Hey guys! I’m pretty new to Photon, I’ve been loving it and am considering buying it.
I plan on using it to send MIDI commands from another app called Prime, which my band uses for backing tracks.
However, the app is quite expensive (At least in my country), and sadly, there’s no way of testing the MIDI feature before committing to buy it. I’ve been reading a few of the threads and it seems like it tends to crash in live gigs, so I wanted to ask a sincere opinion on what’s the status, if I shouldn’t really worry about, or if I should wait until the 2.6 update?
To give some context, right now I’m just using 2 tube lights, a very small Universe which I hope to have more in the future.
I’m currently working my way around using Luminair, but I’ve been loving Photon’s UI which I would gladly pay for the app if the MIDI works out nicely.
In my experience midi is very reliable. Never had any problem with it. I do wireless midi from a floor foot switch to iPad. That works great for me. Can’t speak directly to inter-app midi just midi through Bluetooth.
The crashes mentioned are with the overall app itself. I had an older iPad and used to see a crash in Live mode at least once per gig. But with a newer iPad I have not had one app crash in Live mode since about one year (since the last iPad OS update). I do however get a crash occasionally in edit mode. That is manageable for me, just annoying but not a big deal.
I’ve done my first full gig last night with photon running in the background (ST3 and Spotify in the foreground in split screen) without one crash
iPad Pro 11” (1st Gen), previous attempts to do a show with an iPad Pro 10.5 I had a couple of crashes here and there.
Also important to have the mic disabled in the settings I think it definitely contributes to a more stable setup.
I am doing another gig next week with my lighting setup and will report if it went well or crashed.
Either or, the app is great. iPads and apps crash, nothing is bulletproof, but yes, this app tends to crash occasionally.
There was a Metallica concert about 15 years back and their digital desk crashed on the first or second song and it took over 6 mins to reboot.
If you want 100% stable (but still not bulletproof) you’ll need to go with an all analog setup. Those days are gone and occasional crashes as annoying and unprofessional as they may seem, are part of our daily worries.
OK so i ran another show, and had a single crash, which resulted in Stagetraxx stopping playback
annoyingly as thee crash happened. I am now considering running Photon on a second iPad and sending midi to that iPad via BT, if the app crashes, thats bad enough, having the audio stop as well is not an option
This is better statistics compared to my 2nd gen iPad Pro but still not great.
really looking forward to another update from the team here, they have been very quiet not sure why
