to enter the password for the network. The password should have been saved in my iCloud Keychain. I even went in to the passwords app to manually search for the password. The network was there but in the field for the password, it just said "no password" as if it had been deleted.
During some downtime, I managed to manually retype the password but my iPad was still not connecting to the 2G network. I then tried the 5G network (different SSID but same password) and that connected no problem. The drummer was also able to get back on and it seemed to be working perfectly. I looked at the drummer's iPad and noticed that he had been using the 5G network the whole time while the bass player and I were using the 2G. I connected him to the 5G and everything worked fine for the rest of the night when we were all using the 5G network.
So it seems like there was something wrong with the 2g network. It could have just been a lot of 2.4ghz interference at the venue but I feel like we've played more crowded venues with more 2.4 activity and didn't have any issues until now. I also don't know what to make of the password situation on my iPad. I initially connected to the network so it remembered my password but then seemingly lost it mid-performance. On my iPhone, which is connected to the same iCloud account, I recently had to reset the network settings, which forgets all your wi-fi network connections and other things. I must have not realized that doing that deletes the password from your iCloud Keychain for your other devices. However, my Mac still remembers all its Wi-fi passwords and I can't explain how I was still able to connect initially. Perhaps the password was stored in cached memory or something and then once it tried to refresh the connection, it was erased?
For this gig, I also checked the bandhelper versions on everyone's iPad. The bass player and I were on the most recent versions where the drummer I believe was on a version from June.
For the gig last night (9/20), I made sure that I connected to the 5g network but I didn't check the other two iPads. Before we started playing, I tested the live sharing and everything seemed to be working just fine. However, once we started playing, the same problem happened again to the drummer. His songs were not updating with my iPad. I refreshed the broadcast and when he tried to select my iPad, his app would freeze, prompting a force a quit. We gave up trying to fix it but he told me at the end of the night that he got booted off the wifi network and couldn't reconnect (same issue as me and bass player at last week's gig). Also, there was significantly less people at this gig so 2.4ghz seems even less likely than the previous week.
Again, I'm not sure how to interpret all this. My hunch is that there's something wrong with the 2.4ghz radio on the wi-fi router now. I took the router home and I plan on troubleshooting with it by using two iPads for some live sharing sessions.
Any insight you can offer would be great. Should we stop using the separate SSIDs and just set the router to "self organize" so it broadcasts 2g and 5g on the same SSID?
Could any of this be because of the recent updates both in the app and iPad OS? For the gig last night, my iPad and the bass player's were on the new iPadOS 26. I'm not sure about the drummers. I think my iPad was on the bandhelper version for 9/16 for the gig on 9/13. It seemed like it was available in the App Store early.
Hi Arlo,
I did some testing at home with my own devices and I was able to reproduce the issue but inconsistently.
Any insight you can offer would be helpful. My band relies very heavily on this feature. Let me know if you need to me submit a help ticket.
On Sept. 13, neither iOS 26 or the latest BandHelper versions were released yet.
I don't know how iOS remembers or forgets wi-fi passwords.
Your idea about a problem with the 2.4 ghz radio sounds reasonable. I would try turning off the 2.4 ghz option on your router and see how it works to use the 5G for everything. I don't think you'll need to worry about using the live sharing and the mixer on the same system.